Welcome to my off camera flash tutorial for wedding photographers.
Today you're going on my camera to a few weddings to show you how I use off
camera. Flash on an actual wedding day,
(Intro) Taylor Jackson shooting 67 weddings last year. Taylor Jackson,
Welcome Taylor, you are well known in this community.
You're an amazing photographer.
Hello and welcome to my off camera flash tutorial for wedding photographers.
Specifically,
we're actually going to go on camera to a few different wedding days and I can
show you in the field how I actually use off camera flash.
But for now I'm gonna start this with a,
I guess the overview of off camera flash and why this video is specifically for
wedding photographers and not for commercial shooters necessarily. Uh,
if I was a commercial shooter, I walked into this space,
I could set up a softbox, knocked a box,
whatever lights I want reflectors on a wedding day.
I only really get kind of one light on a stick otherwise and becoming a little
bit too obtrusive.
And as much as I would love to plug in a studio strobe and have a huge octoBox
like three feet away from somebody at a podium.
Unfortunately that's just not something that we can do as wedding photographers.
So we have to be a lot more low key when it comes to making our lighting as good
as it can be. But also being respectful to the day.
As you can tell in this shot, this white balance sucks.
What I'm going to do anytime that I walk into room, if I'm,
if this is the getting ready room, I walk in here,
I want everything to be a single lighting color or as close to a single light in
color as I can right now.
The outside light and the incandescent lights up here are kind of battling and
I'd say it's like a 50, 50 mix of just kind of weirdness. So I walk into room,
usually I'm going to turn off the lights if it's a daytime, if it's a nighttime,
I'll usually go by and Candescent, um,
and giving myself a little bit more exposure there.
What you notice instantly is that the quality of light is a heck of a lot
better.
My off camera kit is this gold ox X pro transmitter and the go docs V one
flashing it that's kinda over here beside me.
And the thing that I love the most about this,
this setup is the fact that it just works all the time and there's never a
refresh time. So if I always shoot my flash manual, I'm,
I would say 95% of the time. If I'm shooting at one slash 32 power, uh,
I'm never going to find the end of that battery because it's a big lithium ion
battery. So if you're shooting one to one pops,
you're looking probably at a second recycle time. But other than that, uh,
you're free to just fire away and make it look like that Jay Z concert that
you've always dreamed of. Um, that said,
don't make it look like a Jay Z concert or Jay Zad if you're Canadian or
British.
The other thing that I'm doing is I'm always looking to point this at things.
So, for instance, in this room right here, everything is white,
which is awesome. The ceiling is white. So if I was using an off camera,
flash in these walls were all black. Um,
I would just be pointing this directly at the ceiling that it's white.
And if I'm standing over here, I mean they had a very nice kind of wash upon me.
I'm essentially recreating a giant softbox from the ceiling.
So the overall idea is that you want to take this little tiny flash head like
this and you want to point it at something bigger.
So if I'm pointing at the wall over here and the spread is going to be something
like this,
I'm essentially turning this wall into a softbox that is like this sized,
which is bigger than any softbox I could ever bring in.
Obviously you're not always going to have a huge soft box wall like this or a
huge softbox ceiling, but a lot of the time you actually do,
if you spend the time to look around,
I'm also cool with using something that's kind of a gray wall or even something
that's a little bit darker of a neutral. Um,
I just turn my flash power up a little bit to compensate for that.
And even if you're bouncing off something that is, say a light wood,
and when the light hits it, it is going to pick up a little bit of that yellow,
orange and throw that back into the room.
But the room is incandescent lit and that orange light coming back in is
matching with these lights. You actually have a pretty good work around.
On that note, the one modifier that I do tend to use is this CTO gel,
which is just a little orange piece that goes over the light here.
This makes it match the light. So if it's an incandescent environment, um,
that my flash is now just a big super powered regular incandescent light and I
can kind of hide that in the room a heck of a lot better.
The one thing that I guess off camera flash does is opens up a lot more
creativity when it comes to actual getting ready shots. So, uh,
you'll love some of them and then some of them you'll, they'll be like,
well that's a really cool shot and then six weeks ago by, and it'd be like,
this is not really my style. It was just kind of in the honeymoon phase with it.
Uh, everybody goes through that, so don't, don't worry
for deciding how much power do you use?
Usually I just start out one slash 64 power and then I kind of dial up from
there.
The plus with having a transmitter like this expo is that you can just control
all the settings.
So if you want to go all the way up to one slash one power and kind of work your
way back down until it feels a little bit more like it's part of the scene
rather than controlling the scene, uh, you can do that and it's very,
very easy to go up and down. If you do want the camera to do more of the work,
you can go into TTL mode.
The only challenge I guess is that your images are going to be a little bit less
consistent between the frame.
So you're going to add a little bit of time to your post-processing schedule.
But other than that, it's still gonna generate amazing results.
The huge benefit of TTL is that if you're in a big room,
and even if you were to have an on camera flash here and you were taking photos,
that if you're taking photos of the podium and then you pivot to something
that's even further away,
that TTL is going to compensate for that and it's gonna throw more light.
My basic strategy when it comes to actually walking into room is that I want to
expose for the room,
the environment first and I want to make sure that something accurate to what I
want. The final product is actually showing up already.
And then I'm going to add my off camera flash to make it just a little bit
better.
My old transmitter is actually on my camera now has a hot shoe Mount so I could
Mount my three 60 camera to it. Kind of helpful in this situation.
Right now I'm just bouncing the light. I am essentially using it kind of like a,
just an on camera flash,
but bounce straight at the ceiling and front and it's just making a softer,
more kind of almost spotlight light fall over, um,
rather than the ambient light, which would be fine.
And the other variation of this is to set it up kind of behind and make it a
little bit of a kick light. And I like this look a lot when done very,
very subtly. And if I subtly,
I mean that the flash barely even shows up and you kind of have to almost look
for it,
but it gives three dimensional lighting that you just would not get ambient in
this room
or on the flip side you can make it a little bit more obvious. All right,
so this is maybe the most obvious of all the off camera flash style things that
I would ever do.
Feel like I haven't done this in a long time cause you kind of do it once and
it's always the exact same look.
Basically what's happening is the flash is kind of hidden,
I would say right about here kind of where um,
Amanda's elbow is and I'll give you kind of a top down view of how this is kind
of looking. So basically what's happening is that my flash unit is here.
This is a top down view,
shooting it this way and it is at one slash one 28th power, um,
with a diffuser over it as well. Um, that's my drawing of a diffuser. Um,
in this case it was, I believe in SB 700. So it has a little, um,
front piece that kind of flips down that I don't know,
makes it a little more diffuse and also a little more, um, or less directional,
I guess a little more wide angle. Um, Amanda is here,
this is the top of her head and I'll put a smiley face on it.
And back here is where I am at with my camera.
I'm obviously a fantastic artist and there is a bit of kind of the uh,
the awning right here. So basically the way that this is,
is covering her and the rains all happening out here.
I wouldn't ask her to do this on her wedding day in the rain, um,
and get actually properly wet.
And this flash is essentially just illuminated out this way and lighting up all
the rain spots. So everything you're seeing here is all limited by that.
Backflash I'm sorry that I, I drew on her here, but uh,
that's kinda how it's working out and it's pretty easy to do the shot,
but again, it kind of looks the same every time that you do it. So, um,
definitely don't overuse this look,
but if you find yourself in a situation like this, um,
if you find yourself out in the snow,
I feel like this is a very easy snow photo to do. Winter brides,
they're a little bit more happy to go do that. Um,
if you are putting your flash out in the rain, um,
you don't have to buy like a case for it or anything.
You just get literally a Ziploc bag and put your flash in a Ziploc bag and, uh,
kind of ads. I got nice. A little more diffusion as well. Um,
but that's kind of the easiest way.
You can also like put them in pools and stuff if you do that,
if you're feeling ambitious enough to yeah, that's how you take that shot.
Hopefully it takes a little bit of the mystery away from it. Um, yeah,
one slash one 20th power, which is low as it goes,
I'm just backlighting directly behind and making sure that it's not creeping too
much through. Cause if I can see the actual flash head,
it really just creates a super JJ Abrams, uh,
style lens flare that is very difficult to control if the hard plastic gel, uh,
the color temperature orange plastic thing, um, doesn't exist for your flash,
you can just Velcro it and you can buy some off Amazon and just get a bunch of
different colors of gels and just Velcro rate to your rates here flash.
And it does the exact same thing that any sort of purchase modifier would do.
Uh, here with this light,
I'm basically just lighting up the entire ceiling kind of in front of the podium
halfway in between me and whoever is speaking at the Podio.
And the good thing is that it's just good quality light regardless of where you
go in the room, that they're always going to be lit the same.
So you don't have to worry too hard about like moving lights or getting close
enough for TTL to make sure that it's lit up. Uh,
that everything is just good and consistent.
Now moving into the dancing aspect of the evening,
I always have one light set up to just make good quality light over the room.
And then at this point I can lay with the idea of setting up a second off light.
So if I was going to do that,
I would have it as low a power as possible and kind of pointed directly at the
other light. Um,
so it's kind of going across the dance floor back towards me and play around
with a little bit of flair,
but my packages are set up so that usually like three or four songs in a
dancing. Uh, I'm on my way home. So, um,
that's not something that I've done in a couple of years.
Now here's an example of maybe unnecessary off camera flash,
but it also does give you like,
I would say an 8% kind of boost in interestingness to typically what would be a
boring shot. Uh, how have the off camera flash setup? Lowest power set up,
pointed directly facing my camera,
just as a backlight and trying to hide it as best I can between the couple.
And the,
I guess the bonus of this is that you can have them walk towards you and you can
also be firing that off camera flash. Uh, especially with this system.
It definitely keeps up and you can create something that is just a little bit
different and feels a little bit better.
I think overall then a traditional shot that would've been the exact same
situation without off camera flash here.
Kind of set off off to the right there and just working as kind of that,
I guess more of a sidelight just to add a little bit more of three
dimensionality into the scene and I think it works really well.
Is it 100% required?
Like do you have to for sure go outside with an off camera flash now? No. Um,
it would have worked well without the off camera flash. The,
I guess the trade off is that you work a little bit slower so you get less
frames, but the frames that you do get are a little bit better.
So you kind of have to find your balance within there.
Right now I have Marshall holding my flash kind of off to the left hand side
there that I just pointed at and I'm trying to get a little bit of a back lit
cause I want to make this a really romantic dark,
moody looking image cause the sky is so incredible right now.
And I was also hoping that we catch a little bit of lightning cause this is a
thunderstorm rolling in.
It's a fly landed on my transmitter there and I have Marshall hiding the flash
as best he can. Uh,
but I do know that I'm probably gonna have to be Photoshopping and out of a few
shots. So that's a,
I guess a another efficiency downgrade by using off camera.
Flash is one that the frames are going to be a little bit less consistent but
you're going to be able to create work that in no other lighting situation could
have existed. Like this one here.
That wraps up the off camera flash for weddings tutorial. Uh,
hopefully you learned a little bit from this and hopefully it inspired you to
get the,
the right tools that you need to go out there and just start experimenting on
your own.
I think the most important part with off camera flash is really just to get out
there and start doing it.
You learn a lot and you have a lot of time over the reception specifically to
just make sure everything is set up by the time that speeches start by the time
that the dancing starts, uh, walking into a getting ready room,
that you have the time as well to at least kind of practice with the details and
get comfortable in the lighting scenario and then bring that light over to the
humans if that's something that you want to be doing. With that though,
there's going to be a lot of challenges that you're going to discover. It's a,
it's a whole new thing.
If this is your first time doing off camera flash to bring in your own lighting
and to not really be able to see exactly
what it's going to do before it does it, uh,
that you can have your best guess of how that balance is going to look.
But as soon as you hit the shutter,
it's going to be a lot different than you were kind of expecting.
Sometimes the positive is that that makes it a heck of a lot better and it's
actually a really, really fantastic surprise. Um,
but then also the flip side is also true where you think you have everything set
up and then it just, it's not working at all. Um,
but just know that there are always options and you can always do the best that
you can with it and usually that's going to be a lot better than if you just
tried to shoot the room. Ambient. So definitely a useful skill to have.
But as I said in the beginning,
I don't use off camera flash unless I absolutely need to. So, um,
that is kind of my stance on it that I would much rather shoot ambient when
possible and this to come in, uh,
just in case anything's going a little bit weird or there's little tiny little
pot lights. Um, whatever it might be that's making my lighting not great.
I know that I can override it if needed,
but I would much rather not have to do anything if at all possible.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you again next time.