Shoot My Shot: Twilight Portrait

Introduction

This post is all about showing you how to take a great photo, at night, in very low light. This may not sound particularly difficult, but I assure you that if you try to shoot in auto mode, or even a priority mode then you would massively struggle to produce the same results. It’s not hard when you know what you’re doing, and that’s exactly what I aim to achieve from this post.

Step 1 – Test Shot

When ever I’ve found a location that I want to use, I always take a test shot on a setting I think might work and go from there. A lot of the time when I’m in a lighting situation that’s changing or I’m not familiar with, these photos come out pretty poorly, particularly like below when I’ve not got a flash out yet. This test shot was not to see what the photo would look like if I didn’t use a flash, I knew I was going to have to use one, It was to test the exposure of the ambient light in the background.

When I take photos at night with models, I always want to include some ambient light in the background so that the photo is more interesting. After all, who says a pixel on the face is more important than on the background. The settings used for the photo below are ISO 1000, at f/2.8 for 1/30 of a second, which is about as short as I can hold the camera steady for at a 24mm focal length.

Step 2 – Flash

For the next step, I added a flash, and after a bit of fiddling around I found a setting I liked. The only problem was that the flash exposure was turned up 1 ev and the aperture was slightly narrower at f/4 with a shutter speed of 1/40, which was allowing less ambient light in. I liked how the light from the flash was looking, but it was clear that I was going to have to change some of the settings with the exposure. To create this shot, I used a special diffuser, but it can be easily created with a regular flash and a cheap £4 diffuser. Before we go any further, it’s important that you make sure you set your flash to high speed sync, which allows it to work differently and at much higher shutter speeds. Without this setting on, my flash will only work to 1/250 of a second. My flash is also set up wirelessly and will require some sort or transmitter, and you can read all about that here. 

Step 3 – Flash Diffusion

The reason I asked a model to come and take photos with me was because I wanted to test out my new beauty dish and grid cover. A beauty dish sends out indirect light which is bounced around the dish before illuminating the subject. The grid that goes in front takes this soft light and forces the light through the holes in the front into a straight line and over my subject. The result is this soft light which still allows the model to have natural shadows on her face and body. The end result in my final photo makes the light look as it it’s come from a long way away, from a much larger, yet soft light source, when all it really is a wireless flash and less than £100 worth of gear. 

Step 4 – Exposure

To allow more light in, I kept my ISO on 1000, at f/2.8 for 1/30 of a second. Clearly, this allowed more light in than before, but because the photo was too dark, this made the grain much more noticeable. The thing about digital grain is that you’re left with uneven colour with an almost grey and red tinge to it. This is no good for the type of photo that I’m trying to achieve, which is supposed to be soft lighting, plenty of ambient light and plenty of clean, soft and sharp features on the model. To try to find a compromise between the flash light and the ambient light in step 2, I reduced the flash exposure down 2 stops to -1ev. This didn’t work quite as well as I had planned, but it’s all part of the process. 

Step 5 – Exposure 2 & Background

As you can see, the grain in this photo is a world of difference to the photo above, and that’s because I changed my lens to a f/1.4 prime lens that allows 4 times more light into the lens when it’s set to its maximum aperture. This allowed me to lower my ISO to 640, and on top of that, I slowed my shutter speed down to 1/6. The reason I was able to get away with such a slow shutter speed was because the initial burst of flash was powerful enough to freeze most of the motion and any movement in the darkness struggled to shine through. You will notice however that there is a little bit of movement on the right side or the face, which I fixed by raising the shutter slightly in the next photo.

Step 6 – Positioning & Background

From examining my photo above, I decided that I wasn’t entirely happy with the lighting the background because the light all seemed to blur into one, so I rotated my model and my positioning to capture the lights that went along the pier. The same settings as before were applied, except I raised my ISO to 800 to account for my slightly higher shutter speed of 1/6 of a second. Even though this photo was shot at f/1.4, I was able to keep the photo looking sharp because I very carefully focused on the model eyes, which is where your eyes are drawn. The rest of the photo, particularly the skin looks very soft, because it is soft. This combination works really well at night as it produces a great effect, while allowing me all the light that I need to work with.

The final settings for this photo were ISO800, f/1.4 at 1/6 of a second with the flash power boosted to +1ev. If you would like to learn more about how I processed this exact photo, then I go into detail about it in this post here. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you. As always, if you have any photos that you feel could be used on this website, click on the ‘submit a photo’ section at the top and have your images seen by thousands. Enjoy!

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