Portraits and Sparks.

As you all already know, I really love doing low light photography. Being able to "control" the light is just so much fun, and it gives the picture a whole different feel. Yesterday my little brother and I found a pack of sparklers, and we had some fun with them while I snapped some pictures.

 

This first picture is probably my favourite. I changed it to sepia to allow the viewer to focus more on the contrast between the light and dark, without it being muddled up by colours rather than shades in between. What I love most about this picture is the contrast between the clear and bright sparkler and the slightly blurred and grainy Caiden in the background, giving the picture depth, texture, and value. Also, the way he is concentrating on the sparkler is pretty cute, a definite bonus. :)
  I had the ISO on my camera set to 1600, making it extra sensitive to the light of the sparkler, which was actually the only light source in the room. My shutter speed was 1/25 of a second, still fast enough to capture the individual sparks, but not too fast that it didn't have enough time to capture the light the picture needed.

 

For this picture I set the ISO for 800, with the same shutter speed as the first. However looking back, the difference in the lighting of the pictures is not that different, save for that the first one was a bit more grainy (which, again, is not necessarily a bad thing).

 

Doing this was a lot of fun, and a bit of a nice challenge too. There was lots of stuff that I had no control over (you can't tell a sparkler how to pose, for example, or which direction to shoot those fiery little sparks), and you can also see a few of my beloved "sun spots". So overall I was very happy with the way that they turned out.

 

 

 

 

Working with low lighting

The past couple weeks I have been fiddling around with low lighting photography. I have always loved the look of it, but have never managed to take one that I was really happy with. So after doing a bit of research I decided to seriously give it a try, and am extremely happy with the results! A special thanks to my sister who was my guinea pig for this rather time consuming experiment,  and had to sit extremely still as I spent forever with changing my camera settings.

These first two here are my favourite. I had the shutter speed set to 1/4 of a second, and an ISO of 400, which worked out really well! Since the shutter speed was longer than normal and I do not have a tripod, it was a bit tricky to keep the pictures from becoming blurry, but it all worked out in the end.The light that you see is coming from a small window in our basement, and I especially love the way that the light caught perfectly in the details of her scarf.

 

And for this one I decided to try some black and white...

 



We also had some fun trying crazy things with the different settings. She turned her head once, not knowing I was taking a picture and it turned out pretty neat, in my opinion. I had my shutter speed set at 3 seconds at that time, with an ISO of 1600, and although its blurry and really doesn't follow any of the photography "rules" I just love the different feel that it has! Almost ethereal, with the way that you can see two faces...

 



So that's about all I have so far with this type of photography! An article that I found helpful can be found at http://www.discoverdigitalphotography.com/2014/low-key-photography-tips/ so check it out! And as always, feel free to post comments and suggestions, I would love to hear from you and get some advice!