Make Light Real

Neil September 17th, 2008

Let me just show you a big, bold wedding ceremony entrance:

Read more to think outside the box in lighting large spaces for maximum creative impact…

This wedding is taking place in Founder’s Hall at the Milton Hershey School, which is providing the extraordinary ceremony entrance for Elizabeth.  The lighting I created is what’s allowing me to take such a dramatic, regal, and poignant capture at the moment her husband Scott looks up to see her for the first time!  I work as a wedding photojournalist, but I want to go beyond my client’s experiences to create pieces of art that fully describe those important moments in their lives with the frozen time power of the camera.  Notice the details in this image which was shot with my Canon 1Ds MarkII with a 50mm lens - so there’s no wide angle distortion of the height here.  You can see the individual expressions of the bridesmaids, you can see the guest holding out their point and shoot camera to capture the bride; but only my shot captures the whole space with a pleasing illumination helping to define all these elements.

Are you asking if this is natural light?

It is in-fact strobe.  Not something a little strobist could produce, but stadium sized strobe lighting. Here’s what the scene looks like without strobe:

Here is just a split second later (litterally two frames) where I had depleted the charge of the flash units by shooting continuous frames.  Ok, ok, that’s not totally fair cause I didn’t white balance it….let me give you a white balanced view just to be absolutely fair - I’ll even size it the same.

My raw file tells me I shot at 1/200th of a second @ f/2.8 with an iso of 500.

In my highlighted image you can see leftward leaning shadows from the marble pillars, but wouldn’t you rather have than then the backlit shot?

Make Light Real - is a process that can guide you to realizing your creative vision, whether it be in a enormous vault of a room like founder’s hall, or in a tiny sitting room.  Let’s talk about how the light is real, after we see a few more of the impossible without it pictures:

With strobe above ^ without strobe below V

The slight amount of direct light from the strobe hitting the side of the bride’s face cast’s a weak sharp shadow, and overall helps to sharpen the image.  Sharpening in the image isn’t just something you do in post production.  Here are a couple of my highlight images from the wedding:

I added a little atmospheric lighting affect with photoshop.

Here’s an emotional look at the bride from between the groomsmen’s shoulders and some darkening from my veritas vignette overlays.  All the contrast and wonderful shaping of the face is a result of my lighting setup, and balance of the strobe with the ambient.

Let me give you one more comparison that uses an isle shot to give you a look at how my lighting approach allows me to shoot in otherwise extremely difficult positions.

The bride received this shot in B+W and here it is.  Because I am using lighting off axis to my camera, I am able to shoot through the guests to reach my focal plane to the ring bearer and flower girl telling the full story of them coming down the isle.  Without the strobe illumination, I would be getting an overpowering flare from the outside light coming through the glass doors.

Shooting faster than my flashes can recycle I am proud to show you what it would look like without flash illumination.  You can certainly lighten it, but without the light getting into the eyes, and shaping the face and body, you’re just lightening a soft and flat photo.

Here now a couple more steps down the isle, you can see the flash illumination from the side, and the overall ambient is brought up to the shutter speed and low ISO of the camera settings.  If you were limited to using an on-camera flash, you would have two white heads in the foreground and two large shadows on the children.  If you tried to bounce, you’d be thinking - where’d that light go? - cause this is the size of the room!

I couldn’t find the stated height of the dome, but it stands about 4 stories tall.

So we’re talking about lighting a working space two stories tall, and probably 40-45 meters wide.  We know that the bride is coming out the doors on the second story to overlook the ceremony before descending to walk the isle - a very dramatic choice and one we want to help illustrate in our pictures.  Here’s a quick look at the finished setup of my lights and then I’ll talk about how I got to that setup.

Yep, three monolights!  Two Alien Bee 800Watt units, One Photogenic 400Watt monolight.  The alien bee units have the 11inch dish reflector on them, the Photogenic has the standard 7inch reflector.  Each unit is at 1/4 power.  We’ll refer to them from right to left AB1, AB2, and PG3.  Let me give you a 4 shot walkthrough of the whole space so you can how the light is filling the space.  

Starting from the right with the lights in the frame

Here you can see where the focus of my light is collecting on the domed ceiling.

Creative balance is the path to Making Light Real

That is why we study the Tao

So back to the lights PG3 was the ’sparkle’ light - it was set to point directly at my subjects, albiet at a lower power, but that small amount of direct, hard-light provides a giant increase in perceived sharpness.  If you would like to understand the effect find yourself some deep shade and set your exposure to be accurate, then add just a light touch of hard light source (like a small shoe flash) at -2 or -1 to the exposure.  It’s very important that the amount of light you add doesn’t change the exposure.  Notice it in small details,the way hair or skin texture is rendered.

Deeper perception leads to greater creation.

Ok, so the challenge was to use the Alien Bees to give me a very soft(in quality of the light) boost in my ambient light quantity.  To do that I must transfer the source of the lighting from a small one at the strobe head to a large one - like a three story dome, if I only had a perfect dome the size of the room.  Oh wait - I do.  Yea so pushing the light into the far side of the room to provide a balanced exposure was the goal.  The Alien Bee 11 inch reflector is the perfect tool for the job because it is highly efficient, no light power is lost, and it throws the light out in a gentle cone so that no direct light falls on the ceremony location because that would completely throw off the balance and quality of the light.  AB1 is covering the walls and ceiling to the back of the room, opposite the balcony and ceremony.  AB2 is throwing it’s light up and over to the dome top and left side of the balcony.  The Alien Bees are putting out roughly 16x more light than the Photogenic to fill the entire auditorium with an extremely gentle light.  Hopefully that illustrates the power necessary to reach certain creative goals, and the freedom that the power gives you in your working process.

Why three, couldn’t just one light do it?

Yes, but without the same control over the balance - I’ll be covering how to balance a bare bulb flash in several tutorials over the next couple weeks.  Secondly, one strobe unit would almost certainly need to be at full power output, which exceeds the recycle time needed after each shot.  I wish to be able to shoot continuous bursts of 3-5 shots and so I adjust my setups to only use 1/4 or less of the flash output giving me that 4 shot burst.

Leave any more questions you have in the comments and I’ll answer them.

If you like this training article, consider purchasing the Video Tutorial on the color blue and continue improving your photographic perception and craft.

• Inspiration , Photographic Flash , Photography Lighting , learning