Night photography has the ability to take a scene and cast it in an unusual light– much like the golden hour surrounding sunrise and sunset can add an element of mood and uniqueness to a sunlit scene. Just as how sports and landscape photography push the camera’s limits for shutter speed and aperture, respectively, night photography often demands technical extremes in both.
Night photography is subject to the same set of constraints as daylight photography– namely aperture, shutter speed and light sensitivity– although these are all often pushed to their extremes. For this reason, the abundance and diversity of night photography has been closely tied to the advance of photographic technology. Early film photographers shied away from capturing night scenes because these require prohibitively long exposures to maintain adequate depth of field, or produced unacceptable amounts of image noise.
