Pixiq

This guest post is by Christopher Lin who is the editor of a photography tutorials website called SLR Lounge, and also the creator of photography products, for Undfind LLC.

There are a whole lot of wedding photographers out there. From your uncle Bob’s with nice cameras to your seasoned professionals with years of experience, everyone seems to be getting into the game these days. It’s no longer enough to be good at what you do, to be consistent in your business practices and product delivery, or to be a great sales person for your services. Now more than ever, it’s important to develop techniques that help differentiate your studio and provide imagery that’s not easily duplicated.

One way to differentiate your studio is to experiment with creative flash photography. Yes, portraits and lifestyle shots are easier when you have the perfect directional lighting, but there are a few pitfalls to relying solely on this. First off, the market is saturated with these types of wedding photographers. Secondly, you’re placing the control of the quality of your photography into the hands of external factors. What if it’s cloudy and there is less light than you expected? What if it’s getting darker earlier than you expected? Knowledge of nighttime flash photography can open up a world of possibilities and give you complete control of your surroundings. In the following article, we’ll go over the basic instructions for getting the following image.

General description of shot, setup and desired effects

In this image, our goals are to properly expose the beautiful city backdrop, create a hair light for our subjects so that there is some separation between the subjects and their background, and obviously expose our subjects properly in a flattering and intimate pose. To achieve this, we have one flash directly behind our subjects and a video light directly in front of our subjects. The light from the back serves as a hair light, while the video light is our main light. Now that you have the general gist of what we’re doing, let’s get into the specifics.

Specific Information and explanations

Location: La Venta Inn Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

Time of Day: 10pm in June

Camera: 5D Mark II – While we used a professional 5D Mark II, the same type of image should be achievable with any SLR with good ISO performance.

Shutter Speed: 1/15th – You’re going to have to slow down your shutters to bring out your subjects. Afraid of camera shake (blur)? Make sure you have a tripod with you. If your camera doesn’t have very good ISO performance, you can still get a good shot but you may have to decrease your ISO and decrease the shutter speed.

Another tip is that you should take a series of shots. You never know if your subjects are moving slightly at such slow shutters, so spamming the trigger for a few captures will ensure that one is crisp.

F Stop: F2.0 – That bokeh in the background creates a canvas-like, surreal effect at such a low aperture. Going below 2.0 is great as well if you can get your focus spot on and produce a tack sharp image. However, with a background as far away as it is in this image, F2.0 was the right aperture to achieve our desired effect.

ISO: 1600 – ISO 1600 and even ISO 3200 on the Mark II can be fixed pretty easily in Lightroom 3.0; but it’s important that the image is properly exposed. If you have to brighten any part of the image, you might have some grain issues. The high ISO helps bring out the background and ensure that the city lights are big and bright.

Lens: Canon 50mm F1.4 – This is by no means the only lens to use in this situation and it will depend greatly on your preference for the crop and the bokeh; but this is a great lens with great flexibility.

Flash and lighting Equipment: 1 Nikon SB 24, 3 pocketwizards, 1 Video Light – You can use any external flash system that you prefer, but the Nikon SB 24s are our preference for their low cost and consistency with Pocket Wizards. Place the flash 5 feet from your subjects; and take the flash power low to 1/16 or 1/32. An overpowering flash will wrap around your subjects and create strange highlights. The hairlight is a subtle but important aspect of the image. You can still expose your subjects properly with just the video light, but the hair light gives the image that extra dimension.

Here are a couple of other photographs that use the same concepts. If you would like to see more examples, feel free to check out our wedding photography blog.

We hope you learned a few things from this article; and we always welcome comments and critique on our work.