Balancing Night and Strobes

I've talked about this method of lighting a little bit before. It's the same concepts as what I talked about at the beginning of the week regarding balancing strobes and ambient. Most of that was in day time or lit conditions, not at night in darkness.

Today's photo isn't quite as far as I push this type of lighting, but I think it'll get the point across.

I took this one in a totally dark room overlooking a parking lot. The parking lot was easy enough to expose at 1/4 of a second, but thats no where near short enough for most portraits. Most people move too much and you just get a blurring picture.

So you use a strobe, of course. I used a 560 on a 26" umbrella up to camera right to light myself. It's a quick and easy solution, but does have wonderful results. I'd love to try experimenting with cross lighting more in the future though..

When you're taking these kind of portraits, there's a lot of latitude to work with. If you use a longer shutter speed, you can make some really cool blur effect around your subject. The subject gets frozen by the strobe, but since it's a long exposer, you get another, blurry subject "behind" the frozen one. I've seen people do really cool stuff with this using lights or even multiple flash pops to make "ghosts."

For tonight, I just kept it simple. Nothing fancy, just a straight up portrait. I think there's some beauty in a very simple portrait like this. The longer expose blurs the edges a bit, and the umbrella casts really soft, wrapping light.

The very blurred background is pretty cool too...

So in Lr, I upped the exposer, highlights, clarity, shadows, and blacks. Soooo basically everything. When I bump clarity I usually bump the shadows and blacks too because the clarity adjustment tends to crush them. I raised the vibrance a bit as well.

I shot this at 1/4, f1.4, and ISO100. I wanted the really open aperture to blur the background, and it also gave a great depth of field on my face. Really shallow, but it works. Unfortunately, using an aperture this big meant I couldn't use very long of a shutter, only 1/4 second. With a dimmer background, I would have loved to push the shutter to 1 or even 2 seconds. I think there'd be some really cool blurring and ghosting going on with that.

Well that's it for tonight, I'll experiment with this more in the future. See you tomorrow.