Candlelight Service Question

During my church's Christmas Eve service, I will be taking non-flash photos. One thing I'd like to do is to capture a couple of close up images with someone holding a lit candle close to their face. Since I've never done this and really won't have a chance to try it out ahead of time, does anyone have experience with this? Looking for setting info and also how to meter. There won't be a lot of time to do this as they will want to lock up the church so families can get kids to bed. I know high ISO and tripod will be required, but the candle's light is going to influence the meter--thus the need to underexpose. Just wondering how to capture their faces without losing too much detail and hope I won't have to raise the shadows too much. And I imagine the light will be blown, yes?

nikonpup said:

i would try "scene" "candleliight" on your camera. Watch videos of candlelight on you tube.

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Have looked for videos on how to do this but haven't yet come up with anything promising. What the heck is a candlelight scene on the camera? I shoot RAW.

hark said:

Have looked for videos on how to do this but haven't yet come up with anything promising. What the heck is a candlelight scene on the camera? I shoot RAW.

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"Candle Light" is a JPG Scene Mode. I forget if the D7100 has Scene Modes or not, but you won't find them on your D750.

I would be shooting my D750 in this scenario and sometimes Matrix will surprise me and give me exactly what I need, so I wouldn't rule it out. Highlight Priority will probably underexpose in this scenario so I would go with Spot metering or Center Weighted. Shooting raw will give you plenty of latitude to work with the shadows, white balance and what not. For CW metering I'd keep the Spot on the small to medium side. I'd suggest you meter off the face, specifically, since that's the crucial element that's going to determine the shots overall exposure.
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I have not done specifically this, but have shot a bunch in low light and some with candles. You will have blowout on the main kernel of the candle flame, no way around this. This would be my plan with the D750.

1. Find where you're going to do the shot. Bring tape and mark the floor. I would suggest painters tape so it peels up easily. On the floor, using the tape, make an upside down "T" - The top of the T is towards the camera. Reason for the letter is to have each person walk up and put their feet in the T - feet together and toes touching the T.

2. Set up your tripod at the distance you need. Using a flashlight on your test subjects face, set your focus. This way each person can step into the T and you don't have to redo focus each time in such low light.

3. Have the person hold the candle just below the face to try and catch as much light on the face.

4. Use a depth of field calculator and figure out what aperture you need to get everything in focus.

5. Now play with the shutter and ISO to find a happy balance. You might use a remote to trigger the camera so you're not adding any additional wiggle to the camera on the tripod since you will be on a relatively slow shutter speed and your subject will not be completely stationary.

Once you have this dialed in it will be pretty easy to repeat over and over with the stationary tripod and T for subjects to stand in.

When you do shoot, fire off a number of shots. You will not always see the slight blur of their body swaying on the back of your camera.

Finally, check your histogram. Your camera screen will appear brighter than usual with your eyes dilated in the church.

Hope this helps. I know there is a good bit of this your already know, but I figure it's better to cover it all than to assume.

I did this last Sunday Night. I have done this a couple years in a row now. I have found the D7200 will focus with the contrast between the candle and the darkness. I set the ISO to 2000 to get a shutter speed of 1/60 and I used my Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 to take the photos. It is a bit noisy, but I adjusted the blacks a bit and I was happy with the results. It did take some testing because the light meter had a tough time with the candle and darkness.

Thank you Horoscope Fish, Moab Man, and Danno. This should give me enough info with which to work!

nikonpup said:

your 610 and 7100 - both have a "scene" selection on the mode dial, under scene there is a selection for candlelight (rotate command dial to select). I checked both cameras they do shoot raw in candlelight.

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She could use a Scene mode while shooting raw but most raw processing applications ignore those settings; Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Lightroom, for example. In order to match the in-camera JPEG using the same scene mode one would need to use Nikon's raw converter which respects the (proprietary) in-camera Picture Control adjustments.

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The candlelight service went well although I was positioned in the back and couldn't move. I didn't get the shot I wanted but still wound up with a couple I really like. Since the other one I'm not posting shows a face lit with the candle's glow and I didn't ask permission to post it, I will only show this one. I still like this with the two flames touching as the candle gets lit. My church might do Christmas cards as a fundraiser next year so even something like this would work.

Thank you to everyone who offered input. I went into this without any trepidation whatsoever because of your help. Oh...and I switched to center-weighted metering which also worked extremely well for this church service. Up until this night, I was using matrix metering in Aperture Priority and always had to underexpose. Most of these were at +/-0 exposure compensation. This is cropped from the original.