How do you take awesome nighttime portraits?
Lancellin sand dunes, with the symphony orchestra lights along the walking paths. Lit with 1 flash off camera, and the ambience of the rope lighting.
Skyline walks along elizabeth quay at night, we loved this rope lit water feature! Using 1 off camera flash again, rear curtain. No tripod necessary as there was so much ambient light, we need a faster shutter speed to prevent any blurring of the couple.
I illuminated this image much differently than most of my others at this Amberly Gardens wedding, before they shut down the venue. No tripod needed, and 1 off camera flash used for backlighting, and with the bouncing light off the tree and the lattice, and shining through the white balloons, (they also had lights inside) this image needed no frontal lighting!
Firstly when shooting with nighttime portraits, consider what your options are:
1: What location am I going to shoot, and what kind of lighting is there around to illuminate the area, or features, or subject?
2: What kind of flash am I going to use? or am I using a flash at all? where will my flash be located, and what will the flash illuminate when i use it?
3: Will i need my tripod, and wireless trigger, will I need wireless flash set up, will I need light stands, or can I get someone to help me hold the flash/lighting?
4: Can I use a creative lighting tool to illuminate my image with something magical, that didnt exist there before, or can I use something to manipulate it into a creative night image?
5: Do I want my couple to be a sillhouette, partial sillhouette, annonymous, or fully lit, or perhaps only backlit, or ambience lighting?
6: Do I want to create several images in this series or just 1, and how much time and patience does my subject have for the creative lighting and set up?
7: How many tries am I willing to do to get the perfect shot, and are the subjects willing to stick it out with me, or will they just get frustrated before we get somewhere?
Elizabeth Quay in Perth, city skyline! using off camera flash, which I let the little ones hold to keep them feeling involved and not bored during our shoot!
10 foolproof steps to leveling up your nighttime portraits
1: Feature lighting
Find yourself a feature lighting for the night, whether its an architechure building, an art structure, a lamp, some fairylights, flowing balloons, or even sparklers, or light painting, or even backlit water droplets, find yourself 1 special feature to create something unique and magical.
2: NO moving!
Keep your subject as still as possible, no moving eyes lips or mouths, I suggest choosing a pose they can hold for a long duration that wont injure or hurt them, and thats natural and easy to hold for several test shots.
3: Tripod
I cant emphasize this enough, how many times I have tried to WING an image at night, and it simply didnt make the cut because i left the tripod behind... It truely makes it easier for you to also light up your image, and work on curating the shot, and getting closer to your couple while doing lighting/light painting...
4: Shutter drag
Typically your long exposure needs to be long enough to capture the essence and ambience of your lighting feature, and not highlight the couple in any way: when you snap an initial shot, it should show the subjects dark, but your lighting feature background, perfect!! THEN... incorporate your flash, on rear curtain, to freeze the final motion of the image of your subject: this can be movement shot, but it is preferable to have your subject still to limit any focusing factors...
Another rim lighting sample, but this one ALMOST leaked a starburst, because the source light can almost flash into the lens of the camera, but luckily the motion of the couple, stayed over the light and kept the lighting covered up, so I didnt get a bright burst of light into the lens and create a lens flare, they can often remove details of faces etc, and you wont get nice expressions, so I make sure that as the couple is moving, I am also moving and trying to dodge that bright flash and keep it hidden.
I call this the dancefloor rim light... Did you know they are surrounded by a crowd of guests in this image?? You would never be able to tell because i set my rim lighting flash (flash behind the subject) to be so bright, that if i set my shutter speed quickly, almost even at 200, then I would capture ONLY what the flash illuminates! and none of the ambient lit subjects!! I just threw my flash on the dancefloor behind the couple and kept firing until everything lined up and there was no starburst.
This is another rim lighting sample, however instead of setting the flashes zoom setting to a 70-100 and putting the flash far away, I also set the flash settings to around 24mm, so a nice wide flash area!! Luckily I had these two pillars to bounce the lighting off of, and onto the backs of the couple so they were more lit up than just rim lighting! Often I like to use the lit up foreground/background, to bounce a bit of "fill light" onto the couple, so its not such a sillhouette.
Sometimes if you are lucky, the ambient lighting in the space around the couple are JUST enough, that you dont need to use any flash at all!!! Often I find these images lose their natural colours however and the colours can be distorted, so if you noticed any black and white images in my work, its because the image either looks better in black and white, or because the colours are a bit off, and non recoverable... This shot was taken with a slower shutter speed and a higher iso, with an Fstop around 4.5
At nighttime, when it rains, the water on the road reflected even more lighting into this image than there truely was, so I used the rain to my advantage to give a more wholesome coloured lighting to the image.
5: Manual Focus
Set your focus!!! Do not allow the camera to focus for you, when you can get tack sharp focus without all the jittery recofusing at night, I find using an iphone light to illuminate your subject, (being both subject and camera are not moving) then you can manual focus and garantee a sharp image!! especially if the couple dont move, and your camera is on tripod.
Here you can see the actual lighting I used for the couple in most of my images at Elizabeth Quay and it made a fun behind the scenes shot, illuminating the kids, and lighting up the couple.
6:Lighting Position
choose your flash, and location of flash, whether you are using on camera flash, (you can however never get as good quality and the distance limits your lighting quality) I recommend an off camera flash, either on the ground, or on a light stand, you may trip and break your flash without a stand (do not recommend without stand.... ) Position your flash in a way that illuminates your subject, but not too much of the background and details you dont want:
I love this peep window feel in a ruins in my hometown during a trash the dress paintball session. I put the flash behind the couple, and I had no flash in front! that is all just fill lighting from the rim light! (fill light is often unintentional in my work, and just happens as a product of rim lighting.
7: Flash Settings
PLAYING WITH THE ZOOM SETTINGS ON YOUR FLASH, WILL OPEN UP A WIDER FEILD OF FLASH COVERAGE OR A MORE NARROW ONE, AND CAN SHOOT FROM AFAR AND GET GREAT DETAIL! (EXAMPLE: 100MM WILL SHOOT A TINY BEAM OF LIGHT FROM A FAR DISTANCE FROM THE FLASH, THIS WORKS GREAT FOR A WIDE ANGLE IMAGE... WHERE YOU WANT THE BACKGROUND UNHINDERED BY FLASH. OR USING 24 MM WILL DO A WIDESPREAD FLASH, THAT WILL BE SOFTER LIGHTING, BRIGHTER, AND WILL COVER A LARGE SURFACE AREA IN A WIDE ANGLE IMAGE... TYPICALLY I AM SHOOTING BETWEEN 30-75MM DEPENDING ON IF ITS A CANDID DOCUMENTARY PORTRAIT DURING ACTION, OR IF ITS A CREATIVE ART IMAGE POSED AND STYLED. ) I FIND USING 30MM IS GOOD FOR RECEPTION SHOTS, AND NIGHTTIME CROWD IMAGES, BUT I WOULD NEVER USE THIS FOR A PORTRAIT OF ONE SUBJECT IN A NIGHTTIME CREATIVE LIGHTING CIRCUMSTANCE.
This image I used a flash off camera, about 20 meters ahead of me and off to the side, and set to a zoom of about 100mm, meaning a very far away tiny beam of light, just enough to light up the couple and a bit of the pathway... Then set my settings low enough exposure to capture those deep sunset colours.
8: Ambience
flash settings are vital to get the right brightness, the right coverage area, as well as the right rear curtain exposure settings, when your shutter is above 200, you need to use High speed sync flash. But when your shooting nighttimes, if the surrounding area is extremely dark and not much lighting in the area, and your lucky enough to have your subject still, i recommend anywhere between 1/30s - 15". i use 1/30 for light painting or sparkler shots, and I usually will use 15" if i am just getting the background ambience like city lights..
Just using the shutter settings at the right lighting to illuminate the couple with only the lights coming from the balloons! A longer exposure and higher iso maybe necessary! But never stop your iso too high or you will get unnecessary grain. Often you will want the image darker in RAW, so you can recover it later in lightroom or your editing software. If you shoot the image with a high iso to begin with, you can always make it brighter, but you cant remove the grain, so I suggest shooting lower iso.
9: Shoot in RAW
Alrighty, so we have all of our elements in place, final step is to shoot in RAW, gosh I cannot emphasize enough, when shooting nighttime work you want FULL quality colour, in low quality lighting... Your colours will be terribly distorted and hard to recover if you dont shoot raw... just shoot raw always anyways... for the greater good of your work
Another rim lighting example, where the light is flooding PERFECTLY onto each and every looped bar at the elizabeth quay art structure at the city skyline. Lucky because of nighttime images, I can remove any unwanted textures/objects in the background using a black paint brush, and fading the black of the image to be as dark as possible, and the highlights as bright as possible. Luckily while I didnt have my lightstand, having the flash lying on the ground behind the couple, was perfection, pointed up!
10: FIRE!!
shoot away, as many images as you can muster, and double check your settings, move that flash to a few new spots, try out some different angles and poses, and work on some new creative images with these lovely 9 steps!!! Double and triple check your focus, often this will be the fail of even the BEST seeming images. (i am guilty of this too!!) ZOom in on the camera screen previews, triple check and quadruple check!!
NO flash in this image, all DJ lighting!!! (lasers are the worst, dont take this kind of image if they have the red or green little dot lasers, because you will be terribly dissapointed, I recommend asking the DJ to amp up all the flood lighting, and get the smoke going, and get rid of those ugly lasers!
PRO EDITING TIP
Just throwing this out there for those who want better finished images:
When editing, I suggest removing and using a black paint tool to cover up any bits and bobs you dont want showing in the image!! Best part about night photography, is if you shoot dark enough on your blacks, removing unwanted things in the background of your image is a BREEZE and can make an image look incredible!!!!!
BEFORE AND AFTER EDITING IN PHOTOSHOP
AFTER: I removed the gazebo in the background!
BEFORE: you can see the fence and gazebo, and even a bit more grass than I would like...
What are some of the challenges your facing in nighttime portraits?
If you are having trouble capturing nighttime images, I suggest you take some time and look at this whole post again, and compare what you are doing differently, and what maybe is missing, there is a lot of steps and often if you get them in the wrong order, it can create a world of chaos when it comes to nighttime portraits!! Send me a message if you would like a ONE on ONE online course training via Zoom, so I can step you through it bit by bit and get your nighttime images looking perfection!
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Much love, and happy nighttime shooting!!
Sarah Wild.
