Gear Talk > Lighting

Multiple Flashes During Wedding Ceremony

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brianleighty:
I currently shoot with a single 430 or 580 flash during wedding ceremony's. For the stuff closer up where I can bounce it up it's pretty decent but for longer distance shots where I have it running straight through a gary fong lightsphere to soften it up some but still straight at them it's not as nice an effect. I've been thinking of getting a third flash (we shoot with 2 cameras) and I'm wondering if it would be weird to have another slave flash off camera just bringing up the ambient light in the room or if that's too distracting. Anybody have thoughts on this or done something like that before?

wickidwombat:
i have 6, I've shot with them all remote on stand with shoot throughs to balance the light because the ceremony was held under super crappy dappled light from a thick canopy of trees so i set the flashes up to light the shadows to equal the hot spots from the dappled light and exposed for the background letting the flash deal with lighting the people perfectly i just set them all up so i had total coverage and then i could move freely and shoot from anywhere knowing i would get light

brianleighty:
Good to know. I wasn't sure if it would be annoying to people but people do tend to like getting married in really dark places and while I'm working on getting better with larger aperture lenses, I think it looks very amateurish if you have a very narrow depth of field and it doesn't have the right part of the picture in focus so I'd rather use flashes until I get there to provide enough light. wickidwombat, what did you use for triggering the flashes? Did you shoot in manual or ttl?

wickidwombat:

--- Quote from: brianleighty on July 15, 2012, 09:28:46 PM ---Good to know. I wasn't sure if it would be annoying to people but people do tend to like getting married in really dark places and while I'm working on getting better with larger aperture lenses, I think it looks very amateurish if you have a very narrow depth of field and it doesn't have the right part of the picture in focus so I'd rather use flashes until I get there to provide enough light. wickidwombat, what did you use for triggering the flashes? Did you shoot in manual or ttl?

--- End quote ---

at the time i just used ebay poverty wizard radio triggers and had the flash in manual
, I have odins now which are much more reliable and can use ETTL however i find for covering a large area its still better to set it to manual and move the flashes around to suit, since the subjects are stationary during the ceremony you want them to be lit consistantly even if you are moving around and ETTL will adjust sometimes whn you dont want it to.

this technique was fine outdoors under the trees however I'm not sure how people would be with satuartion bombing like this in a church.

I just had the flashes on manual and got my assistant to stand in the relevant places while i checked exposure was all ok, maybe took 10 mins to set it up i have external battery packs on all the flashes too to make sure they could keep up

brianleighty:
Thanks for the info wickidwombat. The one thing I've always wondered with shooting manual is how you handle changes in light. Are you having to just manually adjust it as you go? If I setup a manual flash then I theoretically have to either shoot in manual mode on the camera as well or dial in an exposure compensation equivalent to what the flash will fire during the exposure.

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