Tips for shooting beautiful women’s portraits at night

Introduction: The answers here are about the ideas of night photography and the flexible use of a few accessories. The difficulty is from beginner to intermediate. It does not include multi-flash lighting and outdoor shooting lights, so I want to see professional night scene lighting. Please detour. Let’s take a look below!

The biggest test for the camera when shooting night scenes is that the shutter speed slows down because of the small amount of light. There are three ways to solve this problem: opening the aperture, increasing the sensitivity, and manual Increase the amount of light.

Increasing the sensitivity is the simplest method, but high sensitivity will increase photo noise and reduce the picture effect. It is recommended to open ISO400~800 for night scene shooting. If you encounter a dark light scene you like, you can open it appropriately, but it is generally not recommended to open it above ISO2000.

Large aperture is the choice for most photographers to shoot night scenes. It will have a background blur effect that girls like to see, but it often needs to be purchased separately. You have an 18-55 or 18-105 or 18-200 lens. Children's shoes, look down and see if the maximum aperture of your lens is F3.5, so your aperture is not wide enough. You can recommend spending 600 yuan to buy a 50 1.8 or 2500 yuan to buy a 50 1.4. Girls will like it very much.

There are relatively bright lights on the first floor of the viewing platform of Hong Kong Avenue of Stars at night. You can use the light to take portraits. However, the light is not so sufficient in the place where there are star fingerprints. The aperture is F1.4. , so children should stop asking whether such photos can be taken with mobile phones and card machines. The answer is no!

Manually increasing the amount of light is actually adding additional light to the night scene. The general method is to use a flash , hand-held LED, use outdoor shooting lights.

Use the flash effect, the top of the camera flashes.

In addition, when shooting night scene portraits, since most street lights are yellowish, most people choose fluorescent or tungsten light mode in terms of color temperature to neutralize the yellow in the picture and make the picture more natural.

Next, let’s analyze everyone’s needs and problems when shooting at night:

In fact, there are roughly two situations. The first one is because you think the lighting decoration in the city at night is very beautiful and want to take a group photo. , but when photographed, the face is either dark or blurry. The second requirement is to take pictures in a relatively dark situation, where the light source cannot be found at all, and neither the focus nor the shutter speed can be kept up.

The problem with blurry faces is simply that the shutter speed is too slow and the focus is out of focus. As mentioned before, the slow shutter speed needs to be solved by increasing the sensitivity and large aperture. If the subject is not in focus, it is most likely because the light behind it is too bright, which leads to the next problem of dark faces.

A dark face is actually a light problem. The most important thing in night scene photography is to find light. Whether it is the original light in the night scene or artificial light, it is the key point in night scene photography.

So, where does the light come from?

The light that can be found in the city night scene include: shop window light, street lights, light boxes, and car lights.

Among these lights, store light is the best to use, because most of the lights used in stores are fluorescent lamps, which have a relatively correct color temperature and sufficient brightness. When taking pictures, face the window or the store, and it will It can borrow light and get a relatively sufficient amount of light.

In this photo, I was standing next to a drug store in Shinjuku, and my face was basically illuminated by the light from the left, so I was able to focus (the face of the girl behind me is obviously not as bright as mine).

Next to Hong Kong Ding Ding Station, the light on the face is the fluorescent light of Ding Ding Station, so the color looks cooler than the scenery behind (yes, I am the kind of person who has to look above my head before taking pictures) What kind of lamp is it?).

If there is no light like fluorescent lamps, you can look for large light boxes and decorative lamps:

Hoi An, Vietnam is a city of lanterns. Find a brighter lantern next to it. Just one stop!

If you don’t have either of the above, you can only look for street lights. There are many categories of street lights. In addition to differences in brightness, there are also differences in color rendering rates. Some are brighter. In areas such as squares, try to face the light source when taking pictures, and the light on your face can be barely enough.

But to be honest, these lights are already very poor, and street lights often make faces look yellow and lose a lot of details. If this kind of light is really not good, you can process the photos into black and white or monochrome:

Slow shutter photography

In night scene photography, slowing down the shutter due to insufficient light can sometimes produce more interesting effects, but when shooting slow shutter speeds, a tripod is required. , or put it somewhere fixed, and if you are shooting portraits, people must not move!

With a shutter speed of 1/2 second, you can take pictures of the cars on the left and right with a sense of flow. This photo was taken handheld. Children, don’t you want to learn from this? Theoretically, if the shutter speed is slower than 1/50 second, don’t hold it easily.

In short, when taking pictures without using a flash attachment, you have to follow the light and take pictures wherever there is light.

Finally, I would like to give you a piece of advice: Never run down and take a photo when you see a beautiful (lit) fountain and a string of beautiful lantern trees. It is precisely because of your If there is light behind you, you will definitely be black in the photo. If the camera focuses and makes you brighter, then the scene behind you must also be overexposed, so you must first find the light in front of you and let the front and back Only when the light is balanced can you take pictures~

Flash usage:

Do you think it’s miserable to find light everywhere? Then use flash.

If you use an external flash, you can use TTL metering and adjust the output. If you use an on-camera flash, you can control the light by just covering the light with a tissue.

This is a case of combining large aperture and flash. The model's face is exposed correctly, and the light spot in the foreground is in P.

The light in this photo is from behind, and there is no light in front. If you shoot it directly, your face will definitely look dark, so I added a flash to illuminate the face and also illuminate the snowflakes to give the effect of snow falling. .

Below are some ways to play in slow motion, many of which are old photos from when I was a student.

Front and rear curtain synchronization

In the case of slow shutter speed (1 second and above), if the subject continues to move after flashing the flash on the subject, or the camera shakes, many virtual images will be produced. Shadow and light strips are more suitable for playing in nightclubs.

Strobe multiple exposure

This is to flash multiple times on a moving subject at a slow shutter speed to capture multiple exposures of the subject.

Starry Sky Photography

Many people ask how to take starry sky portraits, so here is a brief explanation.

Canon 5D2 lens 17-40 F4, ISO2000 20 seconds

Basic principles for starry sky photography: maximum wide angle, maximum aperture of the lens, screw the lens to infinity (that’s the ? mark on the lens ), exposure time 15~30 seconds, sensitivity 2000~4000.

This photo uses very weak street lights from the hotel next to it, which produces outline light on my body. Due to the long exposure time, the very weak light becomes very clear.

When I shoot starry skies, I usually try to find a place with a little foreground light, but sometimes it is completely dark, as shown below:

Canon 5D2 lens 16-35 F2.8 ISO2000 10 seconds

It was pitch black under the starry sky in Nianbao Yuze. It took 10 seconds to expose. During the ten-second exposure, I used a tissue to cover the mobile phone flashlight to sweep the model, and scanned intermittently within 10 seconds. Tried it three times to get the right light.

Written down in its entirety, it is a relatively user-friendly night scene shooting tutorial. In fact, the main reason is that I don’t use multiple external flashes to play with. Night scene shooting requires more brainpower than shooting during the day, but there are dots of stars. It is easy to get surprising effects with lighting. If you use the equipment you have and take the initiative to find the light, this matter will not be that difficult. I hope you can take photos you like when you go out at night.