In this video I'm gonna show you all two easy ways to light your reception ballrooms for detail shots. My name is Pye, and I'm one of the founders of Lin and Jirsa Photography and SLR Lounge.com We're teaming up with Adorama to bring you a new series of photography tutorials called Mastering Your Craft right here on Adorama TV. So let's dive in. What's up guys my name is Bye welcome to AdoramaTV. We're here to show you guys just how to light a reception, so first thing we might come into a barn like this, and it's already pretty well lit, and we might think we're just gonna shoot it with kind of natural ambient light right, but the deal is if we kind of shoot with this natural ambient light, I'm gonna go to 1/200th se f/1.4 and ISO 800 and I'm on a 50 mm Sigma Art lens, on the Canon 5d for now. If I go ahead and grab this kind of basic shot right here, I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of angle so the centerpiece is right in the middle.
Well I end up with a shot where everything looks okay, the only issue is is that nothing is really that bright, right? The colors kind of seem a little bit muddy, also when we look at the centerpiece, there's not any light really landing on the centerpiece, so what ends up happening is these bright blinking areas of our frame end up being the brightest spots of the frame, and the centerpiece and details that we have, kind of fall more into the background. So I need to add light, now the first thing that we might think is, let's put on a bounce flash, and I'm not gonna say this is necessarily wrong, but I'm gonna say that there's other ways that might be a little more ideal, if you don't have any other options you can go ahead and do this.
So all I'm doing is grabbing an on-camera flash, here we're using the Profoto A1, and I'm gonna bounce this off of kind of the ceiling and the wall up and towards the left okay, and we're gonna just get a little test power, we're gonna go to seven power, and just get a little test shot all right, so we're gonna go ahead and dial this down to six power, we're gonna take, actually we're good in this 5.5, we'll take that shot again, now this looks okay, and we kind of lift the the flowers out of the shot a little bit, but that lighting is not that interesting, because when we're bouncing we're kind of bouncing off of objects that are nearby right, so instead the first lighting setup I'm going to show you is just to grab an off-camera flash and place it sort of on the opposite side of the room, so we're gonna walk to that side, I'm actually gonna put a B10 in onto a stand, I'm also going to go ahead and put on a CTO gel as we can kind of match the color balance of the room, and what we're gonna aim to do is just kind of pop this off in the corner, and fill this entire corner of the room, so what ends up happening back is, we get a nice balance that comes across the entire room, and it's gonna be directional, so we're placing it over there, and then walking back to this side to actually shoot our images.
Now I don't need my on-camera flash at this point so just for the sake of simplicity, I'm gonna go ahead and take the flash off and just put the remote on, so we don't have anybody asking if we were using the on-camera flash. Okay so I'm still at 1/200th of a second f/1.4, and ISO 800, I'm gonna go ahead and take the exact same shot and let's see where our power settings at with the Profoto.
All right so we're just a little bit powerful, I think it's at full power right now, so let's go ahead and back this down by two stops, all right so when we compare this shot to the one that we had previously, we actually have a very nice directional light that's landing right on kind of the entire room, and I would say this – use this technique because it is gonna wash out kind of everything in the room right so I would use this technique when you're working in rooms like this, where everything in the room is kind of bright, it's kind of amber toned, it has that kind of peaches and, and tan kind of vibe.
We're shooting it bright, is gonna look nice and natural, we still shot it in a way we can see the up lights, but whenever you're using a bounce technique, you are gonna fill the room with wash okay, so make sure that you're doing it in kind of a setup like this, let's dive now to technique number two, which is basically pin lighting where you're gonna control the light exactly where we want it.
So let's do that now. All right so this go around, let's grab our B10, I'm going to take this top off, and what we're gonna do is pop a grid on the inside, so I need to make sure that I'm that light, spill right now I'm gonna leave the CTO Gel on, and then we're gonna bring this back, now we're gonna go ahead, and bring this over and actually light our centerpiece and table, so usually I like to light in an angle, and I would kind of pick the angle where natural light is kind of already falling here, it's pretty even on both sides, so I'm just gonna start from this side. The nice thing about reception rooms too if you have a light that has a built-in modeling light, oftentimes it's dim enough inside of these rooms to actually just use the modern light as your primary sort of light source for the scene.
Okay and what we're gonna do is just adjust the temperature to kind of land where this scene is, I'm gonna bring this in just a little bit, so if that modeling light is bright enough, I can just shoot along with it and again with the exact same settings, now I'm going to take this first shot, and you're gonna see that with the mounting light at this ISO, we're just a little bit dark right? So all I'm gonna do is pop the remote on, we're actually gonna use the flash and let's turn the power way down, let's put it to like 2, if that, I'm actually gonna bring the ISO down a little because we're gonna shoot with a little bit more mood in this image, and what we end up getting with this technique is sort of a spot lit effect, right on that table where we can kind of leave the room ambience just a little bit more dark, so what I would say is, when you're working in more dramatic kind of lit environments that are set up to be very sort of dark and dim, and you want to keep the drama, I would go to the pin lighting approach, when you're working in scenes like this, that are kind of already naturally bright.
I would lean on the umbrella or the wall approach, so if you don't have a wall to bounce off of use an umbrella, place it in the corner, of the room for any other sides to have a nice directional light, and you're good to go. Hopefully this helps you guys out, if you guys enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe to the channel leave your comments below on what you guys would like to see next and well I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye..
