Getting Creative With Unconventional Lighting Gear.

Today I am going to give a quick little tip that can create some really cool ambiance in your images.  This technique works for all different styles of photography and in all different lighting scenarios.  I will run down how I created the above image in this post but feel free to try out these techniques with your own style.
If I had to pick a favorite style of photography it would have to be night portraiture because it allows me to get really creative with different lighting, both available and artificial.  For the image above, I used a combination of both ambient light and flash to create the final image.  Check out my camera date below...

Camera: Sony a7ii
Lens: 50mm f/ 1.8
Aperture: f/ 1.8
Shutter Speed: 1/10 sec
ISO: 800
Flash: Westcott Apollo Orb with single Yongnuo 560IV (camera right)

Aperture - I tend to shoot most of my images at a low aperture so my flash doesn't have to work as hard and I like the shallow depth of field but you can definitely use a higher aperture to create a similar image if you want to have more of the background in focus.

Shutter Speed - The shutter speed for this image is pretty important because I wanted to make sure the background was properly exposed but at the same time I didn't want the shutter speed to be too long or else there would be a lot of ghosting around the edges of my subject.  I settled on a shutter speed of 1/10 sec but the only problem was that the overall image was way under exposed even with the flash firing.  This leads us to the ISO setting.

ISO - I typically will always try to shoot at a low ISO in order to keep my image from having too much digital grain.  However, in this situation I needed a faster shutter speed and my aperture was already at the lowest setting.  I settled on an ISO of 800 which is still well within the realm of producing a great image without too much noise.

Everything I talked about above will create a really cool image but I felt like something was still missing so I rummaged through my camera bag and found something that I was sure would spice up the image a little.

That little secret ingredient was a tiny little LED flashlight that I shined directly across the lens to create a flare that give the image a hazy, fog like effect.  All the flashlight was doing was creating a lens flare which just jazzed up the bottom portion of the frame.  It was completely accidental that it happened to look like fog, but hey, I'll take it.

Here is a before and after without the flashlight on the left and with it on the right.  All I had to do next was put the model in place and let the camera do the work from there.

-Note- 

The longer you shine the flashlight at the sense the more light will flood the image.  Play around with different lengths of time to get the desired effect.

Check out the lighting diagram below to see how I set up the rest of this scene.

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial and if you want to see more be sure to subscribe and also follow us on Instagram @ReadylightMedia and "like" us on Facebook!

Until next time,

Jeff C.