P#22 Q4A: Overcome the Obstacles of Low Light Photography

Making it Work

John Siskin: There are two ways to approach low light photography when shooting indoors. The first one is to set up your camera to work with low light situations, and that means working with the found light indoors. You may augment the found light with strobe or with a tungsten light source, but essentially what you're trying to do is capture the light that's already there.

Many people try to do that at parties. They walk in with a camera and they take pictures of a very different party than the one they went to. At the party they went to, the hostess or the host spent a lot of time designing the light and making sure that their living room looked nice.

At the party the photographs reveal, however, the hostess seems to have passed out miner's helmets with little bright lights that everybody put on their heads and that's the only lighting in the entire room. You've seen the pictures of this party.

Audri Lanford: I've taken the pictures of that party.

John Siskin: Right, because you're using a powerful strobe right on top of your camera. You're banging it straight at the subject. The subject is brightly lit and everything else is dark, and there are all these horrible shadows. There's just nothing about it that's attractive, right?

Audri Lanford: Absolutely.

John Siskin: So what are we going to do? First thing we're going to do is we're going to make the little light source on top of the camera, the strobe, is at least a little bit bigger. There are a couple of manufacturers out there that make on-camera diffusers for strobe including LumiQuest, Gary Fong, and Ultimate Soft Box. I can't recall all of them off the top of my head.

All these things do is make a light source that is 1x3 inches closer to 12x12 inches so it softens the light on the subject by lighting the subject from a broader area. Suddenly, things are a little bit better on the subject. There's no harsh glare on the subject's forehead and the subject's eyes don't have shadows from their brows. That's number one for dealing with low light photography.

Number two is that the lights in the house are almost certainly going to be tungsten, although this is changing as people put in the compact fluorescents. What you need to do is use an orange filter. Not just any orange, but a specific orange made by lighting companies to make strobe light or daylight to match tungsten lighting.

You need a full orange from a company like Rosco to do that. Rosco makes a filter kit that's about 1x3 inches. It's a free set of samples that they send out, if you can get them to send you one. They used to give them away more often than they do now. You just tape this filter over your strobe and then put it into your diffuser. That's going to be a big help.

The next thing you're going to do, at least when you're using digital cameras, is change the balance between strobe and existing light. You're going to turn the strobe down and let the existing light become a little bit more powerful.

Each digital camera manufacturer has something that does this. It gives you a broader light source that's closer to the color of the original light in the room. If you increase the shutter speed -- remember that's not going to change the strobes -- you're going to let in more light from the room and suddenly you're going to have an integrated picture of a subject and the room with softer shadows. It's going to work well and you're going to be happier with it.

Alternatively, you can set up a little portrait area and shoot portraits in the house and have people come to you. That's just like shooting portraits anywhere else with a set of strobes, but it's not as simple to set up. It may take more room to set up than the people in the house might appreciate, but you can still go ahead and do it.

It's really comes down to how you approach doing event photography. If you have an automatic strobe like a Canon 580 or a Nikon SB800, it can be pretty darn easy to work with and you can go around all night taking shots that are really going to work out very well for you.

In Closing

You can't always control the lighting of your environment, but you can control what you do with that lighting and how you make it work for you. After listening to John's tips on overcoming low light obstacles, it seems that successful low light photography is just a matter of understanding your found light and knowing how to enhance it.