6 Best Lens for Night City Photography: (2024 Guide & Reviews)

Last Updated on December 5, 2023 by Sharon Advik

With the world becoming increasingly more urbanized, it’s no surprise that cityscapes are now one of the most popular subjects for photographers.

But as any photographer knows, a good photo requires an exciting composition and capturing enough light to make the colors pop.

Many photographers recommend using a fast lens when photographing at night.

In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the best lenses for nighttime photography to help you create unique images with your camera!

I am reviewing the 6 best lenses for night city photography that might work for you perfectly at night.

Let’s drive in:

Which is the best lens for night city photography?

Here are my recommended top 6 best lens for Night City photography:-

Canon 24-70mm F2.8: (Best lens for Night video & portrait photography)

As a professional photographer, I’ve been lucky enough to use a lot of great lenses.

The Canon 24-70mm F2.8 is one of my favorites, and it’s also the lens I always have with me.

This is the one lens to rule for so many reasons.

This is a great all-around lens you can take on any shoot, day or night.

It has an excellent aperture range for low-light photography and offers sharpness throughout the zoom range.

The 24-70 sits right in the middle between a wide-angle and telephoto lens, covering some of the most important focal lengths we use as photographers.

This makes it a versatile piece of glass for everyday use. It handles pretty much everything.

That gives you that nice depth of field, making it an excellent choice for portraits.

This is an excellent lens for night video and portrait photography because it has a large aperture that creates excellent subject isolation.

Any other subject you want to isolate requires a speedy F 2.8 lens, which opens up wide.

Letting lots of light throughout its focal range at F 2.8 gives you incredible brocade, and low-light performance is superb.

This is especially important to me because of the constant photography I do.

I’ve covered entire corporate dimensions using only this lens, which quickly made it my number one lens in terms of return on investment.

This lens can also create beautiful bokeh (blurred background) in outdoor portraits due to its wide angle of view, which allows you to capture more scenery behind your subjects.

Lastly, with such a versatile range from 24mm up to 70mm, you can consistently achieve any shot you need without switching lenses!

This is considered one of the best lenses for portrait photography because it captures natural-looking images without distortion at either end of its focal length.

The wide angle lets you capture more in your frame while focusing on your subject, making this lens perfect for shooting videos!

Canon 24-105mm f/4L: (Best Low light lens for Night City photography)

“Are you looking for the best low light lens on a budget?

The Canon 24-105mm f/4L lens is a great all-around lens for low-light photography.

It can capture beautiful images in different lighting conditions, indoors and outdoors at night.

We will explore what makes this lens suitable for low-light photography and how it stacks up against competitors.

The first thing that makes this lens well-suited to shooting in low-light situations is its 4-stop maximum aperture.

This means the camera can shoot faster shutter, reducing motion blur while maintaining an image with plenty of detail.

This makes it perfect for nighttime photography and capturing amazing shots of the cities you visit.

If you want to capture beautiful photos of your travels that will stand out from other people’s pictures, this is the perfect lens for you!

I love using this one in Italy or France because there are so many spots with unique architecture and details that are great for shooting.

You’ll get more detail than with any other type of camera, making your travel memories last forever!

It is one of the most versatile lenses you can buy because it has a unique focal length of 24-105.

If you had to, you would only choose one over the other if you were shooting in a super low-light environment.

It has a wide focal length range, perfect for shooting night cityscapes and other photos in challenging lighting conditions. 

I think everyone loves to shoot at a certain level, I included.

Another cool feature of this lens is its Optical Image Stabilization (IS) system that helps reduce camera shake when shooting handheld without a tripod or monopod.

Nothing can match a fantastic prime lens like this regarding ultimate low-light performance.

The fixed aperture of 4 lets you shoot with less risk of overexposure or underexposed shots.

This lens’s unparalleled smoothness and clarity make it one of the best lenses on the market today.

This is your guy if you want an all-around versatile, low-cost prime lens!

 

Canon 50mm 1.8: (Best lens for Night Street photography)

So, this lens is the perfect lens for everything.

It’s very sustainable, so it’s 50 mil in this fragment so you can zoom in or out. It’s straight, strictly the same focal length.

I will explain why I recommend it for beginner, amateur, and even professional photography.

I’ve used this a couple of times at weddings; I’ve mainly used this for street photography, and I’ve used product photography and Full Frame Options for everything.

So, that’s pretty cheap compared to most lenses, and its quality is fantastic.

It’s a standard portrait lens with a full frame and crop sensor.

Ideally, it comes in 160 grams, so it’s a very versatile lens.

The actual build quality is fantastic, and it comes with great metal.

The minimal amount for that cheap as well is excellent.

The focus ring is quiet, but it’s not the best.

You don’t like it when you’re using manual focusing.

I’ve used this for street photography, product photography, and portraits.

On the Canon 50 mil one, we noticed the autofocus is fantastic.

It was very sharp, and it is a pretty sharp lens.

If you use it properly, It’s quite an excellent lens to work with.

The only issue with this lens is chromatic aberration, which occurs if you take a picture and struggle with the dynamic range.

So, if you take a picture with a bright background, it will be like little bits of purple or green.

So yeah, chromatic aberrations are a pretty dodgy issue in this camp, this lens, but if you use it properly, you’re aware of that, then you can work with that and then fix it.

This is fantastic; this is my primary lens for street photography.

What is recommended? Well, first of all, it’s cheap.

So, I mean, like, it’s going to be non-stressful.

So overall I think you should buy one if you haven’t got one yet.

Whether you’re doing street, product, portrait, event, or landscape photography.

Sigma 35mm F1.4: (Best Sony lens for Night City photography)

My new favorite lens, and I will talk about what I love about it, what I don’t love about it, and whether or not you might want to purchase it.

The Sigma 35-millimeter F1.4 art lens is designed for the Sony e-mount system.

The first thing is focal length; when discussing focal length, people constantly ask me which prime lens I should get.

And I constantly recommend to people to get a 35-millimeter equivalent lens.

So, if you’re shooting on the Fuji system or an APS C system, it will probably be a 23 or 24-millimeter lens.

If you’re shooting on a full-frame camera, it will be a 35-millimeter lens.

I recommend it to people because I genuinely think it’s the most versatile focal length for anybody.

It’s a perfect middle ground between being too wide or tight to shoot about anything.

It’s perfect for shooting things like landscapes or cityscapes when you need a wider angle of view.

It’s also perfect for getting closer to people and isolating a subject for portraits, street photography, or similar subjects.

I always give this advice: I liked that focal length because it allowed me to zoom in a little, to isolate my subject, and to get a blurry background.

But now I’m shooting on a Sony full-frame camera; I can use a bit of a wider focal length and still get that same subject isolation and bokeh.

We can blur out the background as much as I was with that other lens.

But it also has a little bit of a wider angle of view; what defines that 35-millimeter f 1.4 lens is its unique ability to give you a little bit of a wider angle of sight but still isolate your subject in the foreground.

Because of its f 1.4 aperture, you can take a picture of your subject and give some context regarding what the scene is like and what’s happening in the background.

What’s happening in the foreground, and what does the environment look like?

However, at the same time, that fast aperture allows you to completely blur the background and ensure that your subject is isolated and stands out as the photo’s subject.

In terms of sharpness, this lens is razor-sharp, with every aperture including f 1.4.

I almost exclusively shoot this thing at F 1.4 because, quite frankly, that’s what I spent the money on and what it’s made for.

I will always have a tack-sharp image, no matter the aperture.

So when I’m shooting portraits at F 1.4, as long as I autofocus on my subject’s eye or face, I know it will be tacked sharp.

I always know this lens will be just as sharp as possible.

There are not a ton of lenses out there that can be sharper than this one.

So when I’m shooting with this lens, I always shoot with either the face or the highest action when shooting portraits, things, and other people.

This lens is so good at autofocus that it’s as good as any native Sony lens.

I haven’t had any autofocus issues with it whatsoever.

It’s super quick, super snappy, and super accurate.

The autofocus on this camera is fantastic.

It’s also a high performer and built like a tank.

It is also one of the only Sony lenses with a proper manual focus ring.

So, it has a manual focus switch, where you can switch the autofocus on or off.

And instead of being a fly-by-wire mechanism where you’re electronically controlling the focus.

So, if you like using manual focus for your photos, videos, or whatever, this is a much better solution than many of Sony’s native lenses, in my opinion.

Overall, the build quality of this thing is fantastic, and it’s just as good, if not better, than any of Sony’s native glass.

This is your lens if you’re in the market for a 35-millimeter wide-angle prime with a superfast aperture.

There are many alternatives out there, but most are so much more expensive and quite frankly.

Other lenses’ build quality and image quality will not be much better than this one, which is a rock star.

It’s a killer lens, and I am so happy with it; I love all the pictures I’ve been getting.

I 100% recommend this lens.

This will be a good purchase if you’re in the market for something like this.

 

Canon 35mm F1.4: (Best Canon lens for Night City photography)

This lens came out initially in 2015.

I’ve used it for several shoots over the years, but in January 2023, I decided to pick one up for a wedding I was shooting.

This is a lens for many photographers, especially stills photographers, because it covers many different areas and has 35 mils, so you’re ideally in between 24 and 50 mils.

If you shoot portraits, you can get a fair amount in the background to tell many stories.

If you’re filming a video, you can use this for establishing shots.

This is an F 1.4 lens, which means it performs well in low light and has a very shallow depth of field.

This thing makes anything pop from the background; I love it personally for portraits and full-body shots because it just makes the subject stand out entirely from the background.

Because of the width and the shallow depth of field, you can separate your subject easily, giving an excellent effect.

As I said, it’s just inside that natural scope regarding actual focal length.

In terms of the build quality of this lens, it is fantastic.

It feels like pretty much every Canon L series lens. It’s got that nice, solid body.

My favorite feature of this is the focus ring; it will be easier to find that focus ring if you are doing video work.

Another great thing about the focus ring is it’s not too quick.

Like many lenses, as you turn them, they focus quickly.

You can use manual focus with your hand and do not need to follow focus without stretching too much or doing it.

It’s also weather-sealed, so you’ll have no issue taking this out in harsh weather conditions.

And trust me, I have taken about in some of the harshest conditions, and it’s held up just fine.

It feels fantastic; it balances the camera well.

It’s F1.4, which means you get an excellent shallow depth of field, and it’s fantastic in low light.

It’s also an L-series lens using an ultrasonic motor, meaning the actual detail in the images is second to none.

It’s one of the best on the market for this price point; you can get away with a better lens, but you will be spending a lot more money.

I use this lens; as I said, it’s versatile in its ability to shoot very shallowly and at night, but it’s also super sharp and great for product portraits and weddings.

It’s fantastic for video and pretty much everything else.

As I said, at that 35-mile focal length, you get more in the shot to tell more of a story.

I can get a lot more in the frame and fill the frame with background and essential information to help tell a story.

I love this lens; it is fantastic for pretty much everything.

This is one of my favorite portrait lenses, especially if you’re doing full or half-body shots.

You can get some amicable background separation because of the F 1.4 aperture, and it’s just the shallowest of the depth of fields.

Another thing that I love about this lens is that it’s super quick.

35 gives you that excellent clean ground; everything from the ground up is just massive. It’s an amazing crop, a fantastic size, and a great lens.

It will experience very minimal vignetting, and because of that crop, you won’t worry about it even if it does.

It’s a great lens in an APS-C camera because you’ll still get a very familiar and nice-looking photo.

 

Nikon 14-24mm f2.8: (Best Nikon lens for Night City photography)

It covers a full-frame image circle only for Nikon News mirrorless cameras.

So, let’s see whether this new mirrorless camera version of Nikon’s classic professional lens is better than the competition.

That zoom range of 14 to 24 millimeters means that this lens is wide-angle, 14 millimeters being particularly extreme.

So, it’s not the only lens you’ll want for general shooting.

Still, the zoom range is useful for other purposes, particularly for taking shots inside buildings of all sizes or for landscape photography.

The byte maximum aperture of F 2.8 meters could also be helpful for event and nighttime photography.

So you’re at least getting a very flexible optic for your money.

This lens’s build quality is spectacular.

The lens is a metallic solid feeling, too tightly assembled, and looks incredibly cool.

This lens is not image-stabilized, although most Nikon cameras nowadays have image stabilization built-in.

It weighs 650 grams, about 1/5 pound, so it balances pretty well on the Nikon cameras.

The lens is dust and moisture-resistant, and the rear mount has a decent sealing gasket.

Then, there’s a customizable metallic control ring at the rear, which many people might set to control that aperture.

And you will see the display changing accordingly as you turn it; it turns smoothly without clicks.

Then, we get a rubberized zoom ring that turns smoothly at the top.

We got a rubberized manual focus ring, which worked with the focus motor, putting responsively in my test.

This is, of course, an autofocus lens.

Now, autofocus speed is hardly a top priority on an ultra-wide-angle lens.

Still, its autofocus motor is reasonably fast and accurate and makes a very quiet, wearing sound as it works.

However, if you’re shooting in video mode, it slows down and becomes completely silent.

As a result, motor noise will not be heard on the soundtrack from your camera’s internal microphone.

Overall, the lens has fantastic build quality here, with some ingenious options for people who want to use filters.

With the widest angle of 14 millimeters and the brightest aperture of F 2.8 Right away, the sharpness and contrast in the middle of the image are incredible.

And over in the corners of brilliant performance, they’re not quite as sharp, but very impressive.

At 2.8, that image quality is astonishingly good in the middle and over in the corners.

Overall, this lens’s level of resolution and contrast across the entire zoom range is consistent and brilliant.

It’s just about the sharpest ultra-wide-angle zoom lens I’ve ever tested.

The Nikon lens is supremely dominant, if only over a small field.

This lens could be helpful for nighttime and Astrophotography.

And finally, Bokeh, despite its reasonably bright aperture of F 2.8.

This ultra wide-angle lens won’t be anyone’s first choice for getting out of the figure’s background.

When you get them, they’re pretty soft, although difficult backgrounds may look a bit edgy.

So, the conclusion I’m reaching about this ultra-wide-angle zoom lens is that it is more or less the best I’ve ever seen.

There are only real problems, distortion, and vignetting when shooting in the distance, but those are normal for this lens class and easily corrected.

Its price is pretty excessive, though. Is it a good value for money?

Because there’ll always be a market for professional photographers, these are the best money-no-object choices.

Although I can’t say, the Nikon lenses may be slightly sharper and have superior build quality.

If it’s within your budget, it’s a dream and highly recommended.

CONCLUSION:

Alright, guys, that concludes all the lenses we will discuss today in this article.

Do you guys have any experience with these lenses? What are your thoughts on them?

Which is your best lens for Night City photography?

Is there a lens I didn’t mention in this article that you love using for night city photography?

Please leave your thoughts and comments below.

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11 Best Nikon Lenses for Night Photography:

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