The generator went and nobody moved
Three rolls in one night on a dead grid. Notes on shooting a blackout with a flash, a wall, and no plan.
The power went at twenty to midnight and the whole lot dropped to the colour of the inside of a bag. What I expected was for everyone to leave. What happened was that nobody moved. The music was gone, the lights were gone, and about sixty people stood in the dark carrying on the conversation they were already having.
That gap — between the thing failing and anyone reacting to it — is most of what I came away with. It lasted maybe four minutes. I shot two rolls in it.
Working with one light
On-camera flash gets a bad name because of what it does to a face pointed straight at it. Turn it thirty degrees into a painted wall and it stops being a flash and starts being a room. The wall behind the bar was a flat off-white, which is the closest thing to a softbox you get for free.
- Flash bounced left into the wall, never direct at anyone close.
- 1/60 so the ambient had a chance to register as something.
- f/2.8 and let the far edges go.
- ISO up until the grain was obvious, then one stop more.
A dark frame with one thing in it beats a lit frame with everything in it.
What did not work
The first roll is mostly unusable. I was still metering like the lights were on, which meant I was protecting shadow detail in a scene that was almost entirely shadow. Twelve frames of grey mush before I gave up and let the blacks go where they wanted.
The second roll starts at frame one with the black point on the floor. Everything I kept came from there.
The one I kept
Frame 03. Someone lit their own face with a phone to find a lighter and, for about a second, was the brightest object in a space that held sixty people. I got one frame of it. There was no second frame — the lighter worked.