A Shot in the Dark: Simple Solutions for Nighttime Shooting (page 2)

Happy Hour

Next stop: Denny's Tavern. Here, a bartender had served a rowdy bunch of bikers he suspected might be involved in the disturbances. Walking into the tavern, Wendy found herself in a dark, smoky room lit with small table lamps and neon beer signs. The bartender was friendly enough, and seemed excited about being on television. She set up the camcorder some distance from the bar, planning to zoom in with the lens to get an artsy "compressed" look to the shot.

Wendy asked permission to move a pair of table lamps onto the bar, a request the bartender happily granted. She took the lamps glass shades off to reveal small 20-watt bulbs. They wouldn t provide much light, but they d have to do. Wendy spaced the two lamps about six feet apart, and asked the bartender to stand directly between them about a foot behind the bar. Glancing in the viewfinder, Wendy grimaced at the unflattering light that seemed to be coming from below the man's face.

Looking around, she spotted a cardboard box roughly 18-inches high. She placed the box under one of the lights, which put the bulb about six inches above the barkeep's head. Sliding the higher lamp in closer to the lens made it the dominant light source, and as a result the lower-angle fill light from the other lamp was less objectionable.

The viewfinder showed a greatly improved shot, but Wendy noticed that the overall light level was still a bit on the low side. With just a few customers in the bar, the bartender agreed to turn up all the lights. This improved the shot quite a bit, but the camcorder's gain-up circuit was still causing the shot to crawl with video noise.

Just then, Wendy remembered something she had learned in a photography class. Zoom lenses, especially inexpensive ones (like those found in camcorders), usually pass less light the more they re zoomed in. On a still camera, this meant you had to use a slower shutter speed at higher zoom settings. On a camcorder, it translated to lower sensitivity and more noise. Figuring it was worth a try, Wendy moved the camcorder in much closer to the bar and zoomed out to a wider shot. The improvement was marked--the video noise was gone, and colors were much more vibrant. She didn t even have to move her lights.

Handing the bartender the reflector, Wendy white-balanced the camcorder. Then she checked her focus very carefully, as the low light levels made for an extremely shallow depth of field. This turned the wall behind the bar into a soft-focus collage of colored bottles, a nice background for the shot. Finally satisfied, Wendy conducted the interview.

Story at 11:00

Arriving back at the station by 9:15pm, Wendy found the news director and handed him the tape. As they watched the tape together, Wendy recounted the lighting challenges she had tackled on each shoot.

"This is great stuff, Wendy," he said. "It's perfect for the story I ve got Don working on right now." He took her hand and gave it a firm shake. "Great work!"

Walking back to get the equipment from her car, Wendy felt a twinge of pride at how she d turned three lousy night-time lighting situations into usable footage.