First Wedding Coming Up

I have set my soft boxes aside and purchased a pair of 580 EX's to shoot my son's rather informal but still important wedding in July. I have been working very hard to get repeatable results. I was told to always shoot manual camera in Ettl Flash mode, but could not seem to work out the variables...So a camera store owner said, "turn your custom function to 250th auto, shoot AV mode, and bang away.

When I did this I noticed that under evaluative lighting I could lose a stop of exposure just by rotating my camera on a subject that was bright, so I switched to spot metering with the focus point being centered, and seem to be getting some consistent results with close up portraits, my concern is that once I get to larger groups that this won't work very well.

Any comments concerning AV mode, Evaluative vs. Spot and center focus will be very helpful.

Would really appreciate a link or two to some two flash light set ups for group shots, indoors and out.

I am doing the wedding as a favor but I know they are going to be in a hurry like most weddings are.

Your time is appreciated!

Downing32

Downing,

Evaluative will take some sort of exposure average across the entire frame. As a result, you may get somewhat inconsistent results depending on how your background is reacting to your flash and how much of it is in the frame. That could be why you were getting different results depending on the orientation of the camera.

If you have until July, i strongly recommend that you start reading the strobist blog and going through that sites lighting 101 and 102 info. This will give you a pretty good working knowledge of what you can do with limited lighting resources.

In terms of lighting group shots, your main concern will probably be avoiding blown highlights. As such, you may want to use spot and do a flash exposure lock, metering off of the dress with some exposure compensation to bring it up to maybe +1.5 to +2 EV but that would be something to experiment with before hand. Set up your lights and take pictures of a white dress shirt and black dress pants and see if you can't work out some acceptable compensation where you arent blowing out the shirt, but you are also not losing definition in the pants.

One thing to keep in mind about indoor shots is that if you main roughly the same lighting configuration and light to subject distances, you should be able to take about a minute and lock in all of your values (camera and flash) so that you are able to get consistent results.

Outdoors you will mostly be looking to accent and fill. The flash will become secondary to the available natural light and so you shouldn't have to struggle as much to get acceptable results.

Thanks...I've been reading it and others all day. Some of it is very helpful. Some a bit confusing. I'll have more questions by Thursday, I am sure.
Thanks for taking the time.
Downing32