Shooting after sundown can be very intimidating. I own a Canon T6i which is a great intermediate DSLR, however, the low-light performance is less than adequate. Once you get up to 800 ISO it’s difficult for auto focus. 1600 ISO introduces a nice blanket of noise, luckily Lightroom can fix that. Anything above 1600 is unusable and thankfully the T7i has better low-light capabilities.
ISO 1600
50 mm (fixed)
f/1.8
1/60 sec
External flash used
-2 TTL
Dean
We went out at around 10pm to Steel Stacks and found these great over head lights as well as lights lining the stairs with the colored Steel Stacks in the background. The key to getting great night shots with a bad low light camera is, you guessed it, A LOT of light. I even had my external flash handy just for some filler on the face. The result was great and got me motivated to continue shooting at night.
The magic really happens in Lightroom! I added a vintage profile to give it that old time feel . Lowered the contrast a bit along with the highlights and shadows. Boosted that clarity and vibrance a little to get all the light and color to pop. I then went into the color tab and brought down the yellow saturation and luminance, because it was over powering the image. I then brought out the blue in His jacket to add a nice contrast to the yellow-orange background. I boosted the noise reduction the most i could without taking away the very little detail I had. Other than the standard lens correction that is all that was needed for this! A super simple edit that looks great!
ISO 1600
50 mm (fixed)
f/1.8
1/60 sec
External flash used
-2 TTL
Reilly
For the next image I had the lovely Reilly stand in the same spot, I just adjusted the angle a bit for her picture. I wanted to utilize more of the beautiful background we had. If I could take this again I would have gotten a little closer to her so that she filled up more of the frame. Cropping is not happening with this high of an ISO!
I added the a vintage profile Just like I had done with Deans photo. Then lowered the contrast a bit to mute the blacks. I lowered the whites a tad because I still wanted her dress to pop from the background. I messed with the saturation on the yellows and oranges. I didn’t want them too saturated considering I didn’t have any contrasting colors.
This just goes to show you don’t need a crazy camera to get some nice low-light shots. Just know your limits and experiment. I took at least 50 photos before these, tweaking the settings and location as we progressed.