One of the unique light sources to illuminate the subject in digital photography is the candlelight. The result of illuminating the object with candlelight can be fascinating if you can capture it with your camera. Unlike flash light, daylight or home bulb light, the color temperature of the candlelight is different. Candlelight is in the bottom of the light temperature chart. You can capture the candlelight either to include it in the photo or just a source of low light on your still objects, or even just a solo object in your frame.

Candlelight provides warmth color and you should eliminate the other light sources to give you the optimum result in your photo. Other light sources would just contaminate the scene and not naturally from the candlelight. Make a test and blow off the candle to make sure that the scene is completely dark.

The other thing you must assure is that the built-in camera flash or the external flash must be set to be in off position. In some situations probably you need to add small amount of additional light source when you have more experiences with just a candlelight source. You will have a good sense of when you should add additional small amount of other light to penetrate the scene including which angle and how much light intensity would work best.

Candlelight is much weaker than other light sources such as your camera flash or sun light. Therefore you must treat it the way you take a photo in low light situations including using slow shutter speed, open lens or maximizing the use of wide aperture. But with open lens, the light result in your photo would not be much better than you use the small aperture such as f/13 even though the consequence is slower in speed. As general to get a faster speed, the ISO setting should be maximum your camera can support such as 1600 or 3200. But remember the higher the ISO setting the more noise your photo result. Therefore use appropriate setting such as 200 and make sure to use a camera tripod or place the camera in a fix surface. The other thing you should consider is using the timer-on to reduce the shake when you press the shutter button.

The other thing you should also consider is the object movement. That will result a blurry photo due to the use of low speed setting. Make sure that your object is standing still in the period of you press the shutter until the camera sounds “click”. And remember that the candles tend to flicker and you will not be able to eliminate this flicker completely but reduce the flicker as small as possible. Small flicker will give you a good candlelight effect.

Try some experiment which speed gives you the best result, starting with the automatic camera setting would be a good idea to give you a good sense. Explore with different speeds and different metering settings and see how good the result is with different settings. Make some experiments with different number of candles and different objects to capture. Candlelight is not strong enough to illuminate your object. In some cases you would need few candles to light up the objects and placement of the candles should make sense, and probably they can be out of the photo frame. You can place the candles at the same height as the person’s face and you will get a warmer and softer effect.

What about white balance setting? Some digital camera may have preset white balance for candlelight, or you may select different white balance setting o n purpose to have different result. You may also try to use different selections of the picture style. For example Canon offers you downloaded custom picture styles you can use including the Emerald, twilight, nostalgia and more. Try with different picture style settings instead of using the standard picture style.

Mastering various types of light source in illuminating the photo objects and composing the objects for best result is an art – the art of photography.

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