Hello,
A photographer of an event produced some very nice night pictures. See examples below. (I overshadowed peoples eyes to keep their privacy.)
I am curious what is the secret. I did not have my camera with me but photos taken on my phone look more like this.
I see the photographer used the flash but normally if I turn the flash on you cannot really see the background.
Any ideas?
Take a decent camera where you can control the ratio of flash and ambient light for the exposure.
Edit: Actually, I think the photos could be even better. They look a little bit to much like âflashâ, especially the third one. A small correction of the white balance and improved shadows and highlights might help.
Youâll need a flash + camera where you can control the settings.
You want to balance the ambient light with flash to produce images like those.
If youâre using a manual flash (I donât really use TTL personally), what you can do without worrying about technical stuff isâŚ
Take a photo w/o the flash to expose the background how youâd like, normally being careful to keep the shutter speed below your sync speed (around 1â180 - 1â250 seconds likely). This means youâll likely want to set your shutter speed to (a max of) 1â180 for example, and use aperture + ISO to dial in your background exposure.
Once youâve gotten your background how youâd like it, just add in the flash and adjust flash power to taste.
This should give you a decent ballpark to start with. You can adjust shutter speed down to increase ambient exposure without affecting the flash exposure*.
* This was something that was one of those âA-Ha!â moments when fiddling with flashes. The only thing that modifies the flash exposure (assuming all else is equal) is aperture (technically ISO as well). So, aperture = flash exposure, shutter speed = ambient exposure.
[PS] - a phenomenal resource for this is from the wonderful David Hobby: Strobist. Well worth reading carefully for a great introductory guide to using off-camera flashes.
Iâll just add that if the subject is reflecting enough ambient light to register on the sensor, then changing shutter speed will indirectly affect flash exposure as subject exposure = ambient + flash, and now ambient has changed so flash will have to change if you wish to retain the original subject exposure and only change the exposure of the surroundings.
E.g, if âxâ is the desired exposure of the subject and if ambient is contributing 0.2x at (say) 1/200 shutter speed, then flash must contribute the remaining 0.8x. If shutter speed is now changed to 1/100 to lighten the surroundings, then ambient now contributes 0.4x to the subject and the flash should be dialled down to 0.6x or else the subject will be overexposed by 0.2x.
The phrase I heard for this is âwhite light is a lieâ. 
Important to note that when shooting with manual flash, the apparent brightness of the flash will be change with the distance between the subject and the flash - so if the people move closer or farther away from the flash, power will need the be adjusted to compensate.
All great tips. Thank you @Thomas_Do @patdavid @Raja @Karl for taking the time for this. I will definitely be playing with my camera tonight 
This is why I was careful to say
Given the nature of @Andriusâs original question, I didnât want to go too far down the rabbit hole. 
(though we should probably start working on a lighting/flash series of articles at some point for everyone to use and reference).
Yes please, that would be great!
I agree with both. Flash can be a complicated, though fascinating, subject, and I did debate (with myself) if I should add that post, but having seen too many âuse the spot meter for correct exposure postsâ I thought it wouldnât be too unwise to rush in where angels fear to tread.
A series of articles on photography basics that many people often, or easily, get wrong might be a good idea if we explain them with reference to open source solutions. It could get us a few more users.
Or perhaps I should just go ahead and post questions on photography basics and the resulting discussion can be distilled later into articles.
Iâve started (barely) to author a resource, but it is in XML and authoring can be a bit tricky. My intention is to build a reference book of post processing techniques that doesnât go stale very fast. Instead of providing step-by-step information, I want to include conceptual topics about our tooling. Itâll be necessary to have an article on histograms, exposure triangle, and other basic photo concepts.
I plan to license it freely, but havenât attached a license yet.
