Last year, I shot model Kelly from Knoxville at the beautiful Swann Plantation. Actually, it was not my first time; I shot her here, here, and here, too :D

My friend and lighting assistant Adam dressed her up in a sexy Harley Quinn-themed robe, and we shot away in one of the small houses/barn on the property. Looking around the room, we liked the atmosphere that the hung strings of "Christmas" lights in the background gave. It was a very soft and moody light. When we turned on the room light, it got ugly (still from behind the scenes video):

So we turned off the overhead room light and kept the background string lights. It was quite dark, so dark that Kelly would be completely in shadow. Here's an idea (again, a still frame from the BTS video--although its ISO was cranked up just to see Kelly; that's why it looks brighter than it actually was and the weak string lights look blown out):

For my camera, I used my trusty old Olympus OMD EM5 with the gorgeous low-light monster the Panasonic-Leica 42.5mm f1.2 lens shooting wide open.

First, I set the exposure/tone of the background, which forced me to use ISO 800--and it was still dark. So I slowed my shutter speed down to 1/100 second (normally I start at 1/250 second) to suck in a bit more light. Yet still, Kelly was too dark. So I had to introduce external flash (because you saw how ugly the room light was above). I didn't want the flash to look too typical of "photographer's generic one-light on a stand" look; I wanted it to blend more with the atmosphere of the room. So I noticed a lamp on the table Kelly was sitting at, and thought to bungee cord a speedlight inside the lampshade. This would give the scene a light that actually looks more fitting to the ambiance.

Even at the lowest power--combined with the close proximity to the model--there was slight blowing out on her at times. Shooting RAW helped as I can squeeze out the dynamic range of the EM5's sensor a tiny bit more, but we did the best we could with the equipment we had at the time (what I could fit in my little luggage bag). I also played around with the color/white balance to make the pictures a little more moody. Not a bad result, all things considered.

We had Kelly do thinks like play with her hair and pretend to do her makeup--sexy girly things. And we thew in some "posey" shots. Here's a slew of what we got:

The Panasonic 42.5mm/1.2 Nocticron lens is a very fast focusing lens, but it probably struggled about 30% of the time in such a dark environment. Still impressive for my results. I usually turn on Face Detection when shooting with the EM5, but it was useless in this scenario and I did what I could with selective focus. Even though not 100% of the shots nailed critical focus in this darkness, the ones that were nailed showed impressive sharpness even at ISO 800:

Here I've uploaded a quick behind-the-scenes peek of this shoot on my YouTube (to which you should be subscribing, ahem):

Please forgive the video quality; it was a GH4 just sitting on a tripod with cranked up ISO huhu :(

Anyway, hope you've enjoyed this set/info. By the way, I love sharing/talking photoshoots and lighting, and love posting them for free on my blog. However, feel free to take a gander at some of my other models that I have (and will continue to add) that come with their own lighting diagrams if you feel like supporting any that you fancy ;)