28 Mar Capture Cherry Blossom at Night with Your Camera

Good thing about taking picture of cherry blossoms at night is that weather isn’t as important as if you were to take it during the day. If it’s cloudy during the day, your photo will look dim because you’re missing a blue sky. At night, the color of the sky doesn’t matter as much and you can still get a beautiful picture of cherry blossoms! Another huge plus is that there will be less people during night time.

So why not enjoy the light up of cherry blossoms all to yourself?

Before you start taking pictures, see if you can use any of the tips below to improve the quality of your photograph.

1. Must-have item, Tripod

To capture cherry blossoms at night, you will definitely be better off with tripod. To take in small amount of light, you need to slow down the shutter speed. The slower shutter speed is, the longer it takes to take a photo. Because of that, even a slightest camera shake can make your photos blurry. If you have a tripod, you can manually set the sensitivity low in order to capture it in better image quality. Don’t have a tripod? Let’s improvise using tables or the ground. Using self-timer on the camera also helps minimize camera shake. If you don’t have anything, then hold your camera with both hands and keep arms to your body to stabilize as much as possible.

Photo by Taichiro Ueki

2. No Flash whatsoever

Cherry blossoms that are lit up are brighter than you think. If you use flash, parts that is under light will be white and all other parts will be black. This will create unbalanced photo and it won’t turn out great. So remember to switch off the flash when taking cherry blossoms at night!

Photo by Tranpan23

3. Choose the appropriate setting

Nowadays, cameras are high quality and as long as you choose the appropriate setting, you’ll be able to take beautiful pictures. But that doesn’t mean, you can just choose night view mode when taking cherry blossoms at night! Don’t get me wrong. It works perfectly as long as you have tripod with you. If you don’t have one, forget about it. Night view mode allows you take photo at night by opening the shutter longer. Therefore, if you are holding it with your hand, most likely your photos will come out blurry. No tripod? Use auto mode or high sensitivity mode if you have.

4. Slow-synchro mode flash to capture people and cherry blossom

You may want to include your friend or family in the photo with illuminated cherry blossoms in the background. This can be difficult. If flash is used, people will be bright but with very dark background and if no no flash, people will be too dark and that won’t work as well.

In this case, you need to use slow-synchro flash. You’ll use strobe on your camera and slow down the shutter speed. Depending on the type of camera, using night view mode with strobe will be perfect.

Photo byMeganLynnette

5. White balance setting

If you got the hang of taking photos at night, next step is to play around with shite balance, which is probably the most difficult part. It is difficult to reproduce the tint and tone of the actual cherry blossoms without manually adjusting white balance. Use a white plain paper and let the illumination that is lighting the cherry blossoms hit the paper. Then, turn the camera to it for you to set the white balance.

You are now ready to start taking pictures of cherry blossoms at night! Grab your camera and enjoy the calm spring night.

If you want to be in the photo yourself, why not try our vacation photo?