Shooting portraits by the bonfire

It is Halloween time, and tonight we visited the huge Oak Bay bonfire organized by the local firefighters. Photographing people by the fire is challenging, and the camera settings depend on whether the light source, i.e. the bonfire, is in the frame or not.

If the fire is not in the picture, but simply shines the light on the subject, such as in the photo above, the basic concepts of shooting in low light apply. One needs a fast lens (one with a low minimum f-number) and a camera with good low-light performance. My wife used a Canon EOS-1D X with a 35mm f/1.4L USM lens.  I usually just let the camera expose correctly for the subject and not worry about the background, which will come out either over-exposed (if it is still twilight) or under-exposed, if it is already dark. In either case, it can be ignored if it does not contain anything of interest.

On the other hand, if the fire is in the background, in other words, if shooting against the light, the dynamic range of the scene (the difference between the lightest and the darkest parts) is too great for any modern camera to handle. There is no choice but to add artificial light to the subject. An on-camera flash is far from ideal light source, but it is often the only choice in a given situation. This is what my wife used to take the image below. In manual mode, if the aperture and the ISO are fixed, the shutter speed can be used to control the exposure. When checking the exposure, it is important to look at the histogram, since images on the camera LCD screen appear much brighter than they really are.

Another challenge of shooting with a flash, with fire in the background, is that the colour temperature of the two light sources is very different. The flash is daylight-balanced, while the colour of the fire is very warm (red-orange). One way to balance the image is to correct the colour of the subject in post-processing. In Lightroom, this can be done using a local adjustment brush, which is what I did for this image. In Photoshop, this can be done using adjustment layers applied to a part of the photo.

An alternative to correcting colours in post-processing is to use gels on the flash. A gel is, basically, a piece of a coloured plastic, which is attached to the flash by a rubber band.

Personally, I prefer leaving the colour correction until I can see the photo on a computer and can experiment with various effects. After all, the warm colour of a bonfire creates a special atmosphere that is worth preserving in the final image.