Shooting at Night
Shooting on location can most times be much more interesting than shooting in the studio. Natural environment can open up so much more room for you to express your creativity.
So it did not take us long to decide to do this fashion shoot (the client was a stylist and fashion designer who just wanted to do something different) on location and at night. We were sure the available lights of car head lights, street lamps and shop fluorescents would give the image a dramatic feel. But we soon experienced the challenges that came along with this kind of photo session.
Firstly, the model to wear the stylist’s outfits, make-up artist and hair stylist needed to be urgently decided on. Because of the difficult theme of this shoot I wanted to work with a team that I am already used to and that’s because they already understand how I work. And a model that knows what she is doing and whom spectators cannot easily intimidate.
The location too, was easy to be found. Opebi Raod is a major street in Ikeja and well lit at night. It also has a traffic island in the middle where one can safely move.
Our fist challenge was security. A factor always to be integrated into photography shoots on location. No matter if it’s day or night. But in our case people around turned out to be more interested in what we very doing than hostile. After realizing that, our anxiety vanished and our hired security guards relaxed.
The second challenge I had was with my lighting. I wanted to light up the model with my flash lights and at the same time integrate the available light from the street. Of course flash light is more powerful than available light. Which means my flash lamps would be too bright and the traffic lights and co would be totally underexposed.
I quickly figured out that there are actually two ways to go about it. Since we are shooting digital we can do a double exposure. Fist we meter the flash light on the model and take a few frames just focusing on her. After that we meter the surrounding lights and take a few shots with the correct exposure time of them only from the exact same position. In post production we can now lay the image of the model over the image of the surrounding. And with a couple of photoshop clicks create a perfect image.
The second way (the way I chose) is to reduce the power of our flash lamps, since we can not regulate the intensity of the street lamps. We use a camera that works well also in a high ISO setting and doesn’t give us too much noise. The picture beside here I shot with ISO 800, f 8.0 and 1/20 sec. Enough time for the surrounding light to stream into the shot. Thanks to my flash light that froze in the movements of the model, the long exposure time did not affect the sharpness of the image.
For each frame I took, I always waited for cars to enter the scene, because the lights of their head lamps floated nicely into the picture.
For this shoot I just used two lamps and a battery pack for mobile power supply. We finished the shoot at around 11 o’clock at night .
It is always good to plan a shoot into the last detail. But location shoots will always throw one or two obstacles at you. It is the photographer who has to quickly adapt to whatever the location has to offer and make the best out of it.
Na dann, gut Licht.
Your Yetunde
