Fairy Light Photo Shoot

Hi everyone! For my first post I wanted to start off with something fun, so I'm going to be giving tips on how to use fairy lights in a photo shoot. Fairy lights are really popular with the hipster Tumblr crowd, and any fan of Brandon Woelfel. As always, I will be using my Nikon D7100 and I used a 35mm 1.8 lens.

So, to get started if you don't own fairy lights, you can purchase them for about $10 from Amazon like I did (mine actually came with two strands, a pleasant surprise). Then, once you're ready to shoot I suggest using a portrait lens to be able to achieve a nice shallow depth of field to keep your subject in focus while the lights remain unfocused. I also suggest using a faster shutter speed because you'll be working in a darker environment with lights that can get blurred.

I gave my model the majority of the fairy lights, and kept one end to myself to hold up a few inches away from my lens to give a nice blurred effect of lights running across the front which I think personally looks really cool. A very important thing to consider while taking these pictures is that you shouldn't be in the pitch black because the light will appear very harsh. If you're shooting indoors, have a separate light source whether it's the light flooding in from the window or a desk lamp, etc. If you're shooting outdoors, I suggest waiting until golden hour is almost up and using those last minutes of light, or going somewhere where there are other light sources like a lamp post or neon open sign.

Here are some of my results using fairy lights:

#photography #fairylights #hipster #tips