Night Portraits

Recently I’ve met up with some of my friends for night portraits photo shoot. We organized it to celebrate my new website and spent some really cool time putting it together.

We gathered in front of the town hall in my hometown, Koszalin. The idea was to create interesting, blurred backgrounds of city lights. The town hall building is illuminated by a numerous blue lights that created a nice pattern. You can see it on the next photo:

In this portrait of Michal, I used a small strobe positioned camera left. For a bit softer shadows, i shoot it through a white umbrella. I added some fill from below using another flash bounced of the white card on the ground. I had to use quite long exposure to grab that lights in the background and Michal was lightened only by flashes.

I used a bit different lighting for this night portrait of Marta. I put a long grid and a blue gel on one flash and placed it on the left, behind her. The umbrella was placed in front of her, slightly above. I wanted to reproduce here the traditional color-movie look with the blue highlight from behind and warm key light. It turned out to look great as a black and white photo and I decided to keep it that way.

The below photo of Michal was lighted similarly, but now I set up the light on both sides—the blue on the left and warm on the right. This way I could accentuate his crazily shaved hair and keep the detail on the face. The blue light corresponded with the town hall at night, however, I did not leave it in the frame as felt too distracting.

For the another portrait of Magda I decided to use the white umbrella alone as a key light and include the background lights for a bit of separation separation. In addition I used a small, weak strobe on the ground pointed directly at her eyes. It gave her nice catch lights, that the umbrella could not provide because of her forelock

That’s it for today, hope you enjoyed. We are meeting on the beach for the next session, so stay tuned!