After we had shot their portraits and after the wedding ceremony was over, Matthew and Taylor wanted a few shots in one of their favorite spots in town, the Nashville walking bridge. This location was tough to shoot at because it was freezing cold (24 degrees out!), has cool light on the bridge, but no lights on our couple, AND had the potential to look less than dramatic if not shot right. So we made sure to bring our Elinchrom Quadra lighting rig (our gear list can be downloaded HERE) with our new Elinchrom Deep Octa 39 to rock this out!

This is the before..

Here, in this natural lit photo above, you can see just how awful the existing light was. The lighting is flat, has no (good) contrast on it, and their eyes are dark from the direction of the light. This image was also shot at ISO 6400 at 1/60th of second, and the noise is getting pretty bad. The color tone of these lights cast a purple hue, and the light on their faces is not super flattering or awesome looking! But, the great thing about bringing your own light, is you can add it anywhere that you want to make it look awesome!

The other problem that we ran into, was as we rushed out to get set-up so the bride would not freeze, we forgot our light meter! Without the light meter, we have no way to tell how bright our strobe is, so we had to improvise and make it happen on the spot!

Here is how we did it.

We positioned our light to camera right about 30 degrees which gave us a really nice highlight and shadow on each side of our clients faces. Any further than 30 degrees or so, and we would run the risk of having a shadow cast from the bride’s face onto the groom’s face, which is not pleasant. So when doing your own shoots, watch when you have the light off to one side with two people so that the light does not cast a nasty shadow on the person further away from the light.

Since I did not have a light meter, what I did was use the in-camera meter as a starting point and set my ISO, F-Stop and shutter speed so that if I took an image, everything in the background of my subject would be exactly one stop under-exposed (or a little bit too dark) by having my in-camera meter read minus 1.  We set our camera like this because ultimately we want the background a bit darker than our subject once we have the strobe on. In this particular case, with this very low light situation, that reading (the background being one stop under-exposed) came out to be:

ISO 400

f/1.8

1/100th of a second

When I took an image at these settings, the background lights were all visible, but not overly bright. Perfect! I also checked my histogram after determining my under-exposure of the background lights, and the histogram confirmed that everything was a little too dark. It looked like this (the dark side of the histogram on Canon is to the left).

So you can see that by using the in-camera meter to start, then checking it on the histogram, we get the result we want which is simply a background that is slightly too dark.

Now, all we have to do is fill in the gap with the strobe! We need the strobe to fire at the same brightness as our under-exposed background which would give a perfect exposure on our subjects. If we had the light meter, all we would need to do is power the light up or down until the meter read what our camera reads (ISO 400, f/1.8 at 1/100th of a second). But since we did not have the light meter, and the in-camera meter can’t read manual flash, the only thing left to do was use the histogram as our guide.

So, we powered the strobe down very low (to about 15 watt seconds) since the ambient light was very low, and simply took a shot, then checked to see if the histogram went up or stayed the same. If it had stayed the same, we would know that the flash is not bright enough to make the correct exposure, then we would simply power the strobe up. If we took the shot, checked the histogram and the histogram looked like this:

We would immediately know that the flash was too bright. As long as the ambient light has not changed and the only thing we are adding is the flash, we know that the flash (and what it is hitting) is what is changing the histogram and in this case, there is too much flash and the subject will be over-exposed. So we can then power the strobe down until the histogram just barely hits the side wall of over-exposure (on Canon, this is the right wall) and then we have a perfectly exposed shot.

So we then powered the strobe down slightly until the histogram looked like the one above. This histogram is just to the edge of the right side (on Canon, that is the bright side) which means our flash is lighting up our subject and they are just to the edge of being over-exposed, but are perfectly lit the way we want. Bam! We are ready to shoot away!!

Final image shot at ISO 400, f/1.8, 1/100th of a second. Minor editing of the RAW image in Lightroom 3 (turned back into a JPG).

That is how we did this shot with no light meter on the fly! Set up time was maybe 30 seconds! :)

Ready to come out with us and do this on-location with real models and learn how to master this system yourself?? Click HERE to sign up for our IN-CAMERA workshops spring tour!

Happy shooting!

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Our creativeLIVE Wedding Photography Weekend is coming January 27-29, 2012! Mark your calendars NOW and register for the FREE online workshop. As always on creativeLIVE, during the live event you can participate from your living room by watching the live feed online. You’ll be part of a global classroom with photographers watching and asking us questions from every continent. If you want to own the 3-day workshop to replay over and over, the HD videos are available for purchase and download.

It gets better! We are inviting YOU to submit a video for the opportunity to join us in Seattle for this jam-packed weekend. Grab your iPhone, webcam or DSLR and tell us why you’d love to join us in person during our creativeLIVE event. What do you need to do?:

1. Record a video (60′ish seconds) saying why you want to join Zach and Jody in Seattle.
2. Post that video to your Blog, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Etc.
3. Tweet the video’s URL to @creativeLIVE and include #ZachJodyLIVE

Need inspiration to put yourself out there with a video? There are in-person alumni who share stories about how participating in a creativeLIVE workshop in Seattle has changed their businesses and their lives on the creativeLIVE blog! Just do it!

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We headed out behind our home in the worst lighting conditions you can image, with the sun beating down right on top of us. We love to start off shooting back here because there is not a lot of places to hid from the sun, so just like when you are shooting a wedding, you have to be able to rock out the portraits of your couple no matter what situation you are handed.

We looked for a decent composition and a place where we could use the sun to light our subject, set our camera to AV (an auto mode) and took a shot with the sun coming in at the best position possible. As you can see, the shot is super contrasty, specular, and the color (which was set to auto white balance) is pretty much awful!

So the first thing we did was add some diffusion using the Westcott Illuminator to soften up the light on our model, Ellie. That diffusion panel pops open to 72 inches tall so that you can diffuse 2 people full-body in direct sun!

This, as you can see, really helped bring the contrast under control, but we still have some overly deep shadows and the color is still really rough. Now, we could just do some photoshop on the image later, open up the shadows and fix the color, but that takes lots of time and as a pro shooter, time is all you have left and there is not a lot of it!

So, for the final shot, we added a reflector on the shadow side of our model (camera left) and then had Ellie turn toward that light (which became our new main light). Then, we took all of 2 seconds to grab our custom white balance using the Expo Disk and apply it to the scene, then took another image.

In this final shot below, you can see what an amazing difference controling the light makes! Once we had this set, we could shoot away and get most of the images that we needed for a few minute portrait session of a couple during the wedding day.

After doing the demo, we headed out around the area behind our place to utilize all types of different lighting techniques to tame the sun. We diffused light, reflected it, looked for good light and shot in a array of different situations to show what you can do with one or two simple lighting modifiers.

In this shot below, we found a really cool location that was shaded from the sun and took advantage of the cool composition of the area. There was some sun bouncing off of the white walls just to camera-right shooting some light into this spot. So, we added a tad more light with a reflector and shot it at a really shallow depth of field to make the background more interesting.

You can see here from the behind the scenes shot, that we were shooting the above image in between a trailer home! It’s amazing what kind of shots you can do with some great light and a good composition!

For the shot below, we simply used the gold side of our reflector to bounce sunlight onto our model, then, once we set the white balance for that orange colored light, the background shadows will then turn blue! Pretty cool and no added color or Photoshop tricks! All shot in-camera!

Finally, after 3 hours of shooting, the sun got down low enough to create some really awesome natural light so we did not have to add much to make the next few shots really pop!

After the shoot time we headed back for a 2.5 hours session where we went through all the images, showed them our complete workflow system where we can edit 3,000 images in under 5 hours, and finished the day without anyone passing out! It was great! This was an amazing day with tons of awesome photographers and we had such a blast with them all! Can’t wait to connect with more of you in our exclusive Facebook group and see more of your images!!

Stay tuned for the re-cap of our Lighting workshop! If you are interested in making it out to one of our workshops, then click HERE, our next one will be in San Diego, then London, England all in November!

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We also got into gear, how to shoot strobe with what you already have, and how to get into gear that will stop the sun in its tracks!

This first shot, which was actually the last shot we took, was one that we did indoors with just one off-camera light. This image is right out of camera with a custom black and white conversion. There is no skin retouching done, because the way we lit the shot really makes everything look sleek and smooth!

Here we were demoing a new umbrella that just came out from Westcott Lighting. This $99 umbrella pops open to become a 7 foot parobolic shoot through modifier and you can use it with a 580 flash, or a high powered strobe. It makes for some AWESOME light anywhere!

This above shot was taken with that GIANT 7 foot umbrella and you can see how well it lights the image. Awesome!

After the workshop, we all headed back for a toast to our new-found lighting knowledge. It was soooo fun to do this and then grab some dinner and all hang out and talk about the shoot! We had such a blast with everyone who came out and can’t wait for the next series of workshops here in Nashville!!

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