Neon lights

(@brandonwoelfel)

One of my favorite things to use in my pictures would be neon lights. Whenever I pass by a neon sign, I can imagine a beautiful picture. They’re very fun to edit and mess around. You can change the colors around however you like. Just like working with the fairy lights, it could be a bit tricky. Finding the settings for it could cause a headache. I’m here to help you out a bit.

What you’ll need:

Neon sign/lights
35mm lens

The settings is and will always be the difficult part of taking a picture. Make sure you take random pictures of the area so you can see how the settings are before you go straight in. There are times when you need to change the settings in the middle shoot and that’s fine. I just suggest you always mess around with the exposure triangle. My settings are just like the ones I use when dealing with fairy lights. My ISO would be either 400 or higher. I used the manual priority mode. My f-stop was f/5.6 and my shutter speed was 1/15 seconds.

Find a spot with neon signs can’t be that hard because almost every restaurant uses them. I do suggest going to the downtown area. Downtown could be a bit scary during the night time but it sure is a wonderful place to take pictures especially ones with neon lights. If you’re not the type to go out, then I’m pretty sure you can buy your own neon sign anywhere online. It doesn’t even have to be a fancy sign. It could be just a plain neon light.

When using a neon sign, I find the perfect way to position the model is to have them stand slightly in front of the sign, just enough for the colors to bounce off onto them, and you take a picture on the other side of the sign. Another way would be having them stand right in front of the sign and you take a picture of them in a way that the sign is right behind them.

When editing them, the best part would be messing around with the hue, saturation, and luminance. I love changing the colors around and making them a lot more colorful than the original. I would be talking more about editing next week. I hope this helps you and encourages you to go out of your “photography” comfort zone a bit.