Rangefinder - September 2014

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.