Night And Day.

We needed to have some pictures showing night scenes but logistics and model availability meant we could only shoot in the daytime. So what do I do?

This first image was shot by the beach, in the Caribbean, at noon on a very sunny day.

To achieve this look I changed the exposure setting on my camera away from what might be considered the complimentary setting for shooting in bright day light. I was going to have to do some retouching but wanted a good base image to work with.

Light during nighttime often displays with a pronounced amount of blue, so capturing an image with lots of blue already in would be a good place for me to begin. So I set my camera light meter to read the light as if it was coming from a tungsten source. This would push the overall ambience toward a blue tone. However, I wanted to keep the skin tones warm and not blue. To make this happen, I shot with a speedlite and set the lighting to expose the foreground only. I also put an orange filter on the front of the light which would correct the foreground lighting back to something more natural to proper skin tones and colour ranges in the foreground of the composition.

You can see how the image looks straight out of the camera before any retouching. When I did get to the retouching, I included things such as adding diffused light to an around the candle and generally enhancing shadows and the highlights. Below is another example from the shoot using the same technique.