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Night From Day

There are plenty out there who can shed more light (!) on this, but here is an example of a useful trick.

If you asked to take a night candle lit vigil image in the middle of the day, there is a relatively simple way of doing it.

Set you camera to manual and (1) choose a shutter speed within your flash sync and ISO/Aperture combination (low ISO/small aperture) to make a dark exposure. Go for 1-2 stops under, or dark to the eye, so basically useless as is. You are exposing for the background here, so ignore the subject. An ND filter can be useful here also, allowing shallower depth of field if desired.

Then use a flash to put light on you subject only. I used TTL, which is painfully twitchy, but Manual would work also. The flash was also in a 26” soft box, slightly feathered, but straight or bounced flash would work.

For this file I then vignetted the edges and used the brush tool to warm up and lighten the front of the subject to exaggerate the effect of the relatively useless candle. This worked well against the cooler surrounds.