Since making videos is highly dependent on lighting conditions, shooting in low light can be vicious and definitely requires a bit of know-how. However, one day you may inadvertently find yourself in low light, or just feel the need to challenge your skills and experiment with twilight shots. Anyway, everyone knows that such experiments are full of grainy, dark and cloudy images. Unfortunately, regular cameras are simply unable to detect light as well as the human eye. Fortunately, there are several strategies you can consider in the spotlight of such a problem.
The first and easiest way to do this is to use artificial lighting. While shooting indoors, turn on all the lights, open the blinders, etc. If you’re shooting on the street, you’d better use any and all sources you can get your hands on: car headlights, streetlights, and even moonlight can do the trick. Thus, you can turn this little misfortune into an advantage and shoot very romantic and mysterious scenes.
As far as technical tricks go, shooting at the widest angle is the best way to go when you experience poor light. The wide angle lens lets in more light and thus helps you keep the image brighter. Using diffusion lenses can also help you tremendously, so don’t forget to add it to your videographer’s list of tools.
A good fisherman knows what’s in his toolbox, as does a good videographer. Of course, it is very important to know some ninja tricks, but sometimes your own tool has good functions to help you. So the built-in lights and electronic gain can free you from running around the place and turning on the lights. However, use them carefully because they can be messy and cause loss in terms of quality if used excessively.
Needless to say, shooting in the dark is all about committing. There is always a difficult choice to be made between brightness and image quality. However, here are some things you shouldn’t do, regardless of the situation. So never use your zoom option in low light. The closer you get, the greater the light loss. Also, some camera options can add a few points to the lighting at the sacrifice of other features such as dimension, volume, etc.
Now, with all the tips mentioned above in mind, you’re ready to ride all night without risking losing your best frames. By the way, even if your attempts to shoot in low light failed, you can use some specific software to edit your videos and add some highlights. In general, low light conditions can be easily overcome and nothing can stop you from capturing the best shots.