Flash advice for wedding reception

Obsidian wrote in post #15743655
How did they feel about the grittiness? I was on a grittiness kick for a while and recently switched back to softening. General opinion from brides were they would rather see less detail.

Didn't hear anything. Really just hit it enough to make the wall panels look like more like fabric. That's what they were covered with. If you look at the floor and the bride's skin it smooth.

Just as a follow up, the reception pictures turned out fabulous. I ran the 50/1.4 the whole night, f/4 - f/5.6, 800-3200 ISO at full stops and 1/125 - 200 shutter to adjust for ambient, and manual flash between 1/16 and 1/8, with a couple of shots at 1/4. All bounced off the ceiling as I had white 10' ceiling all around.

I had a couple of fu-bars where I didn't turn on flash, or forgot to point to ceiling moving between landscape/portrait orientation, and a few where I dropped down below f/4 and forgot to switch back, but I think I did get close to 85% including composition and timing.

I was making a way bigger deal out of it than it needed to me. Nothing award winning, but mission accomplished!

Thanks again for all the responses! I'll put a few up in this thread with settings once I get processing.

Glad to hear that

A job well accomplished is always good.

I'm sure the couple and parents will be happy and that's the true measure.

Lots of great information here

Chris wrote in post #15772230
Lots of great information here

+1! Shooting wide open with good light is easy, shooting portraits where I can control everything is easy... the idea of receptions with no control scares the you-know-what out of me.

I like the idea of setting up two lights on a back wall. Here's my question to tailor to my setup...
I use phottix odins on three flashes (2x 580EX II and 1 580EX I). The phottix odin has to go on my hot shoe. Would you set the two flashes on remote with the back wall (set to manual? E-TTL?) and then hand hold the third for bounce on E-TTL?

Of course, in this situation, I could use a bracket of some sort that could hold both the Odin and the flash...

I think to feel really comfortable I would want to experiment using this setup ahead of time (preferably at the same venue!)

Here is the evolution of how I've controlled three lights at a reception, including one on the camera in ETTL mode.

Several years ago it was a 580EX on camera in ETTL with a cyber sync transmitter plugged into a mini-jack firing two 580EXs on stands or two QFlash on stands or two AB800s on stands. Those were always manual for obvious reasons.

Then PW introduced ControlTL. So fo the next two years it was 580EXII on a MiniTT1 on Camera and two or more remote flashes on FlexTT5s. They are always set to ETTL on the Flex but control can be manual or ETTL. For receptions they were almost always ETTL.

Last year Canon introduced the 600EX-RTs. So now its one 600EX-RT on camera and two 600EX-RTs on stands. Sometimes the 600s on stands are ETTL Group B and I use ratios with Group A on the camera.

Other times I set the Mode to Gr and place each 600 in its own group and then set the Flash Exposure compensation. All are in ETTL.