Photography is all about light – the literal meaning of photography is “drawing with light”. So one might think that taking portraits at night is a really bad idea. Yes, on one level low light makes photography very difficult. But the absence of light also gives us the ability to manipulate light in a way that you cannot do on a sunny day. Here are some fun examples of how to use light at night – I hope you enjoy our night portraits with fire and flow!
One a beautiful late summer Saturday we worked with the artists of Cloud Nine Fire Show to create wet plate collodion portraits. You can see what we created on our companion site SunandSilver.photo. We switched to digital photography after sunset and had a bit of fun. Lighting was a combination of fire props, LED props, moonlight and a few monolights.
We used two lenses for all of these pictures. They came from opposite ends of the spectrum – from our most modern lens to a Vintage lens designed long before we were born. Lets look at the modern lens first!
The Canon RF 135mm f/1.8 is,in our opinion, the best portrait lens Canon currently manufactures. It is sharp and renders the most beautiful skin tones and colors. It gathers an amazing amount of light at the most open f/1.8 aperture. The 135mm telephoto focal length captures faces with a subtle beauty that is unique.
Our other lens was a Voigtlander 40mm Nokton f/1.2. The Nokton design goes back to the mid 20th century. Our Nokton is a new manufacture with the vintage design. Manual focus and manual aperture. Where the Canon is a technical marvel the Nokton eschews modern design to deliver authentic vintage rendering – imperfect but beautiful. This lens has a modern RF mount to use directly on the Canon R5 camera.
Below is a comparison between the Vintage Nokton and the modern Canon 135mm. Can you tell which picture was taken with which lens? The differences are subtle but there.
For the record the picture on the left was taken with the Nokton – look at how the focus falls off as you move away from the center. The Canon 135 is much sharper on the edges – a consequence of modern lens design and better manufacturing techniques.
Below are more of our favorites from our time together. After this gallery you can jump to the next page and see the entire gallery of our night portraits!
A gallery of all our photos is on Page 2 (below).
You can see more of our work on our blog
