Location shooting night exteriors

Shooting night exteriors.
This week I have been doing some night shots, filming night exteriors. This took rather a lot of in-camera tweaking to create a profile I was confident to go shoot in low light. I would be having to balance a lot of tiny practical Christmas lights. This was a leap into the unknown for me so I really needed to have created a robust profile and arrive with a versatile lighting package without just throwing in the kitchen sink. I used bounced Tungsten as my primary soft front fill for night shoots. I can then supplement the close-up shots with some hard kicks from LED Dedolight running on V-locks.

For the taxi shot above, I used a 1×1 flex panel with a quarter plus green inside to lift the actors. The kick you see coming in the back window was a 1000 watt with a half blue place some way down the street. I’m filling from the from with tungsten bounced into a 12×8 super bounce and I am balanced for tungsten in camera. Some additional fairy lights are held on a pole to create to the reflection of the over-decorated house in the taxi window as our couple arrive home to find the kids have gone crazy with the decorating of the house.
