Lighting for Night Photography

One of the great things about winter and camping experiences is that along with the winter grade experience but now we're over at Gooses base camp and so we're going to get a nice shot here tonight in the campus tent which is kind of a place where people can come and warm up and hang out on their winter camping trips. But one of the keys, that was nice, I just spilled all the matches is we are going to get a night shot in our campus tent and so we've got some lanterns, a little luxury otherwise we can use candles. The other thing that you can use believe it or not if you carry your flash with you, you can use your flash to go in in multiple pops in order to illuminate the tent. So the key with this kind of a shot is that you got to be here at dusk. You've got to be here before it gets dark because you want to have a little bit of ambient light in your scene because if you don't, all you going to have is a lit tent and a sea of blackness.

So we've got to be here early enough where we can have a long enough exposure to see the tent lit up but also see the background and the forest around it. So, the lanterns we're going to provide are illumination inside and our tripods and long exposures are going to serve our illumination on the outside. And now one of the cool things about shooting this things like this, is that once we get them inside we can have somebody stand against the wall and you'll get a shadow of a person, so you are actually adding a sense of scale to it by having somebody inside. One of the keys now, is we're going to make sure we get tripods, we're are going to get our shot set up. We got a fire going too.

So that is one of the things. The fire can't be too large, if the fire is really large and it overpowers the light that you are getting from your campus tent you've got a weird jin yeng thing going. So what you would do, is get your fire going you get a nice set of cauze and then when you want to use just add fire as needed to get it going to kind of balance this so one is not overpowering the other. They are both just part of the scene. All right.

So there we go, we've got our lanterns lit I'm going to crawl inside and hang them up and come out and get the tripods set Necessary ingredients, for getting great night shots really at any time but particularly in winter time. Head lamp, you got to make sure you got that. You've got to have everything on sticks to make sure that you are able to have a long exposure because as the night progresses here, as dusk progresses, we're going to be getting into probably 10-15-30 seconds exposures. And it's a combination of shooting the fire, and matching the light to fire and this point and also matching the light to the lit tent. So there's is going to be a point here where I'm no longer going to be using the fire because in this particular camp scene, the fire is a little bit further removed away from the tent then visually I want it to be so I've got some choices I have to make like you do with every photograph you create.

Do I want to include the fire, the people gathered around the fire for something? Absolutely I do. But why stop there and say, "We're done for the night." After this, I'll move from the fire. I'll move to the trees. We've got these fabulous red and white pines that are here that I'll be able to include in the track that also includes the sky.

And so then I can remove from the fire move and just concentrate on the tent. The other thing is that we want to make sure we get somebody in the tent. And that posses it's own set of problems. If you think about it, someone has got to be fairly close to the wall of the tent in order for a shuttle of the light that's on the other side of the tent create a shadow otherwise it's just people moving around and it's a dark spot. So we may ask anybody who is in the tent, "Hey, can you step a little closer to the wall of the tent to give us a sense of scale?" For how big the tent is and somebody inside You know they could be inside doing anything but just the shape of a person inside again adds a third dimension to the shot it's just not a lit wall tent in the middle of nowhere, somebody is actually inside warmer than I am.

And so those are kind of the ingredients that we need to get this. As far as ISO goes right now I've got a 14mm lens on here because again the fire is removed from the tent further than I wanted it to be and so by using the 14, I can get them all in the same shot. What that does is right now my fire is large and my tent is small and so after I take this shot, then I'll move over here and the tent will become large and the trees will become small so you can see you just kind of play and shoot as many things as you can. You knock it and that very very tiny window of opportunity that you have in order to do this. The others that have ramped up my ISO, I've being shooting during the day at 200 I'm at 800 now, because as it progressively gets darker, I need more sensitivity in that ISO to bring out the colors in the tent.

Colors and light that I can't see, the digital sensor can see. So we want to make sure that we've ramp up a bit our ISO to give as much light luxury as we possibly can. And that's pretty much what it is. You just kind of wait for things to happen wait for darkness to get to that prime time and then you've literally got about 10 minutes of good light to make it all come together and get your night shot cam. So one of the things here we're going to do too to help add a little bit of life to the fire here is once you've got good coals and what have you going all you really need to do is get your fire stick and just jab the logs on the stick and you'll get sparks that will come up and those sparks will create tracers during your long exposures.

It's a great way to add a little bit of texture, a little bit of depth, a little bit of size to even the smallest fire to make it work. So let's give that a shot. All right, why don't you give a little kick there. Perfect. That's all it takes.

Excellent. So what we've just done here is Rob who is camping with us and taking pictures as well. We've got him towards the tent now and I've gotten him close enough to the tent to where I can actually see the solar well outside the tent. Rob, do me a favor. Go a little bit more to the right so I can see the door stop right there.

Perfect. Now as you stand there, have one of your arms came up away from you so I can see through it. Right there. Now I've got some texture and I've got some again three-dimension. His arms just are making the bigger body.

So now, we're going to try to pull all these ingredients together and we're going to have Christina, our fire lady She's going to kick our fire and give some streaks. So I'll go ahead and give her a good shot. There you go Perfect. Look at that. Now we've got lovely sparks.

Let's increase the size of the fire. I've got a solar light against our canvas tent which gives us the sense of scale for the size of the tent and we've got a nice little fire scene going on. Perfect.