This shoot wasn’t planned at all. It was New Year’s Eve, and my girlfriend Ana and I were waiting for some friends so we could celebrate together. They were taking their time, and since we had already started drinking, Ana asked me to take portrait pictures of her. I’d never done portrait photography before—only live events—nor had I ever done impromptu. Yet I couldn’t miss such an opportunity, so I grabbed my camera and started thinking about lighting and equipment . We agreed on a red and black color theme, with me emphasizing it later in post . Let me explain my procedure with this Gothic Portrait.
Being tipsy and uncoordinated, I hadn’t much of a fancy setup, so i just used my Sony A7 IV with the kit lens and a cheap $20 RGB light mounted on the cold shoe. I kept the ISO at 6400 and the shutter speed at 1/100 since Ana was moving slowly between mysterious and seducing poses, yet keeping the goth charm at all time. My f-stop was at its widest and adjusted as I changed my focal length, which hovered between 30-50mm, sometimes going beyond that.
I started with neutral white light but then switched to pure red to add a darker, more dramatic feel. One thing I really liked was how the glass of red wine in her hand became an unexpected prop, making the whole theme feel even more vampiric—almost like she was drinking blood.
For the bed setup, I realized the background was clashing too much with Ana, so I completely desaturated and darkened it. In reality, the raw images were much darker than that, which is why i turned up the brightness so you could see a clear difference. I lowered the saturation on Ana as well but pushed the vibrance up just a bit to make the red tones in her makeup, earrings, and bra stand out. The goal was to keep the moody, goth aesthetic without making it look unnatural.
The biggest challenge was that I didn’t have any depth. The wall was too close, and Ana’s makeup was, sorry Ana, brighter and whiter than the background. My solution was to desaturate everything 100% but leave the red tones intact by masking them. After refining the mask—like removing color in her fingertips from it to give a more sinister “blood-drained” effect—I pushed the vibrance up. That made the red elements pop even more. Her dress was very light-absorbing, so I had to increase the blacks to bring out its texture. After that, I brightened the whole image and even painted in the wine to make it unnaturally red, reinforcing the eerie, vampire-like vibe.
For the shots with the red lighting, I kind of shot myself in the foot by using cheap lighting. Not being bright enough, and trying to fix it in post introduced way too much noise. Ironically, since I didn’t have much of a choice, I decided to lean into it instead. I created my own filter with a custom noise pattern and made the overall tone colder, shifting the red slightly toward magenta. That gave it a unique, almost surreal feel.
We had a lot of fun and Ana was very pleased with how the pictures turned out. This whole shoot was a reminder that sometimes the best creative work comes from spontaneous ideas. Gothic Portrait photography is all about mood, contrast, and storytelling, and sometimes, imperfections make an image more interesting. Even without a professional studio setup, playing around with lighting, posing, and post-processing in Lightroom can turn a simple setting into something dramatic and eye-catching.
If you’ve never done Themed Photography before, just go for it. If you want alcohol to influence your Portraits, I’ll leave that up to you 🙂
