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Crappy Lighting Condition: Low Light Outdoors

we're putting these in chronological order. We wanted to kind of give you an idea of what it was like for Lindsay, and I had to be shooting on the roof the other day. Um, and it was kind of rough because after the sun went down, it was pitch dark. So Lindsay covered kind of ways to get a stable shot yesterday in the in the church that were at. But when you're up here, you have issues of focuses. Well, a stability. So we had to try to figure out how to focus on our subject in the dark. There's a couple different ways to do that. Under camera, you have what I like to lovingly refer to like metal headlamp. It's like a little, you know, like the cars with one front headlight out. Um, this little guy up here, you can see it's actually such a dark, crappy light in our in our temporary studio here that when I go to focus, it automatically is pumping this little headlamp right here. So I'll show you what this looks like when you're shooting in pitch dark. Every time I push the head butting hal...

fway down to try to grab focus. You're seeing that go on. And what you have to do is, you might think, Well, Eric, why aren't you using continuous focus or using back button or using shutter? In this instance, I want that illuminator light to come on. First thing you have to do is open up your camera manuals that I hope you guys found yesterday. Look for auto focus, illuminator and then in there in that menu, just turn it on once and then forget about it. And basically, from then on every single time you have your camera in single release mode, which means you push the button down once you get one photo and you have your fender, your focus dot in the center, the very center focused dot If you have those two things together and the and the menu item turned on, you'll get the headlamp every single time you go. And that's why I was shooting single and I wish, rather than continuous and single focus rather than a continuous focus mode as well to get that And that's what you see it go on and off every time. So every time we push the button down headlands comes, headlamp comes on, allows me to focus is if I had a spotlight on my subject and goes away right as I take the photo. And I don't know if he actually said that it won't work If you're in continuous, Yeah, it will not work. So if you're trying to figure out how the heck wise and this working that's one of the most common like ah ha moment that people have is they say, Well, I've tried to get put mine on. It won't work. It's in continuous. It will not work. Another thing, too, is your focus. DOT has to be in the very center. A lot of people get it on. They figure out this this single single focus thing and then they're going, going, going. They bump something on the back of their camera and their focus point moves over on old cameras. Remember, like nine or something like that? It was noticeable. You knew. If you're focused on, moved over in the viewfinder, if you've got or 61 points and it nudges over a little bit and you're shooting, you might not notice it. Of all of a sudden you're autofocus illuminator stops working. Just make sure you re center your center focus dot and make sure you're still on single focus rather than a I serve over continuous, um, the low light focusing with flash. Here's the auto focus. Illuminator is gonna be our next option. Click this one more time there. I just saw that one. I'm gonna let that play through and the next thing is gonna be with our flash. So basically, what I like to do a lot of the time is put a flash on. I'm not a big fan of on camera flash. We've discussed all the benefits of getting it off camera, but when it is on camera, you have this front section right here that you're seeing illuminated in this photograph. And that is awesome, because rather than having this giant spotlight firing every single time you try to get focused. You have an infrared beam or crosshairs that actually come out of the front of this again. Center dots. It's under the same sun of same restraints as we had with our autofocus illuminator. Except this is much more efficient rather than like a white light coming out for whatever reason, that crosshairs of red infrared light is much more easily picked up by your auto focus. So it our folks, looks for a number of things. Contrast edge detail. So by having a cross hatching and it gives a pattern that's easily picked up contrast wise. So you might be shining your light on someone with a solid color shirt. Not a lot of contrast. You shine the cross hatching on like this, and all of a sudden a lot of contrasts picked up really easily. Let me show you what that looks like on our model's face. You're really quick. There you go. So you can see the cross hatching. And again it goes off right before you fire the trigger so you don't have to think. OK, push the button down halfway, let it focus, and then take the flash. Oh, God, I hope I didn't get the red cross hairs in it. You can just go ahead and fire away, and it knows to either turn off your headlamp or turn off your cross hatching right before the photos taken. So you turn these features on. You don't have to think about him anymore. You're just gonna know that you're in focus. Finally, when you're shooting in the dark and just clarification he was saying he likes because on camera, then it gives you those those cross beams it doesn't like on camera flash. But this is when you bounce it as well. You could bounce it off the sealing off the wall and would love you to focus in low light. That's how I worked when photographing weddings and receptions is I would use that to focus and then balance it off the wall, bouncing off the ceiling. So if you guys remember the what we finished with last yesterday in the church, this was actually going off the whole time. We maybe didn't mention it, but the autofocus beam was working the entire time for us. So another option is with our flashlight. So what we do is I had her hold a flashlight for me on the model's face. Same is the autofocus illuminator. And then what you do is I get focused, and then she really quickly pulls the flashlight away, and I go ahead and take the shot. So this does a couple things for us, though so far we've been able to get focus of the tiny pinhole light on our camera, and we've also been able to get focused with the cross hatching coming out of our infrared. But what the flashlight does is if you think about it, you saw the first photo, how dark it is. Pitch dark, what our pupils do when it's pitch dark, they dilates. The black part of your eye gets massive, so I don't care how pretty her eyes are. When my flash finally comes on to take the picture, her people, they're gonna be so big, I'm gonna see zero color in your eyes. So when I'm shooting low light stuff in a low studio and I may be using studio strobes or using speed lights, I'll have an assistant take a flashlight and kind of shining in the face of my model to constrict the pupil so I can see the color in your eyes and then I'll take the photo so it does double duty here. It helps us focus, and it also makes the eyes look a lot more natural. No one wants that photo of like, you know, you just got out of the dark. You're looking at like an alien or something like that. So you want to see the color in the eyes much more noticeable with light colored eyes, obviously brown eyes. But yeah, if I'm going, if we're green and it's like, yeah, when I'm photographing the city, I just want to say I totally groovy when I'm doing a beauty shop and I love that girl's eyes. I'll do the same thing so that I can see all of that blue if it's a beauty shop. For that reason, basically, I don't use the flashlight. I just pump up my modeling like on my studio strobe, instead of to a low power, I pump up to full proportion. So it's 100% so that I can see the blue instead of having it lower, even if it's perhaps slightly less comfortable on the eyes. This is something that I think both Linds and I found out by accident and were not ashamed to say it. So you're handling your camera. You've got your flash on top of your camera, or you have your flash in this case using the pocket wizard. See the flexing it there? What this radio trigger does is it basically makes this wireless gap where your flash still thinks it's on your camera so they're able to communicate. And when you have these on, there's a really do you have your depth of field preview button on the front of your camera? Back in the film days, this used to be you would hold that preview button down and it would stop open your camera lens to whatever aperture you had it out so you could preview how much depth you would have. So if I had a super shall it up the field, I'd want to know how much was gonna be in focus and out of focus. It's not so important any more with digital cameras because we could get a live view preview, which is gonna be wide open. Always take the shot Look on the back of our camera. More importantly, but what it does now is if you have a flash system on t t l associated with this and you hold down that flash the depth of field preview button, you're gonna get something really cool like this. We hope saying All right, we're describing that. So right now, I have a large flash bender on there is the flash bender X l We're gonna go ahead and get that into position there and there's the depth of field preview, but right in the front of your camera, we've got that and I'm gonna go ahead. And just what I'm doing now is holding down the depth of field preview button here and it's going to give me this pulse of light. Now, what it's gonna do is, rather than firing the flash, is if I push the shutter button by holding down the depth of field preview button, it's gonna pulse very rapidly that flash. So it almost appears to be a constant lights essentially returning our speed light into a constant light for a second or two seconds wherever long we hold down a depth of field preview button and this is going to go ahead and shrink their pupils, allow you to get focused and also is gonna let you preview what the lighting pattern is gonna look like. So some people are scared to take their speed light off camera because Lindsey mentioned studio strobes have modeling lights so you can turn them on and you have a constant light to see what you're lighting patterns. Gonna look like speed lights don't. But if you use this technique, it could be like, Okay, it's gonna look like that. Move it, move it a little bit and then take the photo and you have a lot more control as well as assist focusing. We're getting a lot of questions from the audience last couple of days. Oh, my God. I'm gonna kill my batteries. This will probably drain. Your battery is more than any technique that we've showed you. But in the long run, if you pick up a nice camera, spend the 50 bucks in another battery and just shoot to your heart's content because, honestly, it's worth it to have a backup. And to be able to get that extra shot rather than having to say, Oh, man, my camera battery died. I'm gonna go home for the day. So definitely worth the investment. We went downstairs off of the ceiling right outside the Creative Life Studios to a street corner where there was overhead, tungsten light and then also cars passing in the background, and then also buildings that were let even behind that So I found this cute girl in leathers posted up on the side. That right there. So, um, low light balancing with Ambien. So if you want to pause us here, I'll kind of give our us a motivation. So we go out there. This is crap crap light. So if you're looking at this, look at Lindsay's hair. The natural light here puts light on the hair and shoot straight down on us. There's no light on our faces. You see Lindsay's nose over there, the corner. There's a spot of, like, highlight on there. There's cars driving by with their headlights, hit you the exposure, goes up five stops and goes back down. I mean, this is really difficult. So what I wanted to do is create a natural looking image, showcasing the cars existing in the scene, lighting her very well and making it look natural. So first thing we did was have to add a light because we're gonna try to change the direction or bring a direction of light. And that's more flattering. Lindsay, trust me. And she knows I'm a decent photographer. Otherwise, I don't think she would have said, Hey, crappy light. Why Don't you take a photo of me instead of the model So good sport for jumping him on this one s. So what we did is we started with that one speed light, which I'm setting up here in an umbrella. And if you want to hit play on this, you describe okay, What we're doing is right off the bat. I'm not even playing around here at this point. We've already balanced out with gels. We know that we're gonna need to warm up our flash. Those overhead vapor, tungsten lights, They burn really, really warm. So I'm putting on a full cut of CTO here. Like that's the thickest piece of plastic they give you in the kit. And that's gonna take my 6500 Calvin and drop it down to 30. 200. Calvin, take my white light and make it orange. So it matches the overhead light, so I'm gonna go ahead. She's gonna show you here after I get this set up. I'm not gonna bother to fix my umbrella. I could tell you it fell over and broke right before this, but honestly, we're doing this on purpose. I haven't broken down like that so that I have more control over it. So earlier we discussed that if you have a 60 inch bounce umbrella is going to send light everywhere by having it broken down like this, it's gonna condense that. So we have a much more narrow beam of light. So it only really covers her because we want to let the ugly overhead streetlamps do most of the work. And I just want this nice light focused in a Lindsay space to compliment her cheeks and her everywhere all over facial shape. So let's hit play here. And I would also say, for you people that are more comfortable using studio lighting for me in the studio. That's and I'd bring out like a tele zoom reflector or a long throw, because that the way that it works, it funnels all of the light Ford because it's not a widespread or the same thing between using a soft box that will spread out more or a strip light because it forces a light forward a little bit more condenses it. All right, let's try this playing for you're gonna notice that as I put this up now to I'm also gonna ratchet it down like that because it wouldn't make sense to have a light in an environment where everything is high overhead street lamps to be coming in an eye level. So when you're placed in a light like this, it's motivated. It's gonna be that light coming in from overhead. It's supposed to be a street lamp. There goes. I've got the cameras set up on the tripod, and this is clutch here because right now we're gonna be shooting at very low. I esos we're going to get some land. We're gonna get some light streaks and stuff in here. So I wanted a stable, stable platform. So, like Lindsay discussed yesterday in the sanctuary tripods the way to go if you got it. And we did get permission to shoot out here on the street. So we weren't gonna get in trouble by putting down tripods on the street. This is our very first shot. All right, we've got I s 02 or I so 401 2/100 of a second F four. So I'm all manual mode. So all things are controlled. Let's see what the next photo is. Eso 800 So now I'm gonna start ramping up my I S O. Because there's not a lot of environment going on here, is there? I mean, I took the flash and I look like an amateur because everything else fell black. It was like, I want environment. I want mood. I want, like, you know, motivation here. So let's up our eyes. So some more. So we got 400. 800. Let's go to 1600. Let's double the amount of light coming in now. We're seeing something. Let's go to 30. 200. Double it again. Hopefully, we'll see a little bit more alive. Okay. Did I go to 60? 400? Practice what I preach. I did Okay. 6400. Okay, so now we're starting to see stuff that, compared to the very first photo on a completely dark background is an incredible difference, right? The only problem is we hit play here. Some of you guys gonna come in here and start nitpicking me for grain. And you know what? The grain really isn't about on these cameras. Lindsey said she went way over the top. Honestly, I took these files in, and I was surprised but I want make this accessible. So what if you come across and you have an older camera, or what if you're shooting films? Still, I bless you. Your purists out there? Um what if you're shooting film out there and you don't want to be shooting out of 6400? I s so you don't have to. So let's go ahead. I'm gonna show you how to get the exact same shot by varying are shutter speed instead. So we got Celeste out There are lovely assistant. We're gonna start off again, Thanks to last. Um, so really, we're gonna start off again. We've got I s 0 200 by the way, find Celeste on the creative live Twitter. She loves Twitter, so we want to bump up or follow him. So I s 0 200 is We're going to start cause everyone seems to be comfortable there. Still it f four and we're at 1 1/100 of a second. I'm gonna slow down to 1/50 of a second. Keep going 1 25th of a second. Again, I'm on a sigma 85 millimeter, 1.4 lens. So this right here is below what I should normally be hand holding out. So this is why we're on the tripod. Keep going. We're gonna go to maybe 1/15 of a second. 1 13 There we go. We're starting. Get light now. This is like I s 0 3200 territory. Remember last time? This is what it looked like when we were at highest. So 6400. But by blocking down on a tripod and using a slow shutter speed, I'm able to stay at a super low. Comfortable. I also get the exact same ambient feel. And what? What going on here? Lindsay was nice enough to stay still for me. But in every one of these photographs, she's been lit by the flash and we mentioned yesterday at the flash the speed of the flash light coming out of the flash is fast. So think about it, is instantly making an exposure to freeze her. And then only reason we have a slow shutter speed is to allow the rest of the photograph to catch up. And for people that are photographing receptions or events like this, it is possible that so they have a lot of tungsten in the room. If you're shooting at 1/ of a second, there's a lot of tungsten hitting that subject kind of like me. What's letting my hair and states letting their face? Even if you're using the flash, you might see a little subject blur because you let in enough light Oh, from the ambient to record the person in the ambient and then you frozen with the flash. You might see some of that ghosting in the background, which sometimes actually really cool. If you didn't want that and you were worried about subject Blur, then you might back off to something 13 or maybe so. You'd see a little bit of background but not worry about the two interacting. I would say I prefer this look much better, and so I would give that a try first. And then if I thought it was a little bit too much subject blur than I wouldn't do 1/5. I do 1/13 1 25th of a second. It's a style thing I mean alive. Some people want everything frozen. No grain. Cool. That's what your marketing, and that's what you're looking for. Get it? But I've got some event. Let's back up a little bit more. Yeah, I've got some event photographer friends who really like the slower shutter speed like this, where they will photograph Yeah, that you get the energy. You get a sense of motion where they'll photograph a bridegroom dancing or people at a reception or someone at a party, and they'll get the freeze, the person with their flash. And then they'll do this to take the picture and swirl it around. So or those zoom in. If ever seen people racking Zoom like that and you get need effects like it warps into the person's face or pulls out, or you get like, light swirling behind them. So, yeah, you might get a little bit of ghosting. And, like Lindsey said, if you speed up your shutter speed a little bit, you'll minimise that. But I mean, this is this is opens the door to all kinds of creative on camera flash photography or off camera flash photography, for that matter, when you have the ability to freeze part of your scene and then get motion and create like creativity pumped into the other part, a really cool kind of dance to go back and forth between. And the other thing I was going to mention is the background light here. It's probably it's kind of fluorescent green. We like that. We thought that it gave it kind of that moody night atmosphere, so that's fine. You know, that's definitely we're not trying to cancel out everything if it's adding toe atmosphere. Yeah, so if we're coming into a room we want if we're doing event photography, we want to neutralize. Like we discussed yesterday morning, we want to neutralize nasty fluorescent nasty, nasty tungsten. If you're kind of have, like, a motivator, event driven portrait or an environment driven portrait like this, you want the gritty colors and stuff. So if the overhead light is very tungsten, the background looked like one of the newer, more energy efficient city street lamps. They've got out there, so it has a little fluorescent green lighting to it. So what's neat about this when you get comfortable with off camera flash and gels is you don't generally walk through rooms in life and everything sterile, like a hospital room and pure white light. When you walk through a room, there's different color temperatures coming through the windows, the doors and the cracks in the lamps out of the ceiling. So why don't we walk into environments and only light with white light? If you really want to take your off camera flash photography and put a creative spin on it, make your images look more natural. Put a little bit of Gela varying temperature on everything you use, and it's gonna look a lot more natural to your eye. So that's why we started out and let these colors kind of live as they were. Last piece of the puzzle though I said I promised I was gonna get some environment in there, I wanted to get some cars in there. So what we did is I had Lindsay holds super super still for me. We're on the tripod and we were looking for some light trails from all the cars and stuff. So this final photo is going to be kind of marrying all of the techniques and stuff that we had in there. So we've got warm light on her. We were able to keep a nice environmental kind of temperature to the lights around there and that slow shutter speed we were shooting that gave us the ability to drag and get some light trails from the car. So we've got this shot and I don't know if she's got a comparison. But if you compare this, let's go all the way. Then just scroll compared this shot in your mind all the way to the very 1st 1 were photographed you on the dark to this end. That's kind of where we started. And that's where we end. So I mean reality. This took us maybe a couple of minutes to photograph and, you know, we wanted to make sure we got brackets, shots and all that kind of stuff. So really not a difficult thing to do if you just go out there and play with your eyes. So play with your shutter, play with your gels.