Painting Lights
Painting Lights
Night Photography shouldn’t scare you away it should bring out your utmost creativity, it should be like painting with lights.
Nigh Photography seems pretty difficult at first for a lot of beginners even for me, a lot of people find it scary and overwhelming to the point when once it gets late at night, they put their cameras away and don’t even think about pulling it out. What if I told you no one knows what they’re doing? Yeah, it’s crazy no one actually knows what they’re doing because it’s all trial and error when it comes to Low-light photography.
I don’t consider myself a professional photographer or an ambassador of low-light photography, the title of “Professional” is scary in itself and it carries too many expectations, it’s like you have to know what you’re doing and do it without any mistakes. I can tell you this that in night photography you will have multiple mistakes, some photo will come out over-exposed, some will be blurry, some even will leave light trails (unless you wanted those trails) and I’ll guarantee majority of your photos will have a lot of noise before you can settle down with a photo you like. But that’s the beautiful part of night photography is the mistakes you can make from the traditional portraits photos you get from school or a corporate photo company.
When approaching low-light photography/night photography it’s impossible to shoot in darkness, you can even see it in cinematography not any night scene in any movie is shot in total darkness where you can see a character. There has to be a source of light coming from somewhere, most movies will use the color blue in their shot to emanate or replicate darkness or night-time. The science of color also known as chromatics or colorimetry is the aspect of things that is caused by differing qualities of light being reflected or emitted by them. Example, when light shines on an object some colors bounce off the object and others are absorbed by it. Our eyes only see the colors that are bounced off or reflected. The same concept can be applied to photography and especially night photography when all the colorful lights and shine their brightest.
“The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.” - Theodore Roosevelt
Little mistakes here and there will always lead you to some unexpected results. As you can tell the top photo of my cousin was a result of learning from a mistake, I’ve made in 2017 when I was first experimenting with night photography. my first time encountering this so-called portrait light streaks was when I was trying to take the usual portrait photos at night but left the shutter speed exposed a little longer then what I anticipated while I was moved the camera. In turn, I got a blurry portrait with beautiful light trails. I didn’t think much of it, I just thought it was another freak accident until late 2018 then I was watching a video by Eric Floberg on YouTube about “FLASH EFFECTS “. Which talks about adding a flash when exposing your photo in movement will be able to capture your subject and also leaving beautiful light trails. Light Trails that are exactly the same accidental mistake I made before watching his video.
What I did to achieve this portrait flash effect from the photo up top is simple. Everything I shot is manual so I set my camera up to try and keep the ISO under 800 and the aperture to 1.8 because that was my max to letting light in, and the shutter speed around 3 to 4 seconds to allow my camera to capture enough light form the flash. Always test your flash before to make sure the light isn’t killing the light trails we wanted in this shoot. I add a red-gel to the flash just in case the light produced by the flash might blend in with the light trails, and so all I did was executed the experiment and Whala!!! I was able to achieve the photo you’re seeing now.
With the flash and controlling what lights I want in the photo and which one I don’t want is just like a painting. Painting a subject with the desired color I want the viewers to see.
I hope that reading this will encourage a lot more people to take their next step in their photography more so into a creative artistic area where you haven’t been figuratively and literally; to not be afraid of the scary void of mistakes and consequences society have tried to mold us in even if it takes baby steps to achieve this change. I hope a lot of people will be able to see the artistry in photography and the time it takes into learning and planning a shoot that it’s not just a click of a button. No one is perfect and everyone is still just learning where talent is a pursued interest. Anything that you're willing to practice, you can do, that it takes time to perfect a special craft, photography or not. I’m still learning so much from other photographers because photography is so vast that your take on one subject will always be different from another.
Like a famous artist said “We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents” - Bob Ross.
Go out there and make happy little accidents.
- A Dearest
