Devi - Night Photography: Part 1
Taking on photography projects, big or small, a question that typically crosses my mind before the shoot is, how do I want the end product to look? This question is never going to have just one answer, as you can see this as, how will the image look in-camera? What emotion do I want to deliver? What story do I want to tell? For the sake of not making this post drag on, I’m going to focus on tone.
What tone do I want the photograph to convey?
Devi and I had a fairly simple concept in mind. Photograph at night in the city and utilise a portable LED light source to cast light on the subject. Using the lights from buildings in the background and ambient light would help elevate the scene to something hopefully “Cinematic”.
The main challenge we faced was what colour the scene should be setup as, and in post-production fine tuning the colour to enhance the overall tone. I aimed to focus mainly on warm colours such as red and orange, but I also included some “cooler” tones such as purple. Another challenge came in the form of ambient colour light, as it can complement (or sometimes) clash with the main light source you cast on the subject. At around the half way point in the shoot we moved to a subway location that offered a neutral light source, allowing us to use red lights without overwhelming the scene.
When it came to Lightroom, I didn’t want to make the post-production look “prefect”, and instead opted for a street style gritty look. Using grain and slightly desaturating the photos. In my humble opinion I reckon this worked perfectly for the subway shots. Adding a slight hue of green to the midtones worked pretty well.
The photographs in the train station were a bit tricky to get the right editing. Initially I set these with a warm tone, but later opted for a colder look. This actually worked out for the better as the colder blue tones fitted the sterile looking background scene and contrasted with the warmer light casted on Devi.
The final location, outside Golden Square carpark in Chinatown, I decided to go for some quick shots using the neon lights from a shopfront sign as the main source of light. Here, I wanted to only use ambient light of the scene and nothing from the portable light I used in previous scenes. It was also fairly easy to decide on using colder tones for this scene, as the night setting and cool neon light colour already set the scene.
