Off-camera Balance/Fill

[deluco]

I've got a few here from Saturday's wedding, demonstrating how I use off-camera strobe to balance the foreground and background.* *This is my most difficult situation to deal with during a wedding, because we have so little control sometimes on where we shoot.* Sometimes the bride insists on a shot that you know is not going to be lit well, but you have to do it.* In this case it wasn't so much the bride's choice as it was the only place that looked half decent in the area that we were allowed to shoot.* I found a row of flags and composed the bride and groom below the flags so that there was a leading line and an interesting composition (considering what I had to work with).* *I balanced the lighting with my off-camera Lumedyne but could not use the softbox because it was too windy.* This could have just as easily been done with a Vivitar 285 on Manual. *I took a shot without people in it to get a decent reading, F6.7 at 1/125th, 100 ISO was what made the flags look good, so that was my target.* I put them in shadow.* My handheld was giving me f5.6 at 1/125th in the shadows.* I added F4 to give me about F6.7 on the highlights and 5.6 in the shadows.

I have a full length and a closup.* In order to get the flags correctly positioned I had to shoot from a lower angle.* Not ideal as it makes the subjects appear as they are leaning back a bit.* I neglected to direct them to lean forward (my error).* *Here's the full length:


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[deluco]

Here's the closeup:

[deluco]

..and one of the bride alone in a standard pose..same setup, same settings. I just moved her down to apply a different background. I wanted to put some greenery in the background: