Manual off camera flash at reception

Hi, at my next wedding i'm thinking of using a YN560 off camera on a stand as a hair/rim light for my reception shots. I'll be using my on camera flash in ETTL and moving all around at the reception. My wife will also have a trigger and on camera flash in ETTL and be triggering the off camera YN560.

I want to use enough power for the flash to show up in the hair of my subjects, but my main question is: how do you handle moving around and if you turned around to shoot something behind you, you now are going to seriously overexpose your subject?

Are you just always aware of which direction your facing and turn the off camera flash on and off whenever needed?

Also, if you're at a small reception on a beach house deck/pool area, would you still use the off camera flash or do you think in more intimate environments (50ish people) that having two on-camera flashes and one off camera (at fairly high power to act as hair light) will be annoying?

And lastly, for this direct flash hair light method, how high on the stand would you have the off camera flash?

I read through Tim's thread and got lots of great information, but I think he does it a little differently than this so I wasnt able to find the answers to these questions! Thanks!

My 2nd light (external) acts more like an extra fill or side light. And its set in Manual mode at 1/32th power. So its not that powerful at all.

I'm aware though that at some angles it might bring a little extra light onto the subject.

If i'm not in a hurry I will have my 2nd body with a flash with no triggers and use that. OR turn off my triggers.

My external light is slightly taller than me (Im 6ft).

You dont need a lot of power from the speedlites if all your wanting is just a bit of side light/hair light. 1/32-1/16th should be plenty. Unless your speedlites are like 10meters away.

Edit: But now that I got my new 600ex flashes I no longer uses triggers On the 600ex I can quickly turn off master and slave. If I need it again It will remember my last settings

Hair light sounds like a bad idea to me. Sometimes it'll be visible in the frame, sometimes not. Plus you'll have a weird light behind them and dark patches in the room.

This is how I do reception lighting.

If I can get my light up high enough, I nearly always use a hair light. This usually means that my light (or lights) are going on a balcony. To address Tim's post above, you won't have a "weird light" behind them if the light is high enough.

And, as they say; "this thread is worthless without pics" here are some examples.

Two lights bounced off the side walls, hair light on balcony

There are very very few reception venues in NZ with a balcony, so I've never done that. I also can't see images linked on other many websites from work, photo bucket etc.

Sure it might be a nice effect, but with two flashes I would much rather try to light the whole room than do on camera flash and a hair light. Doing that you'd have black holes in part of your room. If you have three or four lights, sure, go for it, but two really isn't enough IMHO.

jcolman wrote in post #15042828
If I can get my light up high enough, I nearly always use a hair light. This usually means that my light (or lights) are going on a balcony. To address Tim's post above, you won't have a "weird light" behind them if the light is high enough.

I have learned that too. I recently shot two events where at one there was a low ceiling and I could not get the lights up high. You could see the light source in some of my shots. In the other event I was able to get the lights up much higher and the results were a lot better.