Ninja Photography

Available Dark...

Answered a Craigslist ad early last week for a photographer to do a "shoot in low light, no flash condition, outdoors this Friday night" It looked interesting, and didn't pay a whole lot but I was intrigued by the idea. Turns out "low light" meant candle light and some white Christmas lights in nearby trees. Oh, and I had to remain absolutely unseen and unheard. The event? A marriage proposal on a wooded bluff above Baker's Beach in San Francisco.

I arrived about 7:30, and met the other guys setting this up. They were busy stringing the lights, and helped with a sound check...I was initially going to shoot wide, and fairly close, but the shutter was too loud, and the priority for the night was stealth, not quality of images. Obviously not my choice of compromises, but you take what you can get. The Sigma 150 was not going to help, because at that length there was no way I would be getting acceptable shutter speeds as the light fell.


Here's your light source, now get to work!

Talk about dark out there... I ended up with the 85/1.4 wide open, at ISO 6400, handholding the camera braced against the ground at about 1/5 to 1/10 of a second. Crazy dark. But the D700 did it's job admirably, coming up with some surprisingly acceptable images under these conditions.



Black hoodie, black pants, crawling around in the sand and bushes being a ninja... just another Friday night at Cycle 61 Photography :-)



Oh, and by the way, she said yes. And we were invited to come out of hiding and meet the happy couple. And I'm shooting their wedding. Like I said, just another boring Friday night...