Summer Festivals — Why Night Shots Blur, and Shooting Lanterns and Stalls

Lantern light, the smell of the stalls, the drift of people in summer robes. At a festival the atmosphere is the subject. In photos, though, it tends to come back dark and blurred, or so busy you can’t tell what you were looking at. Two fixes: make the light work for you, and pick one subject.

Tap something that’s lit

At night the shutter slows, and the smallest shake smears. The move that helps most is putting something bright in the frame and tapping it — a lantern, a bare bulb over a stall, the lit tank at the goldfish scoop. Metering for the bright part lets the camera use a shorter shutter, and the blur drops away (→ Adjusting brightness).

When a lantern blows out and you can’t read the lettering, tap the lantern and lower the brightness a little. The red and the characters return, and the darkness around stays as the mood of the night. Night mode is available in genuinely dark spots, but moving people smear in it, so save it for scenes without a crowd (→ Using night mode).

Shoot a line of lanterns as a diagonal

A strung line of lanterns is the easiest subject at any festival. Head-on it flattens out, so look up at the line from below and off to one side and the lanterns become a line running into the distance (→ Diagonal composition / Leading lines).

Put a stall light or a gate where the line arrives, and the eye follows it there.

Composition guideDiagonal compositionSee the full guide for this composition →

For the stalls, move in on one

Take in the whole row and the colors and lettering collapse into noise. Choose one subject and get close.

• A hand holding a candy apple or shaved ice, with a stall light behind
• The lettering on a sign, filling the frame
• Steam rising off the yakisoba, seen from the side

Let the crowd behind go soft — it reads as the buzz of the place rather than clutter (→ Filling the frame / How to photograph food).

Composition guideFill the frameSee the full guide for this composition →

Photograph people from behind, or by the hands

Strangers’ faces filling the frame are best avoided. A back view in a summer robe, feet in wooden sandals, a hand holding a bag with a goldfish in it — you don’t need faces for the festival to come through. Even with people you came with, having them face the lanterns from behind makes for an easy, natural frame.

Leave plenty of room and keep the figure small, and the scale of the night comes across (→ Negative space). Before posting, it’s worth a quick check that no stranger’s face ended up large in the frame.

Once the fireworks start

If the festival includes a display, that’s a different technique (→ How to photograph fireworks). Shooting the lanterns and stalls beforehand gives you a set that tells the whole evening.

Just this to start

Tap something lit, then go slightly darker. Pick one subject and move in. Those two turn festival photos from “dark and unreadable” into “that evening, still there.” And when you find a line of lanterns, look up at it from below.