Yes, those attachments actually serve a purpose.

As wedding photographers, we have to provide lots of high quality images at every event under extreme time constraints and with minimal equipment all while remaining extremely adaptable under every conceivable scenario.  Piece of cake, right?  This is why the sooner you learn to use equipment limitations (or intentionally limited equipment) to your advantage will set you on the road to successful image after successful image.

So it’s dark.  What’s the first thing that comes to your mind?  I need light! What kind of light?  Oh, I dunno.  LIGHT! Well, what are you trying to accomplish?  I want to light this place up! So how do you take a very difficult situation like the one above and knock out a portfolio quality shot of a night exit?  What’s the thought process?  What are the problems we have to overcome to make this work?  I don’t have time to work up images in Photoshop, so I have to get it right in camera.

So we have this looooong line of people throwing flower petals for this exit, and we’ve chosen to shoot from a balcony for dramatic effect.  Hey, how about lighting it from below on the lower porch?  Well, there’s no way to bring enough gear and set up a lighting scenario in the 5 minutes you’ll have to set it up.  At most you’ll have one, maybe two lights.  From this vantage point, lighting from camera position is kinda gonna look like ass.  It’s going to look like on camera flash at night, aka “crap”.

We then decide to light it from behind, which will give us a very dramatic exit, and the flower petals in the air will play much better.  But we have a major problem.  That line of people is looooong and narrow, so how do we light this effectively so we get this right in camera and don’t lose the folks closest to the camera?  Take a look at this graph roughly showing the difference in lighting patterns from a bare parabolic reflector and then one of that reflector with a 20º grid attached.

As you can see, a bare parabolic reflector is going to spill light everywhere.  That’s its job, send light out in this big circle, as much as possible.  So what’s the problem with using just that?  Well, look at the patterns.  The problem is that it’s going to dump an assload of light where you don’t want it and in quantities you definitely don’t want.  It’s going to dump a good amount of light to the sides very close to the light position.  So what’s wrong with that?  You’re going to go nuclear on those people nearest the light, and in order to compensate for that, you’re going to severely underexpose 1/2 to 3/4 of the people closest to the camera, maybe even lose them completely.  It’d be an “ok” shot, but just “ok” and who want’s that?

How do you light this narrow group of people as evenly as possible?  Add lights?  That’s certainly possible, but overly complicated, and probably not all that practical given time constraints.  The answer is to limit your light using a grid on your reflector and then use the dramatic falloff from that grid to your advantage.  So what does a grid afford us in this situation?  A 20º grid is going to fall off very rapidly, and this is a huge advantage to us in this situation for maintaining as consistent an exposure from front to back as we can get given the situation we have to work with.  The red arrows roughly show the degree of falloff we are utilizing to make this happen.

It’s the perfect source of light for this.  No burning or dodging had to be done to make this image ready.  Nobody is blown out, and we even have the bonus of Sarah’s dress acting as a bounce light source to kick some fill back into some of the group.  We are using limited lighting here to draw the eye or focus on what’s really important and leave the rest to the viewer’s imagination.  The back lighting shows a lot more shape and shadow, and the flowers being thrown are much more visible in this kind of light.

Effective lighting is simply a solution to a problem, so think about what you are trying to achieve and what the simplest solution would be before you just have a knee-jerk reaction and just throw light all over the place, hoping for the best.  With the constraints we are forced to work in, it can feel like we are handcuffed by our equipment, but when you learn to use those limitations to your advantage, you’ll feel that much more empowered to walk into any situation and bring back those stellar images you want to be known for.