It works stunningly well under certain conditions!
Playing with the night mode of my camera
I realized today that my camera has a quite good night mode. However, I found out that this mode works better when actually there is some light. Today the evening was foggy, which reflected the orange lights of the city back to the ground -perfect to try out these shots.
To give you a first clear impression about how well it works, compare left (regular mode, no flash) to right (night mode, no flash either) here:
Yes, you don’t get the high resolution you´d get with true light, but it’s amazing how much the camera can see! For this shot it exposed for around 3 seconds. For comparison, my eyes gave me real-time view that was somewhere in-between these two shots. So yes, the long exposure of the camera in night mode truly gains sensitivity.
Another example, a shot of this river with the normal without flash (left) and with the night mode without flash (right):
In this case there was some ambiance light, which makes the regular photo come out not void. You can even realize there´s a river. However, the shot in the night mode is much more vivid. Here the integration time was around 2 seconds. And as far as I can qualitatively judge, the view in the night mode is quite similar to what I could actually see with my eyes standing right there.
Beyond the mere utility that the night vision mode brings up, I like that it comes out with a twist on it, some kind of nice touch that I cannot describe. OK, not in the first example, where the view was probably much too dark. But look at the second night-mode shot, on the river (same as the lead photo). I love it!
Let me share a couple more night shots:
That´s a corridor delineated by highly packed, tall trees arranged in two rows. At the end there´s Lac Leman, and the lights in front are France -I´m shooting from Switzerland.
Here you get to see the French lights better, all across the lake:
And here´s a night-mode shot along our own beach on this side of the lake:
Look at the reflections of the lights on the water!
Lights indeed seem to play well with this night mode:
Do you have experience shooting in the dark? What was your favorite photo here?
Want to see something else from me? Try this random link! (You can try it again and again to see different photo-stories).
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