zarek rahman © 2011
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Taking account of ambient light

This event took place in RS Lounge in Essex on an overcast Sunday afternoon in February. I hadn’t been to the venue before so I turned up about half an hour before the guests were due to get there. For this sort of shoot, i.e. where I am constantly moving around and the lighting situation is changing, I prefer to shoot with an external flash mounted on the camera, shooting in TTL (through the lens) mode.  See the full gallery here or keep reading for more info on how to achieve shots like these in a party situation.

Planning for the action

With any party or event (including weddings) it is important that you can move around freely without having to constantly adjust your lighting settings.  While it would be possible to shoot something like this without using flash and still get good results, I wouldn’t bother because you can get far better results by using one.

I used my Nikon D700 with the Nikon SB900 strobe sitting on top of it. I also used the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 lens. However, you could get equally good results by using just about any camera which has a TTL flash sitting on top of it. I have had similar results by using my smaller Panasonic GF1 & FL-360 flash unit.

Regardless of what camera you use, there are a few important rules to follow when using flash on the camera.

Never allow any of the light from the flash to directly hit your victims

The best way to do this is to look at your surroundings, then rotate and swivel the flash head away from whoever you are taking a photo of, taking note of how the light will reflect back at them.  If you find that you need to angle the light so that part of the flash beam might hit them, use your hand to cover (‘flag’) the light away from them.

Pay attention to the colour temperature of the ambient light

In this case, the ambient light was flourescent. If I had simply set my camera’s white balance to flourescent and shot with the flash, there would have been a mixture of two colour temperatures: (the daylight balanced flash which would be topping up the ambient light and the slightly cooler fluorescent light which was the basis for the ambient light in the room). To get around this, you should alter the colour of the light being emitted from the flash by using a green gel.

Meter for the ambient light, then use the flash to top it up

This allows you to retain the mood of the party by capturing the ambient lights. In this example you can see the coloured lights on the ceiling – if I hadn’t metered for ambient and had used only flash to illuminate the scene, those colours would be gone.

This shot was taken without flash, so you can see how dark the room really was. In order to retain the ambient light, I shot this at f2.8 at 1/125s and at 1600 ISO. Here’s another example of metering for the ambient light and not worrying about the flash just yet:

This is clearly too dark and the client would not have been impressed if I had turned in a bunch of pictures where everyone attending the party was a silhouette. But just by adding a little bit of bounced flash, look at what a difference you get:

Here, the settings for the ambient light remain more or less the same at f2.8, 1/160s and 1600 ISO. But I have also turned on the TTL flash and compensated the exposure by +0.7 (to account for extra power needed to bounce the flash).

Other lighting considerations

There are various other considerations which went into play here, including the colour of the ceiling and walls that I was bouncing off. Luckily these were white and grey (neutral) and so would not cast any colour onto the guests. If the walls or ceiling were painted blue or something like that, then the guests would have looked like characters out of Avatar.

Once the lighting has been setup for the environment you’re in you can generally forget about it and just worry about composition and rounding up the guests for group shots and capturing the action.

A similar but different situation

If you’ve made it this far I suggest you check out this later post I wrote about ambient light which deals with a slightly more difficult situation but uses similar principles:

- Problematic ambient lighting and flash