Dark / Night Shots

E

etrust

Well-known member
Hi,

how could i make a nice night shot inside with a low budget? I'm a beginner and would like to make a music clip. some shots should be at night.

With normal light i can forget. i get to many grain. Maybe at day and use a special filter? I really have no idea

I'm using a 35mm Adapter Letus35 Mini, so i'm loosing a lot of light.

Please help me to implement a nice night shot inside.

Thank you in advanced.
 
You can do some tests and try to shoot day for night. Do a search and you might be able to find some decent tutorials that might help you in your situation. Day for night almost always looks terrible and is incredibly difficult to do, both in production and in post. There is the option to take off your 35mm adapter for the night shots, if everything is dark there is no benefit to having the shallow DoF. Basically, to properly shoot at night you need a lot of light.
 
I would never recommend day for night. We need more info. Is it indoors, outdoors? Do you have access to lights? What kind of lights?

It's all about using lights, and using them properly. I'm going to assume you're inside. You want to make sure your lights are motivated, in that they come from some sort of source. I recommend to do 1 of 3 things:

1) Simulate some sort of external light, or internal light. A common light is some sort of street lamp outside, or neon light outside that "illuminates" the inside via a window. It'll look like night, and have a cool look and feel as well. I often prefer doing this to the other options. Maybe you want some sort of simple lamp indoors that you want to simulate, or flashlights even... Maybe you want everything to feel "dark" and so you'd use some of these lights to "silliouette" the person.

2) Simulate moonlight. Moonlight isn't always realistic as it hardly goes as bright as in movies, but in the movie world it's accepted. So have a nice bright light, and make sure to use some CTB (Color Temp. Blue) at either a partial strength or full strength (I like to use about half strength from what you're balanced to). "Blue" will make the audience feel like it's dark, just be sure to make it bright enough to get proper exposure, don't underexpose on set or else you may regret it, as I have in the past. If you want it darker, make sure to just expose properly without any highlights, and darken it in post. Digital is sometimes unforgiving if you want to brighten it.

If you're outside, you may need the light to be bright and high.

3) Now with the moonlight coming through the window you may want to do this as well. Ambient lighting. This is just an overall unnatural ambient light coming from god knows where. It's bright enough for people to see, it's blue light moonlight, but it's very soft and doesn't come from anywhere in specific. It just fills. This is usually good for when the lights are off in a dark room, but you still need to see.

If doing day for night, look up tutorials, read up on it A LOT. I've never done day for night, but if you MUST do day for night and if you're doing it outside and can't simulate moonlight or a street lamp, keep in mind a few things:

-Make sure there are no highlights, as in anything that will clip and show up as "white" on the image. These are impossible to darken.

-avoid sky, not only will it make it look sunny, it will clip just like my first point. Obviously if you shoot the sun, that's a big no no.

-Shoot near the end or beginning of the day. When the sun is more to the side it always looks nicer, but this helps simulate moonlight and it applies more shadows to the face (in post those shadows will look dark, and give a "night" feel), if done properly.

-Some say to shoot 2 stops down, but I don't recommend it. Just shoot the best exposure without having any highlights anywhere. In post darken it, add contrast (crush your blacks), and add a bit of blue on the highlights or shadows, as blue will give it a nighttime feel.
 
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