Light it up!

This one's more for the photographers who check out my blog, but for the Brides, it might give you some insight into how my background influences what I'm doing today.

Lately I've been implementing more off-camera flash into my wedding coverage, especially the bride & groom portraits. Everyone wants to shoot with "available" light because, let's face it, you don't have to set anything up, and it's much faster to simply shoot with what you have. While this is always my preferred way of working, I don't always have any control over the location or the weather, so I'm not going to let that be an excuse for crappy images simply because of crappy conditions.

Not every wedding is going to give you awesome, golden, radiant natural light. In the past when I worked on editorial jobs, it was normal to set up studio strobes, reflectors, scrims, and anything else that was needed to give the image more dimension and interest rather than simply using "available" light. The biggest problem with those types of techniques is you need several cases of equipment, power, extension cords, and assistants to pull it off. Now there are several systems (Radio Popper, Pocket Wizard, are two that come to mind) which allow the photographer to use their smaller shoe mounted flashes in ways that give the same effects as larger, studio type strobes.

All the images below are shot using some type of flash off the camera, and none of these images required an assistant, or more importantly, much more time to set up than any other wedding portrait I might shoot on any given weekend.

These next two are a good example. The first image is what you get with purely "available" or "natural" light. It isn't THAT bad, and could probably be saved with a lot of photoshop and post production work. However why risk being able to "save" an image when you can get it right the first time? So instead I had a couple of flash units "available" and added those into the mix in the 2nd shot.

This last one might not look like much, but when you combine an image with three dark complected gentlemen, in dark tuxedos, in a very, very, very dark chapel (First United Methodist Church, Evanston) with a really high ceiling that makes it very difficult to bounce anything off of, you're going to waste a lot of time waiting for your flash batteries to re-cycle. What's the easy solution....double your light using a 2nd flash, off camera. Double the output, keeps your recycle time down, fast portraits and onto the reception!