low light portrait photography | photoadda studio

Tips for low-light portrait photography:

low-light portrait photography in this blog I will be talking about the cameras and lenses the lighting the camera settings and also certain additional tips and editing to help you get better low-light portrait images I'm very pumped up for this blog hope you are too without wasting any time let's get started first let's talk about cameras and lenses talking about cameras now it's not necessary that you should have a full-frame camera but if you have an option go for a full-frame camera because in low light the full-frame camera will perform better and will give you higher quality images in low-light at higher ISOs don't misunderstand me if you have a crop sensor camera that does not mean you cannot get better images with the other tips that you're going to see in this blog you can get great images no matter which camera you're using talking about lenses I highly recommend to get a prime lens. if you're shooting with the lens maybe your kit lens that has an aperture of F 3.5 or F 5.6 something like this it won't be very useful if you have a lens with a wider aperture something like a 2.8 1.8 or even 1.4 that is going to be very useful for two reasons first you get a very shallow depth of field and second since you have that wider aperture it allows more amount of light to come in and that is how you get great quality images in low-light the lens I'm using in this blog is the 7200 mm 2.8 and the 50mm 1.4 as I said the 1.4 will be very helpful in low-light situations why I like the 7200 is it has image stabilization so since the lens have built-in image stabilization I can use that with slower shutter speed I will explain more about camera settings later but hope you understand what kind of cameras and lenses should you use when you're shooting in low light the next thing I'm going to talk about is light so when you're shooting in low-light there are two main issues one is the noise the images look a lot more noisy when you're shooting at higher ISOs and the second issue is the lack of light on the subject there are four ways to fix it the first is ambient light so when you're shooting in low-light you might have different light sources available in the surroundings you can use that place the subject close to the light source and get beautiful light on the face of the subject the second method is to use a flash.
flash is great for low-light portrait photography and you can be a lot more creative with it I will soon make a dedicated blog about how to use flash and if you want it stay tuned to my channel don't forget to hit the subscribe button on that note the third tip is to use continuous blog light. I shoot a lot of blogs and that is why I have a continuous blog light with me. if you don't have a flash I would recommend to use a blog light. why I prefer blog light over flash is that it is always on and I have the idea of the exposure of the kind of light that I'm going to capture. it's not that it's better than the flash but I slightly prefer it more since I have a better idea of what I'm going to shoot before clicking the shutter button the last tip is to use the mobile slash flight. if you don't have good ambient light good flash or blog light you can use your mobile slash light as well just take the mobile phone you have turn on the flashlight and use that.
if you use it properly you can have very good light and people won't be able to tell whether you used a good quality light or just a mobile flash so that was all about lighting. let's talk about camera settings I highly recommend to shoot in manual mode. when you're shooting in low light the light can be lot more tricky there can be a lot of highlights and shadows and when you're shooting in manual mode you get complete control of what you exactly want to expose and that is why I always shoot in manual mode the first thing I always set is the aperture. it's a subjective thing it depends on the amount of depth of field you want but most of the times if I've warned that shallow depth of field I should at the widest aperture for example this image was shot at F 1.4 not only it helps me to get that shallow depth of field it also helps me to get more amount of light coming in so a aperture like a 2.8 one 81.4 something like that will be very useful then I set my shutter speed. you cannot use a very faster shutter speed because it will reduce the amount of light and that is not what you want you want to use a fairly slower shutter speed but not introduce any camera shake so a good starting point would be the focal length of your lens so if you're shooting with a 50mm start with one fiftieth of a second if you're shooting with 85mm lens around 100 of a second is a good starting point if you have extremely stable hands you can also use a slower shutter speed something like 138 or 140th of a second just make sure that you're not introducing any camera shake talking about camera shake if your lens have any kind of vibration reduction make sure you turn on that so try to use a vinyl aperture and a slower shutter speed so that you get more amount of light the next setting is the Izone. you have to be careful when you're increasing the ISO if you are using a crop sensor camera anything above 800 ISO is going to give you noise if you're using a full-frame camera 1600 or 2,000 iso is totally fine I understand that increasing ISO will give you much more noise but that can be dealt up to an extent when you're post-processing don't keep the ISO less and shoot an underexposed image because if you're later trying to get that exposure in post-processing the image quality is just going to be worse the last setting is the white balance. I will always recommend you to shoot in RAW and when you're shooting in RAW you can obviously change the white balance while post-processing but it is better to set the white balance when you are capturing the images so you get a better idea of what kind of images you might end up with obviously raw will give you that flexibility but try to get it perfect in camera so that you have to do less work while editing the photos so this was all about camera settings the next tip I'm going to talk about is using a tripod so as I said when you're shooting with a slower shutter speed you can introduce some camera shake and to prevent that tripod is a great option so when you're shooting with the tripod you can use a slow shutter speed like 128 or one thirtieth of a second and that will help you do not increase the ISO a lot to get a proper exposure. using a tripod might feel like a small tip but believe me when you're shooting in low-light tripod is going to be extremely extremely useful. this was all about the shooting part try to get creative with different light sources and try to introduce some kind of foreground and better composition and you will get great images since we are done with the shooting.
The editing part let's jump to Lightroom for that so this is not going to be an in-depth editing tutorial mainly I will focus on three things the first thing I'm focusing on is the white balance so as I said while I was shooting I felt this was the proper white balance but when I later came home what I saw is it's a bit warm so I'm going to dial in a cooler white balance something about 2700 looks good so once I'm happy with the colors the next thing I'm going to focus is noise reduction so when you're shooting in low light you might be using a higher ISO. this was shot at ISO 800 so if you see there's a bit of noise and we are going to remove that. the noise reduction process also depends at which I so you're shooting so four different ISO it will be different but since I'm shooting at ISO 800 I will tell you what I'm doing I will set my sharpening to about 70 and then I will use the luminance at about 25 to 30 so once the amount and the luminance are set the next thing I'm going to do is masking so I'm going to hold the alt or option button and I'm going to pull down the masking till I have the areas which
I want to be sharpened okay all the black areas you see will not get sharpened so all the noise that is there in the parts in the black parts will actually be completely gone so that will help to remove the noise so if I toggle this on and off you will be able to see the difference let me zoom in for you. if I toggle it on and off you can see the noise is gone but we have maintained that sharpness the next thing I am going to focus on is bringing attention to the subject. I have done some basic editing here and. I want the attention to go directly to the subject so what I'm going to do is first I'm going to use a radial filter and I'm going to make a circle around her face okay so this looks fine and then I'm going to increase the highlights a bit so about 15 and shadows just a bit about +5 so as if I toggle this on and off you will be able to see the difference I'm not playing with the exposure I'm just dealing with highlights and shadows and this depends on the kind of image and the kind of light you have on the subject you can play with exposure if you want just a bit so. since I have done this I will make a new radial filter I will just cover the subject and I will make sure the invert option is not checked so everything that is actually not in the circle will get affected okay make sure the feather is 100 so that the changes look bit more gradual then I'm just lightly going to decrease the exposure so I will just increase the size of the circle and then when I toggle this on and off the edges get a bit more darker and the attention. directly goes to the subject and we have our before and after so I hope you understood how to shoot and how to edit low-light portrait images. if you want to make some money by participating and winning contests as I said I have collaborated with shut out for a portrait photography contest you can post photos and basically there are two kinds of entries free and premium entry the premium entry is for about $2 something like 140 or 150 rupees the thing is the more number of participants more will be the cash price so just by spending about 140 150 rupees and submitting your portrait images you can win a lot of cash prizes a bonus for all my subscribers is that when you submit your premium entry then you will get a shutout premium account that will be starting at the year 2019 with the help of the premium account you can submit five photos per contest you can also create your own contest and when you do that you will earn more money so it's a great place visit the website the link will be there in the description and also in the top comment make sure you participate in the contest and all the best for the competition.

Photography Studio | Portfolio photographers in mumbai

Bathtub Setup with props & Lights

fashion photography

product photography studio

Bed Setup with props & Lights

fashion photography

product photography studio

Paper Backdrop Setup with props & Lights

fashion photography

product photography studio

Blog Pages

PHOTOADDA STUDIO

Tips for low-light portrait photography:

@ FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM

PHOTOADDA STUDIO

Opening Hours

Follow Us

Estimate Shipping

Add A Coupon

Follow Us