The best settings to use on a digital camera at night?

Question

What are the best settings to use on a digital camera at night to take landscape photos?

I can over-ride the automatic settings, but need eduating about which manual settings to change, and why.

I am using the optical zoom option and a basic built-in flash at the moment.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you could give me details of your equipment, I could help better. Anyway:

1) TURN-OFF the flash.
2) Place your equipment on a Tripod.
3) Set your f-stop on its most ideal setting to place all in focus (f8 to f11).
4) Take set of fotos with different white balances (from tungsten to cloudy) - and choose which one you like. You will notice that the change in white balance changes the tone of your foto from warm to cool (yellow to blue). Pick the tone that you want.
5) Press your camera shutter halfway to take a reading based on the camera's metering system. Make a record (for example 30 seconds).
6) Place the shutter to "timer" to avoid camera shake resulting from depressing the shutter using your finger.
7) Set the speed of the shutter to 30 seconds.
8) Take the photo (via timer). Take a few more using different shutter speeds (15secs, 45 secs, 1 minute). Preview and choose which foto suits you best.
Enjoy!

Answer 2

Use aperture priority, select a wide aperture and half press the shutter the camera will tell you the shutter speed it has to use to get a good exposure. If this is too slow (likely) you will have to up the ISO and accept the inevitable noise or use flash. Chris

Answer 3

you could take it off auto and use 400 or higher setting for low light so that the shutter speed is slowed way down and gathers more light which it needs to do in low light conditions

Answer 4

Open up to the widest f-stop and don't use the flash.This is going to be a long exposure so a tripod would be nice too.