Night Wilderness Photography- Thower-ish Flood recommendations?

I guess I like to shoot… sometimes guns, sometimes cameras. At any rate, one of my new art projects is doing wilderness photography in the dead of night. I am lucky enough to live in a place where I can be deep in the woods within 10 minutes of my house. I’ve found that using artificial lighting can open up all sorts of new possibilities for images, and now I’m looking for better options.

I’ve been using an oddball assortment of headlamps and random battery-powered rechargeable work/utility lights. I basically want to be able to light a whole landscape scene (not like open prairie, more deep woods and hills) from a couple of angles. The more powerful headlamps/flashlights I have are pretty focused beams, and the work lights don’t have enough throw to properly light something at a bit of distance. I’d guess that my “long range” for this stuff is about a hundred yards, sometimes half that, sometimes a bit over.

In an older thread here, I found mention of these things: NIGHTWATCH NSX3 9900lm 21700 LED Flashlight – Nealsgadgets

That seems like a great starting point, but I would need to boost throw somehow, work in some sort of reflector. But instead of reinventing the wheel, is there something “off the shelf” that might work for my application? A non-spotty throwerish flood? Any thoughts welcome.

I enjoy night hiking and photography, so your project combining the two sounds like fun!

Lighting a scene from 100 yards away will require a lot of light.

Would your subjects work with ‘light painting’ techniques?

Do you mean you want several light sources coming from different positions in the same photo? Rather than using flashlights, you might consider a long exposure while walking around firing off some high-powered portable strobes.

You could also experiment with combining multiple exposures of the same scene lit from different angles.

My biggest floody thrower is the ThruNite TN40S, about 4400 lumens. If money was no object, I’d suggest the BLF GT4. It can sustain 20,000+ lumens until the batteries go dead!

Love that someone else finds it interesting!

Crazy as it sounds, I’m basically trying to light the natural world the same way you would light a studio shoot. I try to set up two or three light sources from different angles. The long exposure/multiple strobe shots thing isn’t what I have in mind, basically because: What I’ve been finding is that if I can light the “main scene” well, background clutter falls away. It’s giving me a way to accentuate things that get lost in the daylight. Whatever I can coat in adequate light is what ends up in the image… anything else falls into blackness. It’s kinda awesome, though also a new experiment.

Money plays a role unfortunately. But also, I have a couple of pretty good thrower lights, but the images end up about as you’d expect… washed out in the beam, pitch black outside the beam. Trying to find a more balanced light that has a bit of reach without being so, ya know, defined-

Have you experimented with diffusing your throwers?

d-c-fix is a popular self-adhesive diffusion material that can be applied to the outside surface of a flashlight lens. It’s thin and easy to cut with scissors or a knife. It is easily removed, and can be reused if you’re careful.

BLF member ‘Boaz’ sells d-c-fix in small quantities and has several types. It’s available in larger rolls on Amazon.

Another option is the diffusion material used in LCD televisions and monitors. It isn’t self-adhesive but it’s certainly cheap if you can find a TV on the curb!

Frosted ‘Scotch Tape’ works too, but might be cumbersome on a larger lens.

You could also try some frosted items from around the house, but they’ll likely cause a lot of light loss. d-c-fix only eats about 3% of output.

Be sure to share some of your photos with us!

I’d tried diffusing, but just stuff I had laying around, and they all killed too much light. That dc fix looks like it could be great!

I can’t find any of the original images at the moment, so I screen-grabbed one of them from Insta on my phone, re-cropped, uploaded… image quality is awful, but gives you an idea of what I’m doing:

I’m out middle of the night, pitch-black, miles deep into the woods, but my approach is basically to light it and shoot it as though it’s daylight. It’s an evolving process! I keep all my light sources at 5000K, high CRI. I like the tip on varied spectrum lights for changing background tint! For this project, background is pretty much just inky blackness. But I could see ways of incorporating the idea… come to think of it, I’ve tried lighting foreground and background images to get separate pops before. Your idea would probably be a more effective tool to do that.

It’s a pretty low-tech approach, so I literally just go around a scene I want to capture, moving those battery-powered shop lights, flashlights, etc, until the scene’s lit about like I want. You make a good observation about multiple pops not being as soft. Gotta try to find that balance between, say, lighting a falls from the other side of the river, but keeping the light relatively diffuse…

The Sofirn SP36 BLF edition springs to mind:

This is a nice review by member Flashaholics:

The problem is shadows. You can bring them up in post a bit though. Keeping ISO down is another issue. Are you shooting moving subjects or stationary?

Bigger lights have more stable output. So don’t go to small, especially if you are setting up multiple flashlights and they have to stay at a certain setting.

To keep the budget down. A few convoy L6 would probably work. Or do you need high CRI?

I’m pretty much a landscape photographer, so the only thing moving is wind/water/precip :slight_smile: For the most part, the shadows are good for this project, makes the foreground pop more… but yeah, I still try to get light from a couple angles to backfill some of the shadows. I’d rather err toward being less “in your face” that it’s all artificially lit.

High CRI is the goal, but those Convoy L6s would deliver… 5K is about as good as it gets. A bit spendy, but looks like a few of them could work, esp with that dcfix.

A couple things I’d been contemplating:

portable spotlight
and

COB disc

Seems like I’d want to make some sort of reflector dish for those discs, though. And I’d have to do something funky for batteries, seems like?

I’ve been using headlamps and some things like this:

work light

But these don’t have enough throw

A couple of Astrolux MF01/MF01S flashlights with the high-CRI Nichia or SST-20 emitters may serve.

Emisar D18 with SST-20 4000K CRI95 emitters is my recommendation. 10000 lumens of high CRI light with high R9.

SST-20 4000K with high R9 could make colors pop a lot more. Most 5000K high CRI emitters have a lower R9, which makes red and brown tones look less accurate. You can adjust white balance in post-processing, but you cannot get back the missing color spectrum when you have low R9.

https://www.soraa.com/learn/science/why-understanding-r9-not-just-cri-matters-you.php

Its beam is best described as thrower-ish flood. You can make it more floody with d-c-fix.

What’s R9? I’ve come to enjoy the neutral color of 5000K, but maybe I could try a 4000K lamp for giggles.

About that Emisar, and lights like it… with absolutely no reflector, it doesn’t seem like it’d have much throw at all? Reminds me of COB shop lights, put out a bunch of light, but it doesn’t necessarily have much reach. I’m just not familiar with that style head on a flashlight. Would it throw 150-200 yards at least?

Yeah, good eye on the color spectrums. I’d have sworn I saw it somewhere! But it was more the design concept. And, holy wah, how would you even go about making a reflector that huge? First thing to mind was to cannibalize an old single-bulb, clamp-style shop light.

Thinking about the goal, I’d rather err toward more throw and less flood… thinking that it’s easier to diffuse light than tighten/project it.

I love going out in horrid weather, so weather resistance would be important too. Will definitely get wet.

If I went DIY, how do I know the difference between quality COBs and junk? I dunno. Think it’d be better to diffuse a spottier light still… but at least fun considering options.

4000K vs 5000K should not matter, if you can change white balance in post-processing, but R9 is a different story. You cannot get back the missing color spectrum with post-processing when you have low R9. Since there are many brown and red colors in a forest, R9 is as important as CRI.

Learn more about R9:

Emisar D18 beamshots in a forest:

You don’t need crazy bright flashlights for long exposure night photography. I often use Convoy S2+ for this, and have also recently started using KDLITKER E6 with various colour drop-ins. Check out my insta for some ideas (I list flashlights used and exposure). @stephenk_lightart