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How to make good nights, sweet prints.
NIGHT AND DAY: Darkness falls on the Hudson (above); the sun-dappled original (below).
It can be very difficult to shoot at night. If you're using film and want the flexibility of a high ISO, you can end up with big ugly grain. If you're shooting digital and you pump up the ISO, you can end up with a lot of nasty noise. And that's only part of it. If you don't have a tripod, your shaking camera can ruin the image with blur. Don't expose long enough, detail will be rendered imperceptible; expose too long, little lights can blow out whole areas of your image.
Luckily, you don't need night to take a night photograph. Hollywood's been doing it for years, using a combination of filters and underexposure techniques to mimic the near-monochrome palette of darkness. And now, with the miracles of technology, we can do it ourselves in postproduction. You can take the process as far as you like—from simply darkening and coloring the image to simulate evening, to adding glowing man-made light sources, or even dropping in a few constellations.
 Not every image will take well to this process—if you shot a picture in bright sunlight that has long shadows, those shadows will look mighty suspicious at night. Also think about how much work you'll have to do. You may not want to spend hours adding glowing windows to building after building. Think simple and envision the final image. Are you interested in simulating the way the camera sees night? Would you rather match the perception of the human eye? Or is there a specific emotion you hope to evoke? And remember: after dark, subtlety is everything. I'll explain my methods using Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, but this process can be adapted to any image-editing program that uses layers.
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