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Useful Photography Tip

How to Do Night Photography Like Todd Hido

Chris Gampat
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Last updated on 08/08/2025
09/17/2025
2 Mins read
A brick house at dusk with lights on inside, cars parked outside, and a tree partially shading the view.
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Photographer Todd Hido is an absolute master at making images that feel both eerie and calm at the same time. His work is well recognized across the world of photography lovers, and his images all encompass a very specific feeling that’s otherwise hard to get. If you look carefully at his work, they’ll also appear to be almost like paintings and surreal scenes from a movie. Trust me, you don’t even need a whole lot of post-production to make this happen. We’ve done it with Fujifilm cameras pretty easily. However, you can do it with any camera you have. It’s all about patience, lens filters, and looking at the weather. Here’s how to get the Todd Hido look pretty easily.

For more Useful Photography Tips tailored to new and amateur photographers, click here.

Try these:

  • Use a Haze filter of some sort: some of our favorite filters are Pro Mist and Glimmerglass filters. But my absolute favorite is the Rigu Misty Business filter.
  • Wait for hazy weather: this is pretty important to the whole process. Fog is such a big component of what Todd Hido does.
  • Shoot through a dirty car window: If you don’t have a car, just give a lens filter the equivalent of a rain shower of some sort, and then just let it dry. But if you’re around and shooting, just shoot through your dirty car window. Granted, this won’t work if you’ve got tinted windows. It works otherwise just perfectly fine. You’ll see this in a lot of his books.
  • Shoot at night: Todd’s work is mostly done at night. And specifically, he’s always photographing scenes with lights in them of some sort. It adds to both the sense of calm and eeriness.
  • Manual settings galore: Don’t just shoot in manual shutter and aperture; set your ISO and also set your white balance. I personally prefer to shoot with a wide-angle lens using a fast aperture because more of the scene will be in focus while the camera can let more light in. Then I use a film-like ISO setting like ISO 400. Typically, I never go above 1600 ISO unless I really need to. And then I use a slow shutter speed. A little bit of motion blur is just fine for this. Lastly, I use a film-like white balance like Daylight or Tungsten. Most of the time, Todd is using the warmer daylight look. Special cameras like the Ricoh GRIII HDF can really make this effect pop out.
car window haze filter manual settings night photography pro mist Todd Hido weather
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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