Candle light portrait?

[SoCalTiger]

So I tried to do this last night and it was pretty tricky. It seemed like my flash was just too powerful so I set the flash to 1/16th power and had someone hold it behind two diffusers about a foot from the diffusers. The diffuser was about 5 feet from the model and then the candles were in the foreground. I don't have remote triggers, but found out that even if I did that it wouldn't work. when I tried it with the flash attached by the chord and off camera, the candles just were way too bright.

So far what I settled on was putting the shutter speed at 1.3 sec on shutter priority and then releasing the shutter. After the shutter was released for about a second I had my helper pop the flash separately. That was the only thing that seemed to work okay but still not the results I wanted. Any thoughts? If these diffusers bareley dimmed the light enough, would a soft box even do any good?

Is 1/16 the lowest your flash goes? Lots of flashes go down to 1/64 or 1/128. Aside from that, do you have room to pull the flash further back?

 

[photomeli]

Yeah that's as low as it will go. I kind of just tried it a bunch of times until I was far enough back to get the effect. The only thing is I just have the one light so I want to make sure I make the best of it. The gel didn't really seem to make much of a difference, so I was thinking of shooting in WB as flash and then later playing in Raw to find the best warmth for the whole photo. I just don't know if this will really mimic candlelight enough.

I also have to make sure the flash doesn't hit the candles because then just lose all candle characteristics

 

[amolitor]

That seems odd.

What settings were you working with? Is there some reason for having the aperture wide open?

 

[photomeli]

The aperture was stopped down as far as it could go with the shutter speed at 1.3 sec. I think I may have needed to change my ISO, I had it on 640 and forgot to change it.

 

[amolitor]

Ahhh, that makes more sense. I've shot a couple things with candles, and while it's a little finicky, this felt just wrong.

With strobes, ISO 100 always. I've forgotten it a few times myself, though. Why is everything ALL WHITE? What's WROONG!!!!

 

[SoCalTiger]

Yeah that's as low as it will go. I kind of just tried it a bunch of times until I was far enough back to get the effect. The only thing is I just have the one light so I want to make sure I make the best of it. The gel didn't really seem to make much of a difference, so I was thinking of shooting in WB as flash and then later playing in Raw to find the best warmth for the whole photo. I just don't know if this will really mimic candlelight enough.

I also have to make sure the flash doesn't hit the candles because then just lose all candle characteristics

Were you using AWB? If so, that is why the gel had no perceived effect. I would set the in-camera setting to either "Flash" or "Sunlight" WB (whichever matches your flash better) or Custom to actually match it (without any gel). That way, CTO would make the image look more orange relative to the normal color temp of your flash. Ideally, your gel would match the candlelight temperature and then you would appropriately set the WB / colorcast your entire image to simulate candlelight.

Either way - you should shoot in Raw so you can get the color temperature where you exactly want it especially for a project like this.