Positioning your Lights!

Lighting creates a mood when it’s done well. It is incredibly important to any images, but especially wedding photography. Whether the ceremony is taking place indoors or outdoors, it’s crucial to ensure that you have good quality lighting in order to take the best possible photographs. Whether you’re a professional photographer or not – you need to take a good look at the venue prior to the ceremony to find out how much additional lighting equipment will be needed, as well as what type. This will ensure that the photos turn out great. With wedding photography, there are inevitable time constraints. It is therefore imperative that you, as the wedding photographer, are able to keep everything running as smoothly as possible on your side, which implies that it is important that you (and your equipment) are adaptable. And it is also important that your gear is easy to set up, and very reliable. While setting up the lighting for wedding formals in the halls, the question often crops up – where do you place the lights?

While shooting these images, the concept is quite challenging. It is practically impossible to shoot using ambient light. The use of an external flash here will ensure that your subjects are correctly exposed. To prevent harsh shadows being cast behind your subject, you should – at all times – avoid pointing the flash directly at them.

Here, to give a live kick to the background, we positioned the Ranger Quadra hybrid behind the subject. This battery flash system is compact, lightweight and it supports full power flash duration's as short as 1/6000, and recycle times as short as 2s. This helped us in highlighting the whole background. Further, for highlighting the subject, we arranged the light setup in front using ELC pro HD 500 a compact studio flash with the bounce light. The distance was approximately 5 to 6 feet between the subject and light. The closer you bring the light, the greater is the risk of having the light fall from too steep an angle and creating shadowed eyes. This flash was used to fill up the dark place and bounce light to ensure that there is no lens flare. For enhancing the soft and warm effect, we have used the Lightbank Octa 190 cm. Likewise, you can conceptualise and use your imagination any way you want. After all, getting the right frame and taking a good picture is what drives you.