8 tips for shooting in low light I shoot in bright daytime environments about 80% of the time but occasionally I do need to shoot in low light and chances are you've also found yourself in a low light situation and if you don't know some of the basic techniques to approaching this type of shooting environment you're going to be stuck with some grainy unusable footage so to start out my first tip is to make sure you have at least one light source now remember
 |
| 8 tips for videography and photography edited in canva.com |
8 Low Light Shoot Tips for Beginners Photographer and Videographer
 |
| best tips for low light shooting image edited on canva |
1. Low Light Shooting:
this article is about shooting in low light not no light so you need to have at least one source of light to help bring some contrast and dimension to your scene now depending on the environment that you're shooting in there are probably quite a few natural sources that you could use to help light it up for our little intro sequence we had our campfire the lights from the truck and our subject cell phones now if we didn't have those lights to help create an interesting scene and we just depended on our iso(photography for set an ISO) to light everything up we'd have an extremely flat image so remember you need at least one light source so you have your light now where do you put it that brings me to the next tips.
2. Lighting
tip number two light the shadows now right now i'm being lit by this fire so it's acting as a key light or my main source of light this can be a good lighting technique for many situations like obviously if you're filming a couple of friends sitting around the fire and you need a natural light source that can light both of them up but frontal lighting the only way to light your subject in the dark in fact unless it's a natural light source like the fire i think generally it looks a little bit too staged and artificial another method of lighting your subject in the dark would be to light what's behind them instead like some of these shots of our subjects setting up the fire they have lights from the car shining on them from behind which creates a nice rim light and separates them from the darkness so you can use a combination of both frontal lighting and back lighting or you can just use backlighting on your subject to really emphasize that it's nighttime this is what i mean by light the shadows you don't necessarily need to light your subject directly a silhouette of your subject with an interesting background is really aesthetically pleasing and it's going to give you a lot more contrast and depth in your image than just one frontal light if you take your camera and you try to expose for the shadows in your scene it'll most likely introduce a lot of noise into your image so rather than exposing for those shadows expose more for the highlights and the mid-tones allow your shadows to be shadows if your shadows are too dark just find a way to light them up with some artificial lighting like i mentioned in the previous.
3. Wide Aperture
tip number third is to use a wide aperture now the lower the f-stop on your lens the wider the iris will open and the more light will hit your sensor, therefore, brightening your image for example the entire image would get significantly darker for that intro sequence I shot all of it on sigma f 1.4 lenses prime lenses like these generally have pretty low apertures so I'd recommend them over variable zooms for low light situations I honestly think having a good fast lens that can at least get below f2 is the first thing you should look at on your setup because it'll probably make the biggest difference out of any of these tips.
4. Frame Rate
my next tip is to use a slower frame rate now if you shoot in a high frame rate let's say 60 frames per second you'll be forced to shoot at a shutter speed of at least one over 120 so your footage has proper motion blur now a shutter speed of one over 120 brings in less light than if you were to shoot at 24 frames per second at a shutter speed of 1 over 50. now I'm not a big fan of lowering my frame rate because generally, I like to shoot at 60 frames per second in case I need that slow motion but sometimes you just have to deal with it because that small change in your shutter speed can mean the difference between a well-lit shot and an underexposed shot the trick I like to use is to actually shoot at 30 frames per second with a shutter speed of 1 over 60 since the difference between that and 1 over 50 are very minimal I'm always editing on the 24 frames per second timeline so if I shoot at 30 frames per second I can slow it down to 80 percent of its original speed and still get just a little bit of slow motion.
5. Camera setting
tip number five is to optimize your camera's iso settings now many cameras give you the option to activate built-in noise reduction to clean up some of that gross discolored that you may experience when shooting at a high iso now canon specifically has what's called high iso speed noise reduction so I'll generally have that turned on when I'm really pushing the iso.
6. Camera
my next tip is to choose a camera that does well in low light now not all cameras are created equal some cameras typically lower-end models or cameras with smaller sensors generally perform a bit worse than those with full-frame sensors having a large sensor size will usually do better in the dark because it can catch more photons or light also a feature to consider when choosing which camera you want to use is its ability to shoot raw since that'll give you more flexibility to adjust your exposure in post now you'll still need to keep in mind the proper camera settings that we've already gone over and good lighting techniques but raw shooting can definitely give you a boost.
7. Standard Picture Profile
tip number seven is to use a standard picture profile now this tip is mostly for vlog shooters i really don't have anything against vlog but because of the nature of vlog you typically need to over expose your image just a touch in order to utilize all of that dynamic range something that number one is going to increase the amount of noise in your image and number two isn't necessary because there generally isn't a lot of dynamic range when shooting in the dark anyway because it's so dark you won't have enough data to actually expose your scene the way you need to so unless you have artificial lights to help light up more of your environment you may as well shoot in a standard profile like rec 709 on my 1dx2 i'm shooting in neutral which is my go-to for most situations and with this tip i'm obviously speaking in a general sense so you can gauge for yourself if it's worth shooting in vlog but like i said i tend to steer away from it especially for low-light shooting all right so now that our footage is shot and we've done everything we can to make sure it looks as clean as possible in camera we can jump into our editing program and make a few adjustments until it looks extra crispy when i'm color correcting low light footage i like to go into my curves panel and bring up the highlights and the mid-tones now naturally i would want to be pulling up my shadows to try and get some of that detail back but if you do that you're going to introduce a lot more noise into those darker parts of your image so i'll only typically bring this up just a touch now the reason i focus more on the mid-tones and the highlights is because it creates a lot more contrast and depth into my final image it's important to once again let your shadows be shadows and respect the lighting where your subject is located there's no need to over enhance it and make it look unnatural all right
8. Denoiser
the eighth and final tip is to use a denoiser so if you followed all of these tips and you still have a bit of noise in your image I recommend using a denoiser plug-in to clear it all up the one I use is from red giant and it's just called denoiser 3. now honestly this has been a lifesaver in several of my shoots sometimes there's just nothing you can do while on location to accommodate for low light and you just have to deal with the splotchiness and fuzziness from your high iso again I'd recommend trying all of the previous tips that I've given first and just use denoiser as a backup mainly because while the cleaned-up footage that you'll get is definitely usable it might look a little bit artificial almost like plastic plus the plug-in uses a ton of computing power to process your clip so ideally, you don't want to use it since it'll disrupt your workflow a bit.