In this video I'll show you how you can
create a candle lit portrait by mixing
candles and continuous LED light.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching
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Now usually when I'm shooting portraits
in my small home studio
I'll use flash as the light source
but it's not the only source of light
that I've got in the studio
because I also have some of these
emergency candles and that got me
wondering, is it possible to light a
portrait with just candle light? Well
spoiler alert yes it is but it doesn't
look great. In fact if you want
great-looking candle lit portraits I'm
going to show you in this video how to
combine candles with continuous LED
light to get a fantastic final shot. Now
of course if you're going to try this at
home, flames and models, there's always a
risk so make sure you take plenty of
care and precautions. So with that in
mind let's get a model in. Let's get
shooting, so it's great to welcome Jade
back into the studio who's going to help us
with this candle lit shot. Now to start
with I've got Jade just holding a single
candle because I want to look at the
exposure that we can get from one single
candle. Now to do this it's going to be
quite a long exposure I can tell you now.
So I'm going to be using a tripod to make
sure we have a lovely steady shot.
You'll also notice well we've got this
room lit for the video purposes but the
photo you're about to see where we'll
reshoot it once the lights are turned off.
Okay so let's get the tripod set up.
Okay and we'll light the candle.
Here we go
and we'll just asked Jade to hold that in
front of her and I can take a shot.
So the exposure for one single candle
was a 1/6th of a second wide open on that lens
f/2.8 at ISO 400
That's not a lot of light to work with.
So how can I get more
light out the candle?
Well the obvious way is to double
the number of candles.
So if I went with two candles
I'd get one more stop of light
and a faster shutter speed.
Four candles would give me
an even faster shutter speed with
another stop of light.
If I go for eight candles
then we would have another stop of light.
That's how light works.
Unfortunately candles are not a consistent
source of light
so it's not quite that simple
but nonetheless the maths kind of works,
so for that reason
we'll get rid of that one
and we're going to give Jade that.
There we go.
Seven candles,
that should give us a lot more illumination.
So there we are we have all
seven candles lit. Now again I need to
turn the room lights out to take the shot
but let's see how this has changed
the exposure.
The extra candles really do increase
the shutter speed and that makes it much easier
to work at those sorts of settings,
however when you look at the pictures
the light is coming from below
which makes sense because that's
where the candles are.
Lighting from below
gives a very distinctive look
it's very popular with Halloween style shoots
but we're not doing that kind of shoot
at all so to get a more softer
even illumination,
I'm going to add an extra light.
So let's go set that up now.
So because the candles are illuminating
Jade from below we need something above
to balance it up and in this case I've
got a little continuous light up here.
This is the Neo II from Rotolight and if
I turn it on,
being a continuous light source,
I can actually see the effect
straight away.
Now there's a few things we can do to this light
to make it slightly different.
One of them is to change the power
and will balance the power
once we've got the candles lit.
The other thing I can do is to adjust the
white balance. Now we have to think about
the source of illumination which is
candle light and that's a really warm
color of light. So I'm going to try and
match that with the Rotolight.
Now I've already added an orange filter
to the Neo II but we can still fine tune the color
for even closer match
and we can do that by adjusting
the color from the Rotolight.
So I'm going to take it down
to a much warmer tone,
something that's going to be
closer matching to the candles
and again I can do this by trial and error.
I reckon probably let's try about 3,250.
Let's see if that works.
Now I can't judge that
until I actually take a picture
with the room lights off
and the candles lit.
So let's get the room lights off,
let's get the candles lit
and let's take a shot.
So here's the shot with out the Rotolight
on and then if we increase the Rotolight
to its lowest possible power 1%,
it should give us a nice little balance
like that and I can increase it further.
Let's go up to 10%
and then we'll go all the way up to 25%.
So which one is correct is entirely up to you
and be prepared to adjust that exposure
as you go through the photo shoot.
So this is starting to come together but the
background, well it's quite dark
in the shot, so to put some light back there,
I'm actually going to use a second Neo II
and this is going to be the background
illumination light.
Again it's in its continuous light setting.
It is quite a bright light
so my theory and plan is
pop it in behind Jade,
point it at the background
and illuminate the background.
Now the white balance on this light is
set differently to the one that's
illuminating the top of Jade's head is
on a more natural daylight to white balance
but if we set the camera correctly or
adjust things in post-processing
it should go quite a blue color
compared to the warm color of the candles.
So let's light the candles
see how this looks.
So this is working really well
but I think there's one more thing we can
add to this to really make it
stand out and that is well it's smoke of course.
It wouldn't be one of my shoots
unless I added some smoke to the scene,
so we're going to put some smoke in the background
and then we're going to rear illuminate the
smoke by getting the second Neo II
and pointing it towards the back of Jade.
Right let's get the smoke machine warmed up
and we'll take some shots like this
One of the advantages of using
LED lights is what you see in the viewfinder
is pretty much what you get,
which meant most of the photographs
came out exactly how I wanted,
however if you're going to try this technique
there is one thing you absolutely must
do in post-processing
to make this a convincing candlelit portrait
and there's an optional thing
as well. We'll look at both.
Let's do the essential thing first.
So here's the picture of Jade I want to edit
and if I go in really close over her eyes
I can see that the lower catch lights
are there from the candles
but there's also upper catch lights
which of course come from the LED light,
so in this case I'm going to remove those catch lights
by using the Spot Healing Brush
and just clicking and sort of drawing
roughly over the catch lights
and they should just magically disappear.
Now the other thing I want to do
is to create the illusion of snow
in the scene
and to do that I'm going to use a Photoshop action.
Now this is a free action on my website at
www.gavtrain.com
there is a link in the description below.
What you need to do is head over to my website,
Find the Instant Snow Action,
just search for it on the site.
Download it,
unzip it
and install it in to Photoshop.
Once you've installed it into Photoshop,
go to your actions panel,
find the Instant Snow Action,
click on the word snow
and then click the play button,
and off it goes.
The action is designed
to create a duplicate of your image
and then It will make three layers of snow
each one at a different size.
Now in this case
it does put the snow across the whole image,
so I don't really want it on
Jade's face,
so what I'm going to do is click on each layer
individually,
add a layer mask
and with a paintbrush,
I'll make sure it's a black colored
foreground. I can just paint over
any areas where I definitely don't want the
snow to go and that will remove it
from Jade's face, like that
and there you go
my candle lit portrait with snow is complete.
Well this really was a great
fun shoot and I love the final result
but if you're wondering
could you do this at home with flashes
rather than continuous LED?
Well yes of course you
could if your flashes aren't too bright
and they're on their lowest possible
power settings,
then that should work fine.
You could even MacGyver something up,
so replace this light with maybe a gold
reflector for example.
Imagination is the key to success
when it comes to great photography.
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I'm Gavin Hoey.
Thanks for watching.