Have you ever wanted to produce a night shot but during the day? Well, it's possible, and it's not even that difficult if you know how to control light properly. In this video, go behind the scenes on an outdoor shoot during the day that yields images that look as if they're in the middle of the night.
To shoot images that look as if they're taken at night when they're not, is a skill worth having. There have been two primary reasons for this desire in my own work: the first is that the shoot is scheduled for during the day and shooting at night isn't possible. The second is that shooting during the day can be much easier, depending on the kind of images you're creating.
In this video by Profoto, you get to see behind the scenes of a shoot taken in a forest during the day, but the results look as if it was nighttime. The effect is superbly executed — no doubt about it — but there are a few additional moves I like to make. Firstly, if you have an incredibly bright continuous light, which I do, you can really paint some contrast and shadows into the frame. I have also used LEDs within the scene and in this shoot, I might have tried them inside the lantern. The second move is an entire area in and of itself: post-production. If you know what you can do in Photoshop, you can shoot for it and push the boundaries even further.
Have you ever made the day look like the night in one of your shots? Share it in the comment section below.
Commenting here to report that this one is showing on the homepage as:
"Scheduled for: November 10, 2022 - 3:00pm by Robert K Baggs
How to Shoot During the Day, But Make it Look Like Night
Unpublished"
My technique to make shooting during the day look like night is to shoot at night. :-)
This technique works well. They even used it in one of the episodes of house of the dragon where they put so much neutral density on the camera that high noon sun looked like a full moon. I wasn't a fan of how dark the foreground was in the episode but other than that the technique works great.
That said, if you are going to have a light source such as a lantern in the scene, you need to rig it up so that the lantern looks like it is the light source. The challenge with this example is that the photographer used a softbox outside of the frame to cast light in the same direction onto the subject that the lantern would be but that softbox is also casting light onto the lantern itself which wouldn't be the case if this scene were real and thus it makes the photos look fake. The top of the lantern and the model's right hand shouldn't be lit from the top as they do not have a line of sight to the perceived light source (the lantern)
It's a really tough one as you want light softer than what the lantern would be casting but you want it to still look like the lantern is casting said light. I'd probably approach it by taking multiple frames that are comped together in post.
I wasn't a fan of those images in House Of The Dragon- which is usually a gorgeous show. The sky should not be brighter than the foreground in a nightime shot and it was here by a massive margin. It was always very clearly day for night and, worse, it was hard to see the actors. To my eye it didn't look much better than the day for night imagery fans of 60s and 70s cinema would be all too familiar with.