Jewel Box Lighting is the art of combining lights, lighted buildings, or lighted objects with a deep blue evening sky. It is a great way to do photography and the exhibit this week at the Franklin Park Observatory is a wonderful opportunity to practice this technique and come away with some unique and memorable images.

The Key to Jewel Box Lighting

The key to Jewel Box Lighting is to get the right balance between your lighted subject and the deep blue sky. If you shoot too early in the evening the sky will look nice but your subject will be too dark.  Shoot too late in the evening and the lighted subject will be too light or the sky will be too dark. The ideal window of time can be 10 minutes or less, so the key is to start too early (when the sky looks too light relative to your subject) and keep shooting until it looks too late.

Keep in mind that when the balance between your subject and the deep blue sky looks just right to your eyes, it is already too late to get the ideal balance in your photographs. The reason is the image from your digital or film camera has a much smaller contrast range than your eyes have so the contrast between light and dark is exaggerated.  So start shooting when the sky looks too light.

Metering is critical due to the high contrast range in this kind of photography. With the broad and varied mixture light and dark in the image the camera meter can easily be fooled into emphasizing the wrong tonalities. It is easy to end up with a seriously over exposed subject or an underexposed sky. It is best to put your camera meter in the manual mode. If you over or underexpose your image, you could correct the exposure with your favorite image editing software, but the color tones of the image will have shifted. One of the little known secrets to getting the best colors your camera is capable of producing is to get the ideal exposure.

Metering Jewel Box Lighting with a Film Camera

If you are using a digital camera, keep reading. If you are shooting with a film camera, read this article and pay careful attention to the “one evening procedure” (unless you plan on going to the exhibit more than once).

Metering Jewel Box Lighting with a Digital Camera

The key to metering is the sky. You want medium to medium dark blue tones in the sky. Start shooting when the sky looks too light. With your camera meter in the manual mode, determine the lens aperture you need to use to get enough depth of field for your image. For this image and the photo in the prior image I needed a lot of depth of field so I used a lens aperture of f/22.

With your aperture selected, meter the sky (and only they sky) as close as you can to your subject without including your subject. Set the shutter speed so the exposure compensation scale reads zero. Put your camera on a tripod, recompose your image so you have your subject and the sky arranged like you want them and take a picture. You will end up with a medium blue sky. Then set the shutter speed one stop faster (less light, therefore a darker blue sky) and take another picture. If you want a wider bracket, try additional shutter speeds.

In a minute or two the sky will be darker. Repeat the whole process again. Meter the sky again and set the shutter speed so the exposure compensation dial reads zero. Recompose and take a picture. Then set the shutter speed one stop faster and take another picture. If you want, you can do some more bracketing by trying more shutter speeds.

Keep repeating this process every minute or two until the lighted subject looks too bright in relationship to the sky.

Do NOT trust the image on the LCD on the back of your camera to judge the best final exposure. Do NOT put total trust in your histogram either, or at least not until the histogram tells you that you have a lot of blown out (pure white) pixels in your image. The real test of your preferred exposure will be on your computer screen. The exposure you like best may be different than the “technically correct” exposure.

When you are all done, you will have a series of images in which the sky is a medium or medium dark blue tone throughout the whole series of images thanks to the way you metered for your images. The lighted subject will go from too dark at he beginning to too light at the end. Somewhere in the middle you will have the ideal balance between subject and blue sky. What you see on your computer monitor will tell the final story.

The more you practice Jewel Box Lighting, the better you will get at guessing the time when the subject to sky balance will look best in a photograph, so you won’t have to start so early or shoot so late (we are generally talking 10 to 15 minutes max for the whole series). But if this is your first rodeo, make the most of it. Don’t trust the camera’s LCD. You don’t want to look at the back of your camera and say “Oh wow, I nailed it”, only to go home to download your photos and realize you missed the ideal image. Just remember, the best subject to deep blue sky balance in a photograph will be when when the sky looks a bit too light to your eyes.

Photo Suggestions for the Bruce Munro Exhibit

The photo above was taken at an outside patio. These large globes with the interior strands of light are relatively bright so they are best photographed about 15 minutes after sunset. Sunset today (March 24) in Columbus will be at 7:47 pm and March 30 sunset will be at 7:54 PM EDT so plan accordingly.

The small lighted globes on narrow transparent stands in the interior courtyard (see the photo in my companion article on the Bruce Munro exhibit) are much dimmer and will look their best about 30 to 45 minutes after sunset. So I would start with the above patio lights first, then head toward the interior courtyard lights. The small courtyard lights change colors. The blue and green colors which are dimmer will look better photographed later in the evening than the red and yellow colors.

There was an intermittent breeze blowing the small courtyard lights around, so I had a hard time finding lulls in the breeze that were long enough to get non-blurry pictures. I had to go with an ISO much higher than I usually prefer (ISO 1600) to get a short enough shutter speed (if you call 6 seconds short) to get the job done.

For the images at the top of both articles my camera was low to the ground on a tripod to get the angle of view that I wanted. When I was done I had some people on the patio ask to see my images on the back of the camera. They looked at them and said “Oh wow, how did you do that?”  I said “Putting my camera close to the ground and shooting up.” To my surprise, all but a couple of other photographers were shooting at eye level.

Turn off your flash! Several people were shooting with flash. They ended up overexposed, flash-lit photos of the glass globes a few feet away from the camera and the colored lights inside the globes were barely visible. Everything 15 or more feet from the camera’s flash just faded into darkness. The results have none of the charm of ambient light photos. I was too focused on the task at hand to think about taking some flash photos myself to serve as a bad example.

The light exhibits inside the solid roofed areas of the conservatory can be photographed any time. Unfortunately, the light exhibits inside the rooms with glass ceilings will be at their best about the same time as the outside patio and courtyard areas so you won’t be able to get all the exhibits at their absolute best in one night. You will have to pick and choose which exhibits are most important to you and make some compromises on the rest, or go more than one night to do justice to it all.

Now get your camera and go have fun!

Photo Data: Canon 5D III. Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens at 24 mm. 0.6 sec,  f/22,  ISO 400.

Links

How to do Jewel Box Lighting with a film camera.

The best colors come from the best exposures.

My article about the Bruce Munro Light Exhibit.

If you need more information about metering and exposure, read the series of articles that begins here.

For a lot more information on exposure, metering, apertures, depth of field, ISO settings, using the light, night and low light photography, and a whole lot more, read Digital Photography Exposure for Dummies. It is one of the highest rated photography books at Amazon.com and it is one of the most comprehensive books on exposure, covering beginning, intermediate and advanced exposure techniques. It also has chapters on photographic lighting, using flash on and off the camera, people photography, wildlife, landscapes, flowers, sports and action, and closeup photography. Digital Photography Exposure for Dummies is based on 29 years of experience doing classes, workshops and field trips with photographers of all experience levels at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Graceland University, The Ohio State University, and a variety of clubs and organizations. Learn more here and order it an Amazon.