Just got done a really fun shoot with Béke Beau and Dar Clinton where we had beautiful, late afternoon sunshine streaming through the studio windows … for about 6 straight hours! “Joe, surely you jest! Even we folks in Southern California never get that kind of sun!” Well, we sure don’t, either. As a matter of fact, there is still a foot of snow on the ground and no sun to be had at any time today. However, with the help of a couple Speedotron power packs and some ingenuity …

I already have windows in my studio but the sun rarely comes in and certainly not today. So I went outside with my Speedo, er, Speedotron 2403 power pack and a 2400 ws head and blasted it at full power toward the studio windows. I jacked the pack and the ends of the power cords up off the snow with a crate and packed snow around the light stand for stability.

Here is a view looking toward the windows. I moved the light source several times before I got the effect I was looking for.

Meanwhile, back inside I shot tests to work out my camera position and where the light fell to tune in everything.

My modeling light was useless with so much ambient light so I placed Stephanie into the scene to further fine tune the angle of the light. This shot revealed shadows falling right across her face so it was back into the snow to move the strobe.

Success! Now I have plenty of time to scrutinize while the models are getting hair and make-up.

Turns out that the shadow side was getting a little lost so I added another strobe to the right of the set with a Photoflex half-dome and a grid attachment to control spill.

I had the main light set to full power while the kicker with a grid was set as low as it would go since it was so close. This allowed me to shoot at 1/125 sec at f5.6-1/3. I warmed things up in-camera by manually setting the white balance to 7600K.

Use Smart Objects and Layer Masks to produce a light painting effect in Photoshop.

Shooting RAW has gotten me out of trouble on many occasions. This is one of those times. I love this photo but the bright lamp on the right draws my eye away from Carrie. Here’s how I fixed it quickly and easily using Smart Objects and a layer mask in Photoshop.

I use Photoshop heavily in my album design work and am always on the lookout for shortcuts to speed up mind-numbingly repetitive tasks and let me spend more time being creative.

This tutorial uses a much-misunderstood feature called Smart Objects. Not since the Pen Tool have Photoshop users been so scared! But fear not. Smart Objects are your friends. So just click here to start!

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.

This is the first of hopefully many more cool tutorials I’m doing to help out photographers everywhere. Yeah, tons of Photoshop tutorials abound on the Internet but not enough focus specifically on wedding photography. Although I may do more in the future that don’t apply so closely to the industry, they’re FREE so you can pick and choose the ones you think will help you.

This tutorial is the Glowing Skin tutorial. Even though every bride is awesome from the get-go, this effect will make your albums really pop. So just click here to start!