We’ve had a crazy several weeks, and so my blog has suffered from neglect. The main distraction that has taken me away from writing was my daughter’s wedding that occurred this last Thursday. Now that it is past, I hope to refocus my energies on other parts of my life that have slipped. As the father of the bride I had many duties to tend to. My primary responsibility was covering the cost of the overall celebration. We chose to cut costs where possible, so we decided that the resident photographer (and father of the bride) would take the pictures. After a miserable failure with the bridal portraits the weekend before, I was a little nervous about shooting the wedding itself. I had several complications with the bridals that all conspired against me at the same time. I scoured the internet for ideas, looking on Pinterest and various Google searches. The idea I settled on was a bit of a complicated strobe setup. I had the equipment to do it, but I lacked the experience and confidence to pull it off. I’ve gotten quite good at shooting with off camera strobe through a white umbrella. It’s a simple look but very classical and elegant. Instead, I wanted to try a dramatic look using a mix of colored strobes. We shot the image in deep shade, starting an hour before sunset in a grove of aspen trees on Mt. Timpanogos. I mostly killed the ambient light by underexposing the image by three stops. I then used a steel blue gel on a shoot-through umbrella at a 45° angle backed off about 30 feet. That would cast a toning light that would suggest a romantic moonlit night in the forest. I hung a second strobe overhead, suspended between two trees to create a downlight on the bride. Since my daughter wanted her fiancé in the shot I placed a third strobe with a grid and dialed way back, behind a tree and shot directly into his face. Since I was using gelled light, I planned to use a tungsten color balance to enhance the blueness of the scene. In my head, it seemed like a great idea. It all started falling apart when my daughter was late to the shoot and we quickly fell into dusk. I had trouble getting the three strobes balanced properly, it was cold, and the overhead light spilled too much on the surrounding aspens. In the end, the effect was more nightmarish than romantic.

Not wanting to repeat the bridal experience, I chose to retreat to a much simpler arrangement. I knew I would have trouble manipulating a shoot-through umbrella in the chaotic stress of wrangling family and friends for the group shots. I chose instead to keep my strobe atop my camera and use the Rogue FlashBender. I metered for ambient light and dialed the flash back to only softly fill in the eye socket shadows. I was happy with the results and considering what was at stake, it was a much safer solution. We were blessed with an overcast sky, at least from a photographer’s perspective. I’m not sure my daughter felt a threat of rain was a blessing. And since I was both father of the bride and photographer I knew there would be some shots that would include me. For those few images, I placed my camera on a tripod and used a remote trigger to fire the camera. The only thing I lost from this setup was having someone calling attention to the small children that didn’t understand they were supposed to look toward the camera.

It was helpful to research ideas of where to pose the newlyweds ahead of time. They were married in downtown Salt Lake City at a very iconic church setting. By googling wedding photos at our particular venue, I found many ideas I might not otherwise have thought of. My post processing has been simple, mostly because of simple lighting. I spent a few minutes straightening and cropping the images, applying the proper color balance, adding contrast and a slight amount of sharpening. Other than these adjustments, the images are ready to print, or in today’s world, go out on social media.