Wedding Receptions and Poorly Lit Rooms

Wedding receptions can be scary to say the least, with the battle of DJ lights, dark lit rooms, poor lighting, ambience and just a whole bunch of terror.

As a firm believer that says use natural light when its good...thats a mere 10% of the time, meaning only 10% of your shots are perfect, the other 90% you are technically not happy with.

So here are some scary moments made better.

The Room:

Under a tent, blue DJ lights, no white lights at all, this set up stayed from speeches through to dancing.

The image on the left is natural light, and as you can see, the settings are a recipe for a grainy and terrible photo, besides the scary blue lights.

However...the image on the right has a massive reduction in ISO, all the way down to ISO 1250, and the shutter speed at 1/40sec will deliver sharp photos purely because of the flash.

Lets take a look at another one with the exact same tent style set up, with no ambient lighting, in this shot we used a 3 light set up to fix the poorly lit room.

So you may ask why multiple flashes?

Well to answer it simply, 1 flash, would give you the usual, 1 dimension look, it wouldn't create depth. Imagine a straight on flash, kinda like a cell phone shot, now regardless of 1 flash off camera, its still somewhat 1 dimensional.

BUT, using multiple flashes to create hair light that can be seen in both the final images creates a much more professional yet REAL feel.

Any questions please ask :)