Master mixed lighting setups

Blend flash with ambient light

Portraits aren’t always just about your subject. Sometimes their surroundings are just as interesting, and you then have the challenge of balancing the lighting so that you capture both. Our portrait subject for this project was Alex, and the location was the amazing Dark Horse bar in Bath. (A big thanks to the boss Louis, by the way, for his willing co-operation to facilitate this shoot.) This location is a maze of rooms and cubby-holes, all creatively lit with a soft ambience that gives the place its character – and which we definitely wanted to preserve because it was essential to the atmosphere we were after.

But ambient lighting in a bar is designed to illuminate the surroundings, not the guests, so we needed additional lighting to pick Alex out so that he wasn’t just lost in the shadows. The trick would be to light him well enough so that he was clearly the subject of the picture, but without overpowering the ambient lighting.

This was all achieved with a single flashgun mounted on a lighting stand, and a silver reflector on the opposite side to bounce some light back into the shadows. Having the flash on a stand gave us the ability to change its angle, its distance and the way the light spilled on to the surroundings.

There are no hard and fast rules for this kind of location flash photography, although we cover the technical basics overleaf. Mostly, it’s about using your photographer’s eye: see what works and what doesn’t, and gradually build towards your finished picture by experimenting.