Chris and Adrienne Scott, Photographers | Nashville Wedding & Portrait Photographers

We’ve gotten a few questions about how to order an album, so I put together this quick tutorial for you. Sorry about the tiny size, the big version was taking too long to load, so I just posted this YouTube video for your quick reference. If you’ve got some extra time to wait for it, click here for the Gigantour Version.

Wanna see it bigger? Here’s the Gigantour Version – Ordering an Album.

chris.

Alright, so I’ve been thinking about posting this for a little while, but I’m not sure how many people will be interested, but oh well, here goes.

I got a question from a fellow photographer in the comments on the post from Kim and Alan’s wedding in Memphis a few weeks back and I sent back a beast of an email to answer her questions. In the email, I talk mostly about our thought process and the actual process of using multiple off-camera lights to light a first dance (or really anything else, you can just take these principles and apply it to anything), it’s the same process we use anytime we use off-camera lighting.  I’ve since gotten a few similar questions, so I just decided to post the email in it’s entirety as a blog post for the photo-geeks or those who may just be interested in seeing how much thought goes into some of what we do.

Just to be clear… I am, by no means, an authority on the subject of off-camera lighting and I don’t claim to be… I’m just a knucklehead who can make it do what I want it to on a pretty consistent basis.  You want some authorities?  You need to check out this guy, or these peoples.  You want “Off Camera Lighting Lite”?  Then read on.

If you plan to make it through the novel ahead, then you’ll probably want to check out the original post she’s referring to, which you can find here.

Here are Sarah’s original questions:

hey!
did you use any fill lights? like with the shots in the previous post, of the flowers in the vase and whatnot…? and the dancing couple above?
i struggle with my SB800…still trying to figure out how to make it give me the results i want.
how did you make use of the light and make it so crisp if you didnt use a tripod or anything? high iso and a decent shutter speed..?

also….tips on compensating for really sunny days?
(i just shot a couple of friends of mine as a test run and it was so bright out i ended up with a lot of harsh shadows)

And my reply (you’ll want to grab a snack right about now, then get comfy):

Sarah,
On the flowers in the vase, re: fill lights. I’m using a 580EX on camera, bounced off of the ceiling or the wall or whoever is standing next to me (just never pointed directly, unless I’m shooting dancing at a reception, then it’s direct).

The next one is going to be a beast of an answer, so get comfy.

The dancing couple in the post you commented on was lit with two lights, a B1600 over my right shoulder (lighting the near side of her face and his back) and a 580EX off camera (held by Adrienne, actually, behind and to the right of the groom (lighting the far side of her face).
The trick with off camera lighting is to really grasp that, for the most part, your shutter speed really only controls the amount of ambient light in your exposure, while the aperture controls the amount of flash. So, for example, with the first dance, here’s how I handle them.
We almost ALWAYS shoot first dances with this 2 light setup, a B1600 on a stand and Adrienne roaming with a 580EX. I’ll throw the light on the stand, then ask Dri to stand in the center of the dance floor. I’ll set my ISO to a nice number, usually anywhere between 100-400 depending on how close the light is to the dance floor (the closer the light, the lower the ISO I can get away with). From there, I start at my camera’s sync speed with the shutter speed, which happens to be around 1/200 on both the 5D and the 40D and I’ll set my aperture to around f/11 or so because I want to kill as much ambient as possible in the room and really only highlight the bride and groom. So then I just fire a test shot.
If the background looks too light, I’ll lower my ISO (because I’m already at a shutter speed of 200, my camera’s sync speed, anything faster and you’ll start to see the shutter in the frame, so since I can’t speed up the shutter speed, but I still want to take out ambient light, I need to bring my ISO down).
If the background is dark, but Adrienne is lit up like a christmas tree, then I’ll bring my aperture to maybe f/16 and fire off another shot (because my aperture controls the brightness of the flash on my subject).
If the background is dark, and so is Dri, then I bring the apterture to f/14, or f/11, or f/9… I just keep firing test shots and tweaking the aperture until I get some light that I’m happy with.
If the background is dark and Dri is well lit, then I’m golden and I’ll go get some water or a piece of cake. =)
So what happens if you’re at your max shutter speed, but your light looks perfect at f/16 on the subject and you’re already at your lowest ISO, and the background is too bright? Look at it by steps… you can’t speed up the shutter, you’re at 1/200. You can’t lower your ISO, you’re at 100. What you have to do in this case is to make your B800 brighter. So turn that bad boy up. Seems counterintuitive, I know, but trust me! So you just make your light brighter, now change your aperture to reflect that new brightness, maybe change it to f/22. So now you’re at f/22. That means that any ambient light in the room has to be as bright, or brighter, than f/22 (or as bright or brighter than your now cooking B800)… probably not gonna happen. You’ve effectively killed the ambient light in the room by making your light brighter and accommodating for it with your aperture, thus (yeah… thus, I went there) essentially filtering anything darker than f/22 out of your exposure.

This usually takes about 45 seconds, or 3-4 shots, to get the exposure nailed down.

So… that takes care of the light in the center of the dance floor… what happens when that couple goes crazy and starts dancing ALL over the dance floor? That’s when you ride your aperture… the closer they get to the light, the higher your aperture (the smaller the actual opening), and vice versa… I’ll just shoot and turn the back dial as I’m shooting, lowering the aperture as they move away, raising it as they come closer.

So now that we’ve gotten that light looking good, we add Adrienne’s 580EX. This one’s pretty easy. My go-to setting on the 580 is manual at 1/4 power. It’s a good starting point. Since she’s holding the light and obviously can’t stand at the center of the floor to test it out for me, this is done on the fly. I’ll start her at 1/4, then ask her to usually go to the position you see in the dancing picture you asked about. If the light is too bright, I ask her to back up (with slick baseball like handsignals… that are usually indecipherable…) or turn the power down on the light, if it’s too dark, I’ll ask her to turn it up, yada yada yada.

I’ve usually got her light looking good and balanced well with the B1600 within 2 shots or so, she’s really good at reading my mind and knowing what I want and what works by this point though, so your mileage may vary. We’re also constantly hand signaling and I’m always asking her to back up, move closer, point the light at their faces, physically raise the light, physically lower the light, raise the power, lower the power, etc. while the first dance/father-daughter dance/mother-son dance/dollar-dance/MC Hammer Dance is going on.

We mix things up by having her go directly behind the couple for a cool rim light, or just in the frame for some great lens flare (which you’ll usually get since you’ll be shooting at f/16 or higher-ish… higher aperture number for cooler lens flarey goodness). I usually get bored standing in one position, so I’ll move around the couple and shoot from Adrienne’s side… same concept still, but my lights are reversed, now my B1600 is the rim light and Adrienne is a walking, talking, hand-signaling main light (Here’s an example of what that looks like) You can get a bajillion different looks from just these two lights. I don’t know why I just thought of this, but I guess it’s good for you to know also that all of these lights are triggered with Pocketwizards, so no cables or anything, just some radio slaves.

So that covers that. Geez… that looks like a lot of words and numbers… ugh, it’s like algebra… letters should never be combined with numbers.

So I just realized I still didn’t answer a couple of questions. On the crisp w/o a tripod. It’s definitely not a high ISO (remember, I’m at 100-400), it’s just a crap-ton of light. You turn on the B800 at full power and it’ll cook something, it’ll also stop action really really effectively in camera. In fact, you don’t need a high shutter speed either, just a lot of light. For example, the shot of the groom doing the worm (bottom right of the dancin’ shots) was shot at ISO 400, f/8 with a shutter speed of 1/20th of a second. Yeah… 1/20th… handheld. I’m not a rock. There was just a TON of light in there. So think of it this way; at f/8 (it was reeeeeally dark in there) there was VERY little ambient light in the room. So if I took at shot with no flash, it would pick up next to nothing on the sensor, even at a shutter speed of 1/20th of a second (did I mention it was REEEEALLY dark?). You can see this in the background of the shot of the worm, see how dark it is where the flash is not hitting? So if I set my shutter speed to 1/20th at f/8 and there’s nothing getting picked up by the sensor, what happens if I pop a bright flash into that shot at, say, the speed of light, at a power setting equal to exactly f/8? What happens is you’ll see what is happening right in front of that flash at the exact time that flash went off. When the flash ends (extremely soon after), you’re back to f/8 with very little ambient, so it doesn’t pick up anything on the sensor. So what you end up with is a very dark background, and one very quick instant frozen on the sensor when that flash fired. No high ISO needed, no fast shutter speed. Just a dark room and a bright flash. In fact, in that worm shot, you can see that there was a little bit of ambient getting in because you can see a little bit of a trail of his right arm moving, that’s where he moved outside of the time the flash was on, but when the shutter was still open.
So another practical application of this is to use a super slow shutter speed and a bright light to freeze your subject, but funkify your background… if you use a shutter speed of around 1/20th, with a flash on camera set to ETTL, you can press the shutter button and spin your camera (or zoom in or out, they all look cool), the ambient light in the background will blur and look all funky because it’s not being hit with the flash and is therefore not affected by the flash, while your subject’s motion will freeze. I just searched forever on the blog (back to May of last year) and I don’t have a SINGLE shot showing this (edit: the “Happy Birthday Adrienne” picture is all shutter draggy goodness), so I’ll attach one (edit: no I won’t… go see the Happy Birthday Adrienne post). It’s called flash drag, or shutter drag and it’s pretty cool for a few shots, then it just gets obnoxious. So give it a try, but use it sparingly.

Ok, what else was there….?

Compensating for super sunny days. This one’s easy, really. Don’t go outside, it’s too hot.

Ok, so you have to go outside. These are going to sound like cop-out answers, but they’re the go-to answers.

1. Try to schedule your shoot during sunrise or sunset or about an hour around them. Direct, low (on the horizon, that is) light is much better than direct, high (over head) light.
2. Find shade. Shoot under trees, in doorways, in parking garages… find a place that has shade, but is still allowing a good amount of that sunlight in. There is a good spot of shade on one side of any building in any country around the world at some point in the day (except for high noon… suggest going to get a glass of sweet tea at high noon, then find that shady side of the building after you’ve enjoyed a glass of sweet tea and the sun has moved a little).
3. Put the sun to their backs. You’re going to need to bump your exposure up until it looks like the shot’s going to be super overexposed in order to light the dark side of their body, but you can put the sun to their backs and blow out the background.
4. Put the sun straight on their faces. This works but makes for very unhappy, very blind clients. This is good for a few shots though because when you get the exposure right on their sunlit face, it’ll also be pretty close to correct for a super blue sky (like this shot at the God-only-knows-why-there’s-a-full-size-replica-of-the-Parthenon-in-the-middle-of-downtown-Nashville). Full disclosure though, there’s been some photo-shoppery done to that shot, but you get the point.
5. Use a reflector. I have a little 5-in-1 reflector that works well, just bounce some of that sun up onto the subject and go to town.
6. Use the force. Or a flash if you don’t have the force. This shot was done with the sun hitting one side of her, and a flash (gelled orange to match the color temp) hitting the other side and you really can’t tell too much.
7. Use the sun for good and not for evil. Break some rules. Put the sun in your shot and get funky. I’m a big fan of funky. Here are some funky for you (here, here, and the super-funky one here), all have the sun in the frame (this is where it’s good to remember that high aperture again, try anything higher than f/22 or so and you should start seeing some flare in there, especially if you just let the sun peek around the edge of something instead of putting the whole thing in there).

Ok, so this was the longest email known to man. I hope this stuff helps you out, lemme know if you have any other questions. In the meantime, I ******HIGHLY******* suggest you go to www.strobist.com and memorize every golden word that comes off of the tips of David Hobby’s fingers. He is the be-all-end-all at off camera lighting and everything I’ve learned I’ve learned from his site. If you’ve got the dough, pick up his DVD set, you’ll be a MUCH better photographer for it. Seriously, go check out the site, it’s the most comprehensive site on lighting, taught by someone who knows how to explain things… it’s amazing, really.

Alright, back to work. I’ll let you know when I post the blog on lighting… or you can just keep blog stalking and you’ll see it. =)

Hope all is well!
chris.

Did you make it this far? Any questions? Put ‘em in the comments.