Shooting a campfire/bonwire in the dark

G

grantw

Well-known member
I'm shooting a wedding that is going to end with a bonfire on the beach. I'm using T2i 24mm/1.4. What can I add here so that I can see peoples faces at least a little bit? I videod a fire that just had 4 or 5 logs going pretty good and I couldn't pull any exposure on the face w/ just the camera (maybe at 6400)

Anyone have any suggestions? LED (ex: litepanel micro pro) w/ a CTO on it?

In this case there is barely any moon. But has anyone tested with the moon's brightness and if it adds any stops to the video? Think I'll test myself.

Thanks.
 
If it's an event that they want to capture you need to tell them ahead of time that the shoot is going to be less than pro if you can't set up lights or use an onboard camera light (Which people tend to HATE)... Just make sure you CYA... Cover your a**
 
yeah, thats going to be the rub. for wide shots youre gonna need a monster light. and that would kill the ambiance for the attendees.
so you may have to rely on the closeups with some kind of on camera light for recognizable face shots
 
Iit is only a thought - Shoot it with the DVX100A I shot a scene from 'Tikana Ameirican' that was a bonfire on the beach at night and the only light
we had was the bonfre and it work great. If I have the time I will look for the footage.
 
depending on the size of that bonfire, how close people are to it, and what kind of images you need to get, you may not need anything special to get something nice

I mean: you probably don't want your footage to look as if it was shot with daylight, you want it to feel like night with a bonfire; if recognizeable shapes sculpted with the bonfire as a rim light are enough for what you need, your t2i at f/1.4 should be more than enough

you can see some example of that in the second half of this video, that I shot with a borrowed t1i and an 80mm f/2.8 lens:
http://www.vimeo.com/13082728
(don't judge me too harshly for the quality of the video itself: it was one of my first videos ever, I was terribly bad at pulling focus and didn't have loupe; plus the t1i doesn't even have manual exposure, I could only set aperture and that's because the lens is vintage manual; just look at exposure)

also: IIRC I used ISO 800, and I didn't use neat video or anything like that

in total, you have two more stops because of the faster lens, and one or two stops more because of neat video; bring a dimmable on-camera led panel and CTO, just in case the bonfire is too small or people don't gather around it, but my guess is that you'll be able to shoot without it, unless you want your footage to look like it was shot with daylight (which I wouldn't want)


(on a side note: it is great to look at this older videos and see how much I've learnt in such a short time, in big part because of people on these forums; thank you)
 
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