Most of this comes down to putting the camera on a tripod, then using a button that keeps the shutter open for a long period of time. Drop the ISO way down and then hold it open for 0.5s. Features like that aren't really available in smartphone form, and it felt like a loss.
Lighting is just as important, of course, but you can achieve some interesting effects just by giving light more time to enter a physically stable camera.
EDIT: I changed my mind. If you look at the photos carefully, you can see most of the effect is from a fill light behind the camera. If that light source doesn't exist, no amount of holding the shutter open will make it seem like it does.
> If you look at the photos carefully, you can see most of the effect is from a fill light behind the camera.
Yeah, I was going to say what's really going on here is the photographer has a nice big soft box behind the camera (or maybe even just a diffuser on an on-camera flash). That way all of the flat surfaces facing the camera show pleasant highlights and then the dark areas define the edges of those.
I would say it’s at about 1/60. The guy is still sharp but the pencil leads have some motion blur. Slower than that you will start to get motion blur in human subjects if you are unlucky. 1/30 it is still possible to get sharp portraits but some will have motion blur.
These shots are most certainly flash. The dark ambient background is achieved by stopping down the shutter. Shutter controls ambient, aperture controls flash exposure. Assuming of course you're not setting it faster than your cameras sync speed (which now can be alleviated by high speed sync) on high end cameras. So now you have a well exposed subject, with nearly dark background.
Lighting is just as important, of course, but you can achieve some interesting effects just by giving light more time to enter a physically stable camera.
EDIT: I changed my mind. If you look at the photos carefully, you can see most of the effect is from a fill light behind the camera. If that light source doesn't exist, no amount of holding the shutter open will make it seem like it does.