Night landscape scene mode is a dedicated automatic exposure mode found on many digital cameras that optimises the camera's settings specifically for photographing outdoor landscape subjects in low light conditions, such as twilight, dusk, dawn, and nocturnal scenes including moonlit landscapes, illuminated cityscapes, starlit skies, and other night time environments where ambient light levels are too low for standard automatic exposure modes to produce satisfactory results without resorting to flash illumination.
When night landscape scene mode is selected, the camera automatically applies a combination of settings carefully chosen to balance the competing demands of low light exposure and image quality in landscape photography. A small aperture - typically a high f-number such as f/8 or smaller - is selected to maximise the depth of field and ensure that the full range of the landscape scene, from foreground elements to the most distant parts of the scene, is rendered with acceptable sharpness simultaneously. A long shutter speed is then set to compensate for the reduced light transmission of the small aperture, allowing sufficient light to reach the sensor over the extended exposure duration to correctly expose the scene despite the low ambient light levels. The ISO sensitivity may also be raised modestly to further assist exposure without excessively extending the shutter speed beyond practical handheld limits, though the mode typically keeps the ISO as low as reasonably possible to minimise digital noise and preserve the tonal quality and shadow detail that are important in low light landscape photography.
The combination of small aperture and long shutter speed selected by night landscape scene mode makes the use of some form of camera support - most commonly a tripod - strongly advisable or even essential for achieving sharp results. The extended exposure durations typical of this mode, which may range from a fraction of a second to several seconds or longer depending on the ambient light level, are far beyond the limits at which hand held photography can be reliably achieved without camera shake introducing blur into the image. Even photographers with very steady hands and good technique will find that exposures longer than approximately a quarter of a second produce noticeably blurred images when the camera is hand held, and night landscape scene mode exposures frequently exceed this threshold considerably.
Night landscape scene mode typically disables the camera's flash, recognising that artificial flash would be wholly ineffective at the distances involved in landscape photography and would serve only to create an unpleasant foreground lit flash exposure that destroys the atmospheric quality of the ambient night light. Some implementations of the mode also apply long exposure noise reduction processing - a technique in which the camera automatically takes a second dark frame exposure of the same duration immediately after the primary exposure and uses it to identify and subtract the fixed pattern thermal noise that accumulates in the sensor during long exposures - to improve image quality in the finished photograph.