Sing-song

Last week I wrote a fairly detailed post on how I lit a group shot of 69 people using three Nikon speedlights, wirelessly triggered, and posted the test shots that led to the four frames which I took while I briefly had the group’s attention.  That post was tweeted by David Hobby from Strobist, and in a day had received over 2000 views, which is a record (so far) for the blog.  In the hope that some of those new readers are coming back for more, I thought I would do another breakdown of a shot lit with – wait for it – three Nikon speedlights, wirelessly triggered.

The setting this time was the Morrison Room in Carton House, where Catherine and Dean were enjoying their wedding reception.   They had the run of the entire old house at Carton, which allowed them to set up their dancing (and have their speeches) in a different room to where they were eating their meal.  This allowed me an opportunity to set up some off-camera lights around what would become the dancefloor without disturbing the meal, and well ahead of any dancing, so that I could take test shots, work out angles and power settings, and generally satisfy myself that by the time the first dance came, I would be lighting the dance floor sufficiently to give me good clean shots with a nice quality of light.

The room was big, and so for a start I knew any lights I used would have to be bare – no modifiers would be possible.  Mainly because they would absorb too much power, and so cost me too much light in this big dark room, but also because it’s not very practical to three speedlights firing through umbrellas up around a dance floor.

To give me a reasonable coverage of light, but also a good reach, I set my three flashes to a mid-point in their zoom range, and mounted them on 8 foot tall light stands.  I had an SB-800 and two SB-600s.  I set each up as a remote flash, and that would allow me trigger them from the pop-up flash on the D700 and the D300 that I was shooting with.

I had a 70-200mm lens on the D300 and a 24-70mm lens on the D700, so the ability to pick up either camera and trigger the lights without needing to move a transmitter was very beneficial.

With three lights, I arranged them at three corners of an imaginary rectangle that bounded where I expected the dance floor would be – it was up for grabs how much of the floor would be used as a dance floor, but I assumed the half of the room closest to where the DJ was setting up was a good bet.

I tended to find that 1/4 power on the SB-800 and 1/2 power on the two SB-600s worked well for my test shots.  Thanks to Nikon’s CLS system though I could adjust the settings from my camera, so when the time came to shoot the first dance I would have plenty of control straight from my shooting position.

Before the first dance, Catherine’s two brothers and the other musicians who had performed during the wedding ceremony started playing some music at a piano near the DJ’s setup (and so just about within range of my three lights.  Referring to the photograph at the top, the diagram on the right shows roughly where my three speedlights were located relative to the three people in the shot.

In many ways I’m reverse engineering the photo to determine this lighting setup, because while I remember how the three flashes were arranged relative to each other (A, B and C in the diagram), how that all sat relative to these three subjects isn’t so easily recalled.  However, I can deduce it to some extent from the end photograph.

For a start, the main light in this shot is light A, because it is the primary source of light on the main subject, Andrew, who is playing the piano.  You can see from tthe shadow of his nose that it is slightly to the right, and above him.  That tells me I was pretty close to it and so have put the camera relative to it as shown in the diagram.

Looking at Robert (at the right of the frame), we can see that the camera side of his face is dark, and so I would speculate that he is getting little (or no) light from the main light, and is instead lit by the cross-lighting fill light, C.  He is facing this light almost head on, and so there’s very little shadow on his face, but the side of his head is quite dark.

The back light, light B, is a little trickier. My memory tells me it was pointed towards C, and I also recall it was to the back left of the frame, yet from the shot it is clear it is throwing some light back towards the camera – you can see its reflection in the piano – and while doing so is giving Andrew a hair-light which isolates him a little from the pillar behind.  The hair light may be from reflected light off the pillar, originally from light C, but it may also be that the zoom was such for light B that the edge of the beam skims the top of his head.  Given the piano reflection for light B also, I think this is most likely.

The benefit of this setup was that, for almost any direction over a 270 degree sweep, at least two lights would fire (CLS requires line of sight from the camera, and so at times not all three lights fired), and the area in the frame would be well lit from mulitple angles, with one light naturally acting as a main light (the closest to the subject) and the other one or even two filling in the shadows, and/or adding nice separation from the backgroud.

Getting a shot like this in ambient light would have been near impossible given the low level of the light, while on-camera flash would have made keeping all three subjects well lit would have been a tough ask.

CLS and the three off-camera flashes did a good job, therefore, of lifting what might otherwise be an ordinary snapshot.