Rangefinder - September 2014

Challenge #2

INDOOR BRIDAL PARTY GROUP SHOT

This bride had been following our work and specifically requested that we do a Vanity Fair-esque portrait of her bridal party inside this stone mansion (the Branford House in Groton, Connecticut, where we ourselves got married!). She even rented the green settee and had it brought in for this picture.

The dark walls and smaller windows
make everything even darker, and on top
of that, the wedding took place in the dead
of winter when it gets dark early. The other
part of this challenge, of course, was getting
even, but still interesting (dimensional and
dynamic) light across a group this big.

SETUP AND EQUIPMENT

We shot this with the 5-foot Profoto Octa and a D1 behind it, with light coming in from the right side and slightly forward, and a white reflector on a stand on the left side to help kick some light back onto to that far side. (If we were to shoot this same portrait today, we would definitely use the B1, so we don’t have to plug it in, paired with the Profoto XL white 65-inch umbrella.)

Lens: 50mm | Shutter speed: 1/80
F-stop: f/4.5 | ISO: 250
EXTRAS

We used a slower shutter speed to allow some of the warm ambient light in from the chandelier so that the light felt more found and natural. To make sure we didn’t end up with mixed light, Justin put tungsten gel on the D1. Because we were using the D1 and air remote, we had plenty of power even though this was a larger group and our aperture was stopped down to f/4.5. By bringing the light around more to the front (somewhere around a 45-degree angle) we were able to get a more even spread of light across the group and we also made sure that we weren’t casting shadows from one person’s head onto the next person’s face.