So I flew out of the country to shoot this wedding, and just before the wedding it started pouring.  I was looking for an ark out of the corner of my eye the whole time.  It looked like we wouldn’t get any portraits outside that evening, though eventually we’d have about 5 minutes of a glorious sunset that we didn’t know was going to happen.  I had no choice but to make best use of the space they were in.  The best room there was really just a big empty room with two brightly painted walls with some glass art mounted in some sort of fancy installment fashion.

Flying out of the country meant basically two SB28 flashes at my disposal.  Below is a photo of this wall.  The lighting is courtesy of the gallery, some cans aimed to kind of give this install some interest.  I knew I had to make some awesome stuff here because, well, the only other rooms were packed solid with guests and it was buckets outside.

As you get away from the wall, it’s very very dark.  No other lighting was in this room.  Advantage: Photographer.  I had the perfect environment to do whatever I wanted, so out came a camera flash.  The challenge here, though, is controlling that light.  If you just take a flash out and fire it, no matter how you aim it, it’s going to splatter the whole area with big ugly camera flash light.  Unless you’re Weegee, forget it.

So these camera flashes make it really easy to control the angle of light exiting that fresnel.  Just hit a button a few times, and blamo, a concentrated beam of light you can really use in this situation.  Remember, a shotgun makes a big ole’ mess, but a rifle, well, there you go.  I think I had this flash zoomed to a mid-tele range, just enough that I could cover Jen and no more.  Again, I despise messing around in Photoshop (or anything else) burning and dodging and fixing sloppiness, especially when there’s no reason for it.

I did not, however, want big ole’ shadows on the wall.  I flew internationally, so I was really light on equipment.  To get around this, I used an RTG.  They are really handy and there’s almost always one around.  What?  Oh yeah, RTG = Really Tall Groomsman.  So it was his job to get that thing way up so the shadows fell very quickly behind this setup.  I did bring Jen out from the wall enough that this wasn’t too much a problem and also to put her in heavy shadow so I’d have independent control of my light on her as well as the background light.

With her in complete shadow, I could change my shutter speed, flash power, anything I wanted really without affecting each other, which is an amazing amount of control you can’t always get.  It allowed me to get just the shot I wanted.  The bonus of her reflection in the polished concrete gives the shot a lot of depth.  Shooting low really emphasizes this.  See how hard the light is without being totally obnoxious?  Getting that light off camera axis gets you a lot more flexibility.  Her pose is very much because of the limitation of where the light is coming from given the situation, but I think it turned out pretty nice!  There it is, straight out of Lightroom.

On the wall perpendicular this one was a blue wall with all this glass art in a very rigid pattern.  This was perfect for this kind of shot.  I knew the glass would throw some wicked shadows if I lit it right.  I had someone just hold that flash straight up from the floor back toward the wall a bit so I could get those shadows and to put the hot spot right where I wanted it, again because of the ability to adjust the flash zoom.

So there you have it!  Two great portrait setups out of a fairly ordinary situation!  I wish I’d have shot the room as it looks without any extra lighting.  Then you can see how much a little technique can really dress up a room fast.  Oh well, next time!

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.

Like everyone else, I’d love to not have to worry about syncing cameras.  However, I am one who does not control all the gear going into the shoot.  I use various photographers I know.  It’s pretty likely their cameras aren’t synced to mine (aka, Apple’s Time Servers or whatnot).  It’s nice if they are, and I try to get them to do this, but in all likelihood, it just doesn’t happen down to the second, right?  This has become a bigger issue now that I have more people working with me than just Zack.

So! I’ve read and read and all I can find is that people do one of three things:

1 – They just try to find a shot that happened around the same time and use the EXIF stamp to figure out how far to offset the other camera.  Fine, but this can be off a good bit, and you still have to hunt for a shot at a similar time.  Not fun!  Especially if you are dealing with several cameras.

2 – They all shoot a frame at (sorta around) the exact same time as a baseline.  Again, not all that convenient, especially if you have each person using more than one camera.

3 – They all set their menu for a predetermined time at (again, sorta around) the exact same time.  Again, if you have more than one camera per shooter, you’ll need more arms than you have.

I was recently thinking about this as I was running into this more and more, and I realized that you have to go pretty far back to have a camera that will display a static time or a time where the seconds don’t count on screen.  Ok!  So why not use the baseline camera (your main rig) and just shoot the screen of the other camera(s) as their time counts? That gets you down to the second (as seen above – and again, important that their seconds count on screen).

What if you have multiple cameras?  Have every camera photograph your main camera’s screen.  Simple as that!  That way you have your time difference locked into each camera’s individual files.  No need to go back and forth and look at time stamps.  You can just sort by metadata (camera model, etc) and change the times just for those series of photos.

The best part about this is that you can do this at any point throughout the day, even with shooters who show up later than the rest of the crew, etc.  You don’t have to all be together at the exact same time.  Cool, huh?

Ideally you’d all be synced to the same time source, but that’s not always practical, so hopefully this makes it a bit easier on you.