 Maryann Ianniello |
Large Wedding Party I use a Metz 60ct-4 flash for all my weddings. I keep the setting in TTL mode. My question to you is I am never happy with my results when taking large wedding group photos. The center comes great but the left or right of the group don't come as bright. I do bounce off white card but it dosn't seem to help. Can you give me some suggestions? Thanks for you help.
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Jeff S. Kennedy |
The problem is you are not getting the light even. You either need a more powerful light source placed farther away or multiple flashes positioned to even out the light. Better yet, shoot them outside and forget the flash entirely (unless you just want to add a nice catchlight to their eyes).
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Judith A. Clark |
You can buy slave flash really cheap that fire when you fire you flash, they attach to a tripod and would give you the extra lights you need, Jeff makes a good point, shoot them outside when you can. Natural light is unpredictable, but much more beautiful then flash.
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Gregg Vieregge |
TTL settings can be fooled. It works great when the subject matter has an even tonal range and for closeups. I would suggest going to the manual setting for large groups. Put a light meter to the sides of the group and do some test firing for the proper exposure. The bounce card for large groups I would trash. You are are already far enough from the group for good light diffusion plus your losing flash poser. You might try dragging the shutter speed down to around 30 to let ambirnt light do some of the work.
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Maynard McKillen |
Metz may have a clip-on wide angle diffuser to spead out the light emitted from the flash. Gregg's idea about using a slower shutter speed, thus gathering more ambient light, is good, too, though you probably figured out that your camera will end up on a tripod. The other advantage to dragging the shutter is that the background will not be as dark, resulting in a more natural looking photo. Rethinking the way you pose large groups may help, too. Arranging them in rows on the steps at the front of the church may create a more compact group, which the flash head illuminates more evenly. Some fall-off in the eveness of illumination is likely if the group becomes a long horizontal mass. Consider posing the group to mimic the aspect ratio of your film format. If you shoot in 35mm, pose the group to create a rectangle with a two-to-three ratio. That way the group fills up the frame efficiently, and your picture doesn't include a lot of the floor or the space above the group. If you shoot in 6x6 medium format, you can imagine arranging the group to form a nearly square mass. With big groups, I may ask the ushers to kneel on one knee in the front, just to the left and right of the bride and groom. Often it's a better place to put the ushers than having them stand at the left and right sides of the rest of the wedding party. For very large wedding parties, I've even posed groomsmen on one knee in front, again so that they don't block the view of the bride and groom, and then asked bridesmaids to sit on the groomsmen's raised knee. (Pose them last, to save the groomsmen's knees, since the floor is often tile over concrete.) One fellow photographer had a wedding party so large (42) that he arranged in advance to take two pictures, which were mounted as facing pages in the album. The bride and groom were posed in the center of each group.
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Ebi Abd |
Baran
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