Shooting At Night Is Hard! Part 2

In my previous post, I stated that focusing on a subject at night is very difficult, but I managed to get a more or less clear shot of my buddy Brian. How did I do it? 1. Stabilized my camera on a tripod. 2. Had Brian shine a flashlight on his face. 3. Autofocused on his face. 4. Switched focus to manual, so the lens did not refocus when I pressed the shutter release. 5. Asked Brian to turn off the flashlight and hold very still. 6. Snapped off a shot and examined the LCD. If something was off (focus, composition, and/or exposure), repeat the process. After what must have been an hour, I finally got the shot above. It was hard work for the both of us! By the way, there is a hot shoe flash shot through an umbrella positioned above and in front of (camera left) Brian's face. Here's what it looked like when Brian pointed his flashlight directly at his face:

Shooting At Night Is Hard!

What's one of the most difficult skills in all of photography? For me it's focusing on a person at night. Autofocus has a difficult time in the dark and I can't manually focus if my life depended on it! So what's my solution? Since I need to stretch my blog entries out to meet my monthly quota, I'll answer that later today. Yes, I know, it's pathetic :-)

Face First

Often I find myself taking photos of friends on a sunny day. If my camera is set to any of the auto or semi-auto modes (aperture or shutter priority), their faces appear too dark. The reason this happens is because the camera is trying to balance a bright background with what is usually a darker face (especially if the person is wearing a hat). Let's say I'm taking candid shots and don't want to shoot with flash and I don't want to ask them to move to a different spot. What do I do? I set the camera to manual exposure mode and spot metering (I use this setting 99% of the time anyway) and I just meter for their face. I largely ignore the fact that the background will be extremely overexposed, because most of the time I only care about their face. You can't always do this, for example when you want to make sure that something important in the background is visible behind your subject, but most of the time I find that I only care about the subject's expression.

Move Around

Trying out different compositions is a great way to increase the likelihood that you'll create an interesting image. The best way to do that is to keep changing the position of your camera relative to your subject. Normally when I shoot Kasey, she does all the moving and I just try to keep up. But when she sat down and started banging on the Rock Band drums, it was my turn to move. I shot at Kasey's eye level: I shot above her: I shot below her: I don't think the pictures are very good, but the set would have looked a lot worse if I had just sat on the couch and snapped away. You can see the rest of the set here.