Extreme low light event filming & photography - Candlelit Concert in Edinburgh

The Cro and Kow team (with Patricia photographing and Simon filming) were asked to capture a candlelight concert in Edinburgh’s St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in photos & video.

Photographing & filming by candlelight is one of the biggest challenges, and there’s a lot of technique in capturing them. We are well used to working in low light conditions (Scotland is not a very sunny country to start with and it has many medieval castles where big windows are a rarity -  we often work on such locations, capturing photo and video so we had a lot of experience).

The first step is to make it all possible in the first place by filming with cameras with amazing low light capability - in this case using the fx3 & A7iv - and lenses that are superb for light gathering with a wide maximum aperture -in this case an extremely capable f1.2. After that it’s down to technique: using shutter speeds as slow as possible, being careful not to underexpose the image tempting though that may be (which reveals all the noise when you bring it back up in post), effective use of the light and shadow that there is available, careful management of colour balance, choice of focal length and so on. And one of the most important things is doing all this without disturbing the experience for the audience in any way. It all made it easier to achieve pin sharp image of high quality even when handheld.

The brief was to capture the most interesting visual aspects of the scene, while staying out of the way of the audience listening to themes from ‘Bridgerton’. After the performance we were able to add close up action portraits of the talented quartet of musicians from the Cairns String Quartet. Of course, it’s not possible to photo/video the musicians up close during the concert so we managed to keep them to one side and do some clips & images before just before the audience came in and the concert started.

Here is a little excerpt from some of the results!

Filming: Simon Crofts, Photos: Patricia Garrigos
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