.... night shoot with a single flash?

After having not done portraiture or portraiture-like shoots for such a long time, I decided to plan a shoot with a model.... she can only make it late afternoon so I decided to do something that I have not actually thought of doing so soon, a night shoot.

Armed with my camera, a 24mm, a 50mm and a 135mm... one hotshoe flash and a lightstand; we started our journey to the location of the shoot ==> Putrajaya.

The difficulty in this shoot was to:
1) get at least some background which was lit by the existing streetlights and bridge lights at location, the reflection on the water
2) get the flash output just right as to not overpower the subject
3) control & visualize how the flash is going to light up the subject

(1) was not that difficult, I just basically metered the highlights at +2 and set exposure level to something that I can still shoot handheld reliably, have the background suitably out of focus which actually meant I was shooting wide-open with the fast primes that I brought with me.

(2) is actually the most difficult aspect, shooting at f/1.2 or f/1.4 at ISO400, shutterspeed of around 1/30 or 1/50; the hotshoe flash that I brought is actually way too powerful for most shots, unless I were to place it 10-20feet away from the model. In order to place it that far, I would have to control the light precisely so that it doesn't light up the entire area spoiling the mood. I have even intentionally placed a diffuser on the flash head but that is still not quite enough... I have learnt a lesson this time, next time I shall have some "ND filters" for my flash.

(3) is basically achieved by educated guesses and a couple of test shots as hotshoe flashes do not have modeling lights to work with. By adjusting the height of the lightstand and the zoom manually on the flash head, I was able to achieve most of what I wanted to achieve in terms of light coverage.

Would you like to see more? Please visit my Flickr gallery to view image #2, #3 and #4 for this series of shots.