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 CTS cut. However, the gels provided with the Profoto B1o are a range of CTO gels, so that’s what I used here.

When using a 1/2 CTS / CTO gel, the background is now nice and warm, but the warm tones aren’t so strong that it overwhelms the photograph with all the murky orange tones. If we only partially correct for the difference in white balance between our flash (which is around 5400K), and our much warmer (incandescent or warm fluorescent lighting), then our image appears pleasantly warm … and somehow looks more like the scene as we might remember it.

Below is a photo where I gelled the flash with a 1/2 CTO gel, bringing the WB to 3450K in processing the RAW file.

1/60 @ f/4.5 @ 1000 ISO
WB: 3450 K with 1/2 CTO gelled flash

With this photo below, I used the Profoto B10 flash (B&H / Amazon), as a video light. I changed the WB of the LED light which is built into the B10, until the color visually more or less matched the existing light in the lobby of this wedding reception venue.

1/30 @ f/3.5 @ 1000 ISO
WB: 2550 K with the Profoto B10 used as a video light

You can immediately see that even though the skin tones in the two images are fairly similar, the image lit by the video light looks color. It’s because of the daylight filtering in from above in the top part of the image.

Neither image is right nor wrong. but I do prefer the warmer image at the top. It’s just more appealing to me, especially in a wedding context.

Of course, there are numerous options open to you in-between these two possibilities — you could change the filter on the flash. You could change the WB setting of the video light portion of the B10. You could change your exposure settings, and thereby affect the way the ambient light will register. We have options! Now it’s the challenge to pick an option quickly that looks most appealing.