Tag Archives: low light photography

NightCap and iPhone, for those times you need low light photography

Previously, I’ve covered a ‘night’ camera app that did calculations to fill in the dark areas of photos. There was also the app that took a whole bunch of photos and merged them together to get a night image from a dark room. Now, NightCap is claiming they just went back to the basics and is controlling the shutter time open to get a true low light photo need handled. And to help you start using the app, the developers are currently offering their app for free.

Keeping the iPhone still to get a really good result is important, but NightCap seems to deliver on their claim of being able to keep the shutter open long enough to bring in all the light possible.

To assist in the capture, there are buttons to lock the focus, exposure and white balance. There is also a self timer to give you the ability to not have the press of the shutter button effect the shot through the slight movement of the iPhone.

Settings in NightCap lets you turn on/off the background alignment grid, geo-tagging, use the volume button as the shutter button, length of shutter opening and if you want to manually control versus full automatic.

Just so you know what the remote and table looked like without NightCap assisting:

The Science of Taking Low Light Photos with the iPhone

there are mixed opinions on if the latest iPhones are better in low light than previous models. The higher resolution, faster action and more capabilities to focus has gotten us to notice when our images are less than perfect. So, whether it’s a iPhone 3 or iPhone 4, photos taken in low light appear grainy at best.

One solution is to hold the shutter open longer to get as much of the available light into the iPhone’s camera. A new solution offers a different line of thinking… taking multiple pictures and merging them together. Both paths work best with the iPhone on a tripod or at a minimum on a solid surface. The solution, Average Camera Pro does as it’s name states, takes multiple images and averages them. Giving a brighter finished photo with stronger colors. Length of time and number of photos taken is adjustable.

Taking that a step further, when a iPhone camera is assembled, there are a few irregularities that show up in photos that are challenging. Average Camera Pro offers a solution to this problem too. Telling the app where the issues are, the app uses the info to correct those areas. “Telling the app” is as simple as taking a picture of a white piece of paper.