Often, candlelight is too dark to use when you are using other sources of light. This means you can either work with them in processing or you can do some fun lighting hijinks if you have the lights and gels to make it happen. For this post I’ll explain how to use your lights and gels to make a lantern look like it has a bright candle in it. Please note, this is just one piece of a bigger puzzle, presumably you’d have more in your photo then just a lit lantern, but this explains how to get the lantern part of it down.
By no means is this the only method.
Anyway, for this trick you want a lantern, a speedlight, a gel, and someway to affix the speedlight behind the lantern. For this setup here, I went with the easy chair setup but with proper placement you could have someone holding the lantern. I put the lantern down on the chair and placed the speed light behind it. Without a gel you get a bright white light. At this point you should experiment with how bright you want it and how high up you want it, understanding that if you put it too high you might have to edit out the speed light.
After that I added a warmer gel color and eventually added a candle. You can play around with this setup and really tweak it to where you want to get it. If you have a person holding the lantern you might want to have a light on them with a gel that has a similar color to the gel you are using aimed at them to make it look like the candle lighting their face some.
It is another neat little trick that is worth practicing because you can do so much with it.
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