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
power would probably do). Keeping the
flash power low also helped in making the
shot feel more natural.
dark venues