I recently wrote an article about night time portrait photography with, and without, a flash. Since that shoot, I have returned to the idea and have some updates and suggestions that might be helpful for those struggling with this technique, as I have. I generally scout out locations for shoots but this is especially important for night time portraiture as you need to know ahead of time where to find nice lights for the background. Instead of returning to the location I used previously, I looked around my neighborhood and found a few decent spots. I ran across an incredibly awesome location but was asked by security to leave the property AND delete all my photos of the building (we’ll discuss your rights as a photographer in an upcoming post as I found his request both amusing and infuriating). After location scouting, all I needed was a model. Mattie was the first model that came to mind for this idea. Mattie has a very elegant and classic, girl-next-door, type of beauty that works perfect for portraits, IMHO. After pestering her to help me out, she agreed. Click on an image for a larger view. And on a side note – I’m willing to bet Mattie doesn’t realize her own beauty. I find that most people and models don’t. We are all so quick to focus in on our own flaws and imperfections that we rarely take the time to look beyond our self-critical glasses and really appreciate ourselves, myself included. And yes, you can realize your own beauty without being vain or overly confident. I know for a fact that I have never taken a picture of someone that isn’t beautiful but I’m also willing to bet most, if not all of the people I have photographed would disagree with that statement when looking at images of themselves. So incredibly sad. Celebrate your beauty! Anyway, for this second round of night time portrait photography, I changed my approach a bit. With the prior shoot, I was simply trying to get night time portraits with mainly available ambient light. Only on an occasion did I resort to a flash when the surrounding light just wasn’t bright enough. This time around, I exposed specifically for a dark background and the background lights first, and then used a speedlight with a relatively large softbox to illuminate the model for every shot. I did not rely on ambient light to light my model at all. If your try this method at night, you will quickly learn that the overall color of the light at night is much warmer (oranger, if that makes sense) than the light you get from your flash which can appear quite cold (bluer). This is something I discovered on my first shoot. To correct this problem for this shoot, I used an orange gel (CTO) to help balance the color temperatures. It worked great! For a few of the shots, I probably could have used a stronger gel or maybe even two gels to get the look I was after. Much like my original outing, I wanted to get a decent amount of bokeh from the background lights so I shot as wide open as I could. I used mainly two different lenses (50mm f/1.8 and the 24-70mm f/2.8) for the shoot. Shooting this wide open aids the camera collecting light from lights in the scene. It also helps create amazing bokeh but with one significant drawback – speedlights produce a lot of light, even on the lowest power setting. There were several times I needed to move the softbox further back to reduce its power. Even on its lowest setting inside of the softbox with two layers of internal diffusers, the flash was simply still too bright. In the future I will bring an additional diffuser I can place over the flash head to help reduce its power in addition. I did not want to raise my f stop and lose the bokehlicious background and my ISO was already at its lowest. The only option left was to move the light further from the subject (which in turn made it a harder light which I didn’t necessarily want either – just can’t win). We made a night of going from location to location – one of which was a parking lot outside of a police station. At one point, a police cruiser watched our activity for a bit but eventually tired of our antics and left. As always, Mattie brought several different outfits to keep the images looking fresh. I experimented as much as possible with different settings because this type of photography is not something I feel competent at…yet. Upon review of the images, some I liked and some not so much. But that’s okay! It just means I get to try it again and build on my experiences. I never tire of failing. It’s when I learn the most! So as usual, pick up your gear, find an idea you’ve never done before, and go mess it up as best you can! Special thanks to Mattie for helping out when I’m sure she had a plethora of other more appealing options that Friday night. Much appreciated!
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