Shoot low-light portraits

Jason Parnell-brookes joins Nikon School UK in the bright lights of London, armed with off-camera flash for a masterclass in low-light portraits

We go out after dark to shoot with Nikon School

We joined Nikon School UK for its course on low-light portraiture. The first thing we learnt was about light, and namely four distinct aspects: quality, quantity, direction and colour.

Starting the workshop in Nikon School’s studio in the Centre of Excellence, we saw there were several different light sources in the room to contend with – overhead spotlights, fluorescent lights and daylight coming through the windows – giving a mix of colour temperatures.

The most flattering light for our portrait subject is soft light, and that means we need to diffuse the light to allow a wider spread. We used the Lastolite Ezybox Pro Strip softbox for this, which has a pair of white baffles inside to soften the light. How much flash light we need depends on our camera settings.

In order to remove the extraneous mixed light, whether shooting inside or out, we set our Nikon’s exposure to settings that would give us a dark frame. By doing this we were able to avoid the combination of white balances that come with having different light sources, be it inside with bulbs and strip lights, or outside with street lamps and traffic lights.

The direction of the flash is also crucial. Flash aimed straight-on at our subject eliminates shadows, but power is important, because those shadows give us visual cues about our subject. Let’s take a look at how we constructed our final image.

Flash aimed straight-on at our subject eliminates shadows, but power is important