How I photograph interiors with low light! Photography tutorial..

In this case - it’s the lovely Covino Restuarant & Wine Bar

The light thats available on a shoot, or the light that you use/supplement natural light with, is without a doubt one of the most important factors in how your photos turn out. My job as a professional photographer is to make sure that poor lighting is never an excuse to not creating beautiful images.

Chris from Covino reached out to me and said that he has struggled to get photos that show the true atmosphere and ambience of Covino - he especially wanted to get across the way it looks in the evening - warm, vibrant, busy and full of life. Part of that meant not creating imagery that looked too bright and sterile - the shoot had to have a certain emotive feel to it.

I shot the following images mainly on the sigma 24mm and my Canon 5d Mark IV - probably my favourite combination. It allows for wide angles with almost zero distortion, stunning detail and image information to be captured, something that is really important in post processing.

One of the struggles with this shoot, as you can hopefully see from the images - is that there were tungsten bulbs (around 3500k) in hanging chandeliers that created an almost spotlight effect on the tables below. There was then the light from outside, as well as the bright light from the open kitchen which were both closer to daylight temperature (around 5600k). This means that you have a bit of an exposure nightmare, what do you try and meter for? Let’s dive into it in the next paragraph, but first - an image from the shoot.

So the difficulty is that you have a dark room, with harsh light (not softened) from the tungsten bulbs and a big bright light that you dont want to overexpose. My choice for this shoot was to expose for the tungsten bulbs, which meant that peoples faces were also lit well and not over or underexposed. I asked the chef to turn off his big white light (not ideal for cooking but had to be done!) so I could acheive a more pleasant exposure which you will see in the following shots. This allowed for a more ambient romantic feel to the shots. Camera settings were generally around the following - F4, ISO 800, 1/80 shutter. On the 24mm wide angle lens this allowed for plenty of light to come in without any camera shake, using a longer lens like a 50mm may have been problematic. White balance was set manually at around 3600k - this gave me the colour balance in camera that looked like it would work best for colour grading in post - I’d really recommend using manual white balance if you have time on a shoot.

I hope this blog post has been useful for you, if there is anything you want help with photography wise, or you have a space you want photographed - feel free to get in touch!

Thanks for looking, Jonny x