by Holly Grams (@holly.grams)
EMOTION.
I love low light for at least one thousand reasons. But one thing I love the very most about low light is how it can be used to convey deep emotion. I’m a psychologist by trade and am fascinated with people...all people; and especially people’s emotions. Happiness. Excitement. Sadness. Thoughtfulness. All of it. My favorite photographs are often not technically perfect but they make me feel something. So look for something that makes you experience some sort of emotion and the sense of connection to the moment or to the person in a photo. When photographing children it’s difficult to force them to convey any kind of specific emotion. When I’m photographing my own kids I take several shots of them just doing their thing and when selecting my final photos I look for images that give me all the feels. These images are rarely perfect and sometimes not at all what I intend to achieve but they are authentic, real moments. So my recommendation is to just go for it, embrace the imperfect of it all and just focus on what makes you feel something. Trust your gut, you’ll know it when you see (feel) it.
CONTRAST.
You don’t necessarily need to go all out with tons of contrast when working with low light. But I happen to LOVE deep contrast in my photos. Like serious contrast and low light is one of the easiest ways to achieve all kinds of crazy contrast. I love highlighting a single subject with light and then letting all of the unimportant things fall right into the shadows. One of the easiest ways I’ve found to create deep shadows is to place my subject by a window. I was always under the impression that a window needed to get really bright light in order to get all of that contrast, but guess what, not true! Which happens to be awesome for me because I live in the middle of thick trees and even on the sunniest day, I get hardly any light in my home. What I’ve found creates really great contrast is subtle light. Think, dreary days with little light coming through the window. I know! But trust me, just try it! Crank up that ISO and go to town. When you use this kind of light it makes editing a photo a complete breeze because the SOOC typically will look pretty darn good. Note, the closer you put your subject to the window (or whatever light source you use, the more contrast you’ll get).
EDITING:
Low light images are some of my favorite images to edit. One of things I like to do is use the tone curve and pull the midtones down as much as I can get away with. I push it to the absolute max and just eyeball what looks good. This is where the magic happens. Seriously, it’s addicting. If you get the lighting right when you pull those midtones down you’ll watch everything in the shadows disappear (goodbye dirty dishes in the sink, goodbye dumped out bins of toys in the background, goodbye unmade bed) whaaalaa, junk=gone. Seriously magic!
One thing you need to watch for with this, is it really can over saturate your photo and especially mess with skin tones. So, I always decrease the saturation and vibrancy a bit until it looks more natural. Sometimes the skin will get a bit orange or red and I’ll have to correct it by bringing it into PS and using a hue saturation layer to correct the skin tones. In the photo below you’ll see how everything in the deep shadows is gone. I hope this helps and you fall in love with low light as much as I have!