Turning Day Into Night With Speedlights

On this Westcott video, pro portrait photographer Kevin Kubota demonstrates how to shoot with an ND filter to gain the effect of high speed sync, allowing you to shoot a night time looking photo during daytime with speedlights.

This video has a pretty interesting and quite unique setup that allows you to achieve something fascinating – a night-time look for a daytime photo. You will need a few things to be able to recreate this photo:

A speedlight with a remote trigger.
A variable ND filter.
A fast lens.
A warm gel for the speedlight and the Westcott LunaGrip.

Now all you need to do is place the gel on your speedlight and attach both to the LunaGrip modifier. Use your lens wide open and set your camera white balance to 2500k and you shutter speed to 1/250 second at basic ISO with the aperture wide open and use the ND filter to control the exposure of the image to the look that you want.

Now you can go out and make a night-time (sort of moon-light blue color) portrait with this setup during the day.

You can check out many more helpful photography tips on our Photography tips section here on LensVid as well as more specific lighting tips here.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.