Rangefinder - September 2014

Challenge #3

OUTDOOR PORTRAIT OF BRIDE AND GROOM

This couple got married in City Hall Park
in Manhattan. They were having a small
dinner for family afterward, but it was at a
restaurant during normal business hours,
so there really wasn’t an interior venue
that we could fall back on for portraits
inside. Aside from that, it’s New York, and
the couple really wanted night shots of
the two of them that represented the city;

shooting outside was a must. There was some natural, found ambient lighting in the form of street lamps on the sidewalk, so we mimicked those lights in a way that the viewer could argue that the couple was only lit by a street lamp.

SETUP AND EQUIPMENT

We used the Profoto RFi 1.3x2 softbox on a stand with the SB900 behind it fired by Pocket Wizards held by Justin as he walked a few steps ahead of the couple just outside of the frame on the right. We liked using the smaller softbox for this setup for a couple of reasons: one, the smaller light source felt more like a street lamp and two, it was more mobile and easier to carry for longer amounts of time up and down the stairs. Also, the softbox is a lot less likely to fall over outside because of wind.

Lens: 50mm 1. 4 | Shutter speed: 1/100
F-stop: f/1.4 | ISO: 1600
EXTRAS

We gelled the flash CTO to match the street lamps and then used a slower shutter speed to allow that ambient light to fill in and make it feel more believable that they were just hanging out in found light versus, “Hey, look what the photographer did.” We liked that the slower shutter speed also gave us some very slight motion blur to feel the movement of them going up the stairs, but if you wanted to avoid that, shooting at 1/125 of a second would probably be more ideal. Because the flash and the street lamps were roughly the same color, we could white balance to taste, but we still decided to keep it pretty warm, as a street lamp would feel. Because the flash was pretty close to them (just outside of the frame on the right) and we were working with a pretty high ISO, we really only needed just a wink of light (1/64 or 1/128