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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Low light lens for night hikes (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by FoolishTook7@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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I am looking for equipment advice. I am a member of a group that does night hikes on a regular basis. I would like to take photos of the people in the group during the hikes, and am wondering what I should look for when shopping for a low-light lens.
I would like to shoot people and dogs as they hike the trail. Sometimes, we have bright moonlight, and sometimes we are deep in the trees in darkness. Everyone carries either headlights or handheld lights, so there is some light from that.
I would like to capture the people, and also the environment. I feel flash, in addition to being an annoyance to dark-adjusted eyes, would eliminate everything except things closest to the camera, which I feel may not make interesting shots. I can't expect people (especially dogs) to hold especially still, so long-shutter photography would be difficult.
I am thinking of shooting people at a range of 5-20 ft. Moderate zoom would be nice, but is not a requirement.
It sounds like I am looking for a very high aperture lens. Does such a lens exist, or am I hunting for a snipe? Would such a lens make such a narrow DOF to be almost unusable?
I have a Canon EOS Rebel T3. My budget is in the couple hundred dollar range (less than 100 if possible).

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[–] msabeln@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Over a decade ago I went on a night hike on New Year’s Eve, in the wilderness, under the light of the moon. It was cold, foggy, and lightly snowing.

I wanted to bring a camera, but the only camera that would comfortably fit under my jacket was my old Nikon D40, with a 35 mm f/1.8 lens. Even back in those days the D40 was not considered all that great of a camera in low light. It was a cheap camera when I purchased it, and had very little value at the time of the shoot.

My solution was not to be worried at all about noise but instead try to get any photo that would capture my impression of the scene. I did use a monopod that would allow a longer shutter duration of ¼ second, and I set ISO as high as I could while still getting a usable image.

Sometimes I converted the image to monochrome:

https://flic.kr/p/dHhDVH

https://flic.kr/p/dHo5qm

https://flic.kr/p/dHo5j1

Other times I just underexposed:

https://flic.kr/p/dHo5EL

I thought they turned out OK, in a very impressionistic, rough but memorable manner. I didn’t attempt portraits, but you wouldn’t even see hardly much of anyone’s face in this situation.

It’s possible to get very good monochrome photos from even extremely underexposed raw files via a special technique: extract the raw, mostly unprocessed color channels from the file and sum them together. This bypasses the color processing which adds a considerable amount of noise.