I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about this image from people that want to know what I did to catch such a lucky break on the lighting. Well, it wasn’t pure luck. But I did take some steps to ensure that I’d get lucky! This setup is typical of my reception lighting in that it uses two lights. One is a small lighsource (a Q-flash behind the couple used as a backlight) and a very large, broad lightsource as a main light (my on-camera EX-580 pointed at the wall to my rear-left).

Click for larger version

The Q-flash was set to 1/16 power and my on-camera flash was set to 1/8 power. I got those numbers by doing a little testing with an assistant before the reception started. I wanted the backlight to be very subtle and just give a little separation between the couple and the background. I know that a lot of guys will advocate using the equipment’s automatic settings and I do when the situation is right. But in this case, with multiple lights, I didn’t want the camera’s meter to be fooled by any light spilling over from the Q-flash.

My camera was set to ISO 800, f4.0 @ 1/60 second to catch some ambient light. Here is my original image.

And here it is with a slight temperature adjustment, a little corner-burning and a curves adjustment.

Next time we’ll look into a really quick way to use multiple lights to make the rest of the reception really pop! Oh, and special thanks to Kevin Kertz for putting together the cool, layered Photoshop lighting diagram that he allows anyone to use for free.

Tags: lighting, tutorial

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.