The Dark Side ...

I've noticed that a good bit of the images I've been working on and drawn to lately have one thing in common. That would be low light dark images. Across many situations too. Dark clubs for concerts, very last few minutes of sunset, nighttime cityscapes, light painting in completely dark settings, and the like. I've got some pics to show, and some tips to tell for low light photography.

Get Stable

I took the panoramic image above in Jinja, Uganda at sunset in December. It was already pretty dark, and getting hard to get clear pictures while hand holding. I didn't bring a tripod, so I used the rail of the balcony to steady the camera. I pushed ISO to 1000. With my D200 I really don't want to go any higher than that because of the noise. Newer cameras like the D3, D700, D300s, and even the D90 deal with noise much better and make for clearer shots with ISO1600 and up. I could have pushed to 1600, but at the price of not only introducing noise, but also loss of color. The contrast and saturation tends to go down as ISO goes up.

Grasp Your Lighting Situation

I shot these at the bottletree, a cool Birmingham bar/music venue a couple weeks ago. The artist is Garrison Starr by the way. Like most bars with live music, this place is very dark with lots of colors. To get anything good in a place like this, I immediately assess the lighting conditions. I started out by setting ISO to 800 and aperture to f/2. All I brought was a D60 and a 50mm 1.8. Only manual focus on the D60 but I would've done that anyway in the low lighting. Then I tested to see how fast of a shutter speed I could get away with. The beauty of digital is that I can test, review, change, test, review, tweak. All while seeing the results immediately and not paying for developing. I settled for around 1/50 sec . There was enough light for it and I could lower to 1/30 if need be. That's my limit for handheld. I kept at 1/50 for most every shot of the artist though because she tended to move A LOT. Its important though to go into difficult lighting situations with an idea of how you'll be shooting. Find a base and work from it.

Get Creative

One more way to have fun with low light is to put your camera on a tripod and take advantage of long shutter speeds. Leave that shutter open and paint your scene exactly the way you want it lit. Get in a dark room or outside when its completely dark and use flashlights, glowsticks, christmas lights, or whatever to paint creative lighting onto still subjects or make some unique light art by moving small lights in patterns facing the camera.

Some More Self Portrait Jazz and Cleaning Backgrounds

Alright, I got a little bored again and since I've been playing guitar again lately I wanted to do a self portrait involving that. Great, I've got plenty of props! So with the D200 still off at the doctor, I'm using basically the same setup from my last post (D60, SB-20, paper softbox, Phoshot wireless flash triggers) with the one addition being a SB-600. So here's the setup after moving lights around and playing with output settings! (by the way, all the pics are clickable to bigger sizes)

• Nikon D60 with 18-55mm @f/9 on tripod about 14" off the ground

• SB-20 on mini tripod with my expensive paper softbox complete with duct tape 1/16th power

From Steven Lee Photography

From Steven Lee Photography

• SB-600hanging from the ceiling bare at 1/8 power

Simple and straightforward it would seem. Except for having to set the timer and get to where I thought I should be positioned. That proved to be pretty hazardous in my cluttered bedroom, but after tripping and falling in the floor enough times I was able to get a couple of decent frames.

As you can see, my room is a bit of a mess and with the space and equipment I was working with, I couldn't black out the background. It ended up looking something like this.

So I decided to go about editing in two ways. With one image I took it into Photoshop CS4 and hacked it to bits as follows.

• Duplicated background layer (usually always my first step in PS)
• Made some minor tweaks to the background copy with levels, curves, colors
• Created a new blank layer
• With the paint brush, I painted black everything I wanted to fade into the background
• Created a new blank layer
• Cleared up skin with cloning and healing
  
• Reduced fill of the skin clearing layer to 60% to look more realistic
• Saved as PSD and went back to Lightroom
• Added a preset with vignette and tweaked colors to my liking
• DONE!! (took longer than I'd like to admit)

Next up I decided to see if I could get the same effect using only Lightroom. All I did was use a brush in the develop panel. Make sure you are using the in depth brush menu by toggling the small boxes in the upper right side of the brush box.

• I lowered the exposure and brightness till I had a black brush and painted out everything I didn't want.
• Applied a preset and tweaked colors
• Done (much quicker than CS4)

The result is not much different except for the skin touch ups that I did in CS4. I decided to keep my guitar case and a little bit of the wood in the background for this one. Here is the before and after.

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Just a few more for now

Here are a few more photos from this year.

This is a portrait of an old friend I snapped at another friend's wedding. Its one of my first attempts at controlling a flash. Bounced off the ceiling


Here's my niece being an unknowing model


Some over processed nature with a friends 70-300 VR


I see them every time they come to town. Bo and Bear of NEEDTOBREATHE