OVERCOMING DARK VENUES
Lighting
Six low-light wedding scenarios with easy-to-follow solutions.
Challenge #1
THE INDOOR PORTRAIT
Sometimes shooting outside isn’t an option
and you have to find a way to make the portraits work inside. There was a small room at
this venue in Connecticut that was used for
both cocktail hour and as a dessert room
after dinner. We had a short window of time
in which the room was empty of both people
and tables full of desserts. We set up a gray
backdrop—that took about 10 minutes—
then we shot with the couple for 10 minutes
(together and alone), and the breakdown was
about 5 minutes. If you don’t have or want
a backdrop, look for a plain wall to shoot
in front of. The venue itself was super dark
inside, so all of the light had to come from the
gear we had with us.
SETUP AND EQUIPMENT
Normally we bring our smaller one-light
setup of a Profoto B1 behind a 42-inch
white shoot-through umbrella, but because
we knew we had a room to ourselves, we
went ahead and broke out the big guns: a
5-foot Profoto Octa softbox coming in from
the left and slightly above paired with a D1
Air 500 head (the B1 hadn’t come out yet).
We also used a white reflector to fill in the
shadows on the right-hand side. Going
with the larger light gave us that resulting
painterly-looking portrait.
Lens: 50mm | Shutter speed: 1/200
F-stop: f/2.5 | ISO: 100
EXTRAS
There was some tungsten overhead lighting
in the room that we wanted to diminish and
used our shutter speed to do so. We then
further compensated by raising the power on
our D1 with the air remote.
the how-to issue
BY JUSTIN & MARY MARANTZ