Ok so I am totally a newbie to photography so I apologize in advance if these are kind of general questions.

I am wanting to take some night time pictures. I don't really know of what but possibly some nicely light buildings or something of the sort. I am curious how you know what settings to put the camera on like what ISO is good for night shots with low noise? What should the shutter speed be? If anyone can give me some helpful hints I would greatly appreciate it. I don't know if this is important but I will be shooting with the kit lens my camera came with which is the Sony 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6

I have the tripod and also have the remote so I don't have to worry about hitting the shutter button.

Thanks again.

 

To get the least amount of grain you'll want to shoot at the lowest possible ISO (which you'll DEFNITELY need that tripod for).

I'd say start witht he shutter speed your camera suggests (most have some sort of scroll bar to show you when the picture would be correctly exposed) and work from there if it needs to be a bit brighter/darker.

If you're using auto focus bring a light to shine on the car (especially if it's a dark color) to help the camera find it

 

Oh ok so now this is making more sense. I am sorry that I am so dense on the subject. I do have the exposure bar that goes from -2 to +2 so when it is at 0 that should be the correct shutter speed? I believe that the lowest the camera will go is 100 for ISO. I am going to try this tonight. Thank you so much for you help.

 

Yup, use ISO 100.

Then, depending on how dark it is, you can start with a 10 second exposure, just to see the results. If its still too dark, go to 15 seconds, and so on. If its too bright, drop it to 8,7,6, etc.

 

Awesome I will give it a try and see what happens.

 

Tripod
Remote or timer set to 10 seconds
ISO 100 (or lower if you can)
Camera set to Aperture-Priority mode (you pick f-stop and the camera picks shutter speed)
try F6.3 (not a bad starting point)

or

set to manual and you set f-stop and shutter speed

-Good Shooting
Shawn

 

If you don't have a hotshoe flash to assist with AF, it can be tough to tell if your image is in focus or not when shooting at night. I've never used an alpha so I don't know how large (or small) the viewfinder is. One thing you can do if you don't use manual focus is to bring a flash light, which will help the AF system lock on to what you want to be the primary focal point.

I use my hotshoe flash to assist with AF; in the custom functions, I have AF assist on but the flash does not fire upon shutter release.

For night landscape shots, shooting around f/10-20 is generally recommended unless you want less depth of field. try not to use any filters if there are any light sources nearby, otherwise you may get some flare.

Shoot in RAW and you can fix the white balance much easier than shooting in JPEG.