Wedding photography: Video light vs (gelled) flash
Over time, I've posted several articles explaining how I use gels to bring the color of my flash closer to that of the ambient light. In summary, we gel our flash, to improve the color balance in the photo, and avoid an overly saturated murky orange background, when our subject is lit by flash, and the background is lit by incandescent lighting or warm lighting of some kind. We can reduce this difference in color temperature / white balance, by adding a gel to our flash. The gel can be CTO or CTS. I prefer CTS, and usually as a 1/2 Read more inside...
A versatile lighting tool that is always in my camera bag - a video light. With a video light you can localize how you light up something like details at an event. Unlike bounce flash, it doesn't light up the entire scene - just where you point the video light at. Eg: bounce flash vs video light. I love LED video lights (affiliate), since they are compact, don’t run hot, and the color balance can be continuously changed from 3200K tungsten (Incandescent) to 5600K Daylight. Light is produced flicker free at any frame rate or shutter Read more inside...
In reply to some questions on using video light for portraits, here are some images of Sasha, a model who brought an entirely appropriate sense of the dramatic to the photo session. With vintage clothing and hats, the video lights appeared a good choice for lighting.
For this session, I had an assistant who held up two Lowel ID-lights (affiliate), each with barn-doors to flag the light and stop light spill .. and in this way get a lot of control over the direction and placing of the light. The one light was used to light up our model, Read more inside...
