equipment recommendation - How to illuminate an outdoor night time portrait with a cityscape background?

I encountered this problem the other day at one of the many skybars in Bangkok. I wanted to take some photos of my friends enjoying their drinks, but the situation had a few challenges; the only light source came from the bar itself and was not illuminating where we were sitting at all, the space was very crowded so I couldn't set anything up other than in my 'personal space'(no tripods or reflectors), there are no walls for bouncing light, my camera (Canon 5D) is useless for noise above ISO 1000.

I used my hot-shoe flash but this either:

• Washed the people out, but the city lights were bright enough


• Captured people in correct exposure and the cityscape lights being not light enough



• The real problem. Captured people and cityscape with the correct exposure, but there were awkward heavy shadows cast by their eyebrows, chins and noses as the flash was coming from half a foot above my camera.

Without walls to bounce light off, I am out of my element!

I would like a recommendation on what sort of flash setup could get rid of the shadows. It would be great if the setup was light so that I could carry it around all day without a fuss.

Answer

If you weren't doing this already, use slow sync flash. Then you can use the flash to illuminate the people in the foreground, while at the same time exposing correctly for the cityscape in the background. You will need a tripod (or equivalent way of keeping the camera steady), and this way you also have the luxury of choosing a low ISO.

As for the awkward shadows under their nose and eyebrows, this is just generally the result of having direct (non-bounced) flash.

If you only have the camera's built-in flash there's not much you can do about this except to try and move further away and crop/zoom instead. But since you have a hot-shoe flash, assuming you can rotate it, you may be able to swivel it and bounce it off a white clipboard or something. When you bounce flash, it doesn't always have to be bounced off a wall, you can always bounce it off a smaller object. Even bouncing it off a white business card will give it a slightly softer quality than direct flash (probably better than a diffuser you may pay good money for). Try, for example, bouncing it off the pages of a book or newspaper - as long as it's mostly black and white it should be good. Try bouncing it to the side instead of above for a more flattering angle to the shadows.

It sounds like you're probably not interested in more elaborate flash set-ups such as multiple flashes or off-camera flashes since this was just a casual outing with friends and you need to carry the stuff with you, but if you are, there's a whole other world of stuff you could get into!