When you walk into any reception, you need to quickly assess the situation, make a decision on HOW you are going to light it, and then set up your gear (oh yeah, and take amazing images!). It can be super fast-paced at that moment, and can cause some anxiety each time you shoot a wedding.
2. We also always ask the bride and groom to give us 10 minutes from the time we all arrive at the reception to when they come into the hall. This gives us the time to assess the room, set up our gear, and take a few test shots. That way we never miss a key shot that is happening with our clients!
The other huge problem that you run into at wedding receptions is getting great quality light on your subject with off-camera flash.Sometimes we can simply bounce flash and that is awesome when we can do it. But other times the room just does not allow that, so we need to use off-camera flash AND make it look good.
How do we do that?
1. Modify the light.
We try and 45 degree light or “short-light” our clients whenever possible. This is simply shooting the light in from the side, and then photographing the image from the shadow side to create that highlight and shadow on the face. When you couple a great light modifer, with a great lighting pattern, and then blend the ambient and flash power just right (which is easy to do) you get stunning images!
The third problem we always ran into at receptions was when we were doing off-camera flash shots, we sometimes needed to shoot a quick shot somewhere else that was not set for our off-camera rig. We would then have to take our transmitter off of our camera, run and grab our speedlite and throw it back on the camera, and then try and get the shot.A Better Solution
We realized this was not a good way to shoot in a high-paced environment, so instead we ALWAYS keep a speedlite on our camera even when doing off-camera flash.
How To Learn More
Just a quick reminder: in just a few hours (at 11:59 p.m. Pacific), the early bird extended pricing for our brand-new Reception Lighting video workshop is expiring (increasing by $100).
And like everything we do, this comes with a money-back guarantee. If you buy the DVD (or one of our special launch packages), follow what we teach, and within 30 days don’t get better results than you’ve been getting, we’ll give you your money back!