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Tangents

bounce flash examples – wedding receptions

December 19, 2009

bounce flash examples – wedding receptions

Over the course of the past year or so, I’ve made a steady attempt to move this blog away from being wedding-heavy, and take the material more towards general photography, and photographing people.

However, since the most of my work is as done as a wedding photographer  in New Jersey, I still get a large number of questions which relate to wedding photography - and specifically, photographing the reception.  So I thought I would expand a little on the techniques I use in photographing wedding receptions.

A few years back, I would regularly use additional lighting to add extra light to the reception room, in order to avoid the dreaded black background which everything faded into.  But I rarely do so these days, and haven’t used additional lighting at a reception in more than a year.

Somewhere around the time I started using the Canon 1D mk3, I decided to forgo the additional off-camera flash setups at a reception. I could now really make use of the high-ISO capabilities of the camera to bring in the ambiance.  And now with cameras such as the Nikon D700 (B&H) and Canon 5D and Canon 5D mkII (B&H), incredibly good high-ISO performance has become more accessible.

Other reasons for not using additional off-camera lighting at receptions usually have to do with the logistics and space, and shape of the reception room.  Quite often there just isn’t space to safely put down a lightstand or two.  Also, more and more receptions venues are lately using up-lighting.  This already helps create a more colorful and interesting background, and additional flashguns would just destroy the mood.

To show some examples from weddings this year:

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lighting the wedding formals (part 2)

October 7, 2009

The previous article on the topic showed a more static set-up in how I light the formal portraits of the bride and groom and families on their wedding day.  But I try and get as many on-location portraits of the bride beforehand to bring in some variety to the portraits.  It is also a very good idea to get as much done as early on as you can on the day .. just in case the time-line gets compressed and things don’t quite follow the original plan.  Then you’ll be much happier for having some solid portraits in your pocket.  So it definitely is a good idea to shoot some formal portraits when you can just after the bride has finished her preparation.

In this example, I had the bride in the hotel’s foyer, but I specifically had the bride stand in a place where the overhead tungsten spotlights didn’t fall directly on her, but there was obviously enough spill light to give a strong color cast.  So she was relatively in ‘shade’ compared to the brighter background.  This was done on purpose, so I could use flash to light her properly.  In this case, on-camera flash in TTL mode.  And to make sure I don’t get an ugly color cast in adding “blue” flash to the warmer tones of the tungsten+daylight mix .. I gelled my flash with 1/2 CTS gel and had my white balance set to 3700K.  More about that on this previous post on using flash in a tungsten environment.

 I bounced my flash to camera left, and used the Black Foamie Thing to shield any direct flash that would’ve fallen on the bride.  I specifically want indirect flash.  The moment that your subject can see any part of your flash tube, there is direct flash … and that would spoil the effect that I am after here … soft indirect light that is still directional.

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photographing in hard sunlight, with or without flash

June 13, 2008

photographing in hard sunlight, with or without flash

This is one of the toughest lighting conditions to deal with. Where I can, I try and position my subjects so that they are in shade, or at the very least their backs are to the sun. This way they are looking away from the bright light and less likely to squint and frown, and they will also have more even shaded light on their faces, with rim lighting around the sides.

But where you can’t position people and you have to deal with the lighting situation as it is, you have a few options:

You can get lucky with the angle so the features and details of most of the people are shaded, providing you with fairly uniform light on the essential parts of what you want to capture. Some parts of the scene will blow out, but hopefully nothing really relevant.

With this photograph, no flash was used. However, I did work things in my favor by shooting in the RAW format so that I have much more control over the image in post-production. I can more easily hold detail in the highlights while bringing up detail in the shadow areas.

(The examples in this posting assume that you are a solo photographer without the team of assistants to hold up large scrims and fill lights, but that you have to make do with what you have – a camera with a speedlight mounted on it.)

But if you’re stuck with full sun where part of the subject is in shade and the rest in sun, you have two options:

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