Any solutions for this bride's dressing room?

Wedding coming up in a few weeks and this is the dressing room on-site. Bride and groom are from out of town, so either of their homes is out. Any ideas on what to do with this room? It'll be the bride, her two best friends and her mom. I've got plenty of off camera lights in my kit, but light is clearly not the only problem here. To make it even worse, those "windows" look into a hallway!

Excuse the horrible quality iphone shots from the location manager.

Any ideas?

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They should get a hotel room, rather than getting dressed in a meeting room.

Is the wedding planner going to set dress the room? Mirrors, dressing table, etc...

Really - like Tim says - I've done a number of gigs where the folks are from out of town and manage to get a room. Now if they can't..... and this is stretching it a bit, you could always rent some sort of muslin background and try to hide areas of the conf room. That will be pretty challenging though owing to it's shape. You'll really need somebody to help if you take that route. - Stu

Well, you'd probably have to push the table out of the way to make room for the girls to get ready, and take as many pics as you can facing the wall to avoid getting passerby's in the hallway.

Why don't you cover the windows with some white cloth from the outside, and shoot your flashes through them. Then you have nice soft directional light, and hide the hallway. You may want to gel your flashes too so you can get consistent light.

Red Tie Photography wrote in post #9654481
Why don't you cover the windows with some white cloth from the outside, and shoot your flashes through them. Then you have nice soft directional light, and hide the hallway. You may want to gel your flashes too so you can get consistent light.

That's a really good idea. Did the OP say he had OCF setup?
<edit>: He did. I might actually be tempted to use studio lights through softboxes, even.

Bring in warm things, push the table to the side, take the chairs out and find better ones that don't roll, take the clock off the wall and hang a mirror, bring in a standing mirror, hang cloth over the windows, put vases of flowers on the table, use a table cloth if you can.

The photojournalist in me would never touch a thing. If THEY change it -- add things, pretty it up, or whatever, great! If not? That's where they got ready and I want to document it!

One of my favorite weddings got ready in almost the exact situation. Rent (if you don't have) a 50L and shoot at f/1.2 most of the time (your 85L would probably be fine -- but it would be too tight for me in that room). Everything will look awesome, and you'll preserve the integrity of the day by not manipulating the events

Just my two cents. You can do all these other things or just shoot wide open and it'll look just fine

Bobby

I don't understand. Exactly who is paying who here? Now we have to talk them into getting hotel rooms because there are no drapes and a balcony? You can gloss over this thing all you want but the bride knows that she's prepping in a meeting room - no reason to make her feel ashamed of it. I've certainly seen a lot worse.

Yep...exactly what Bobby and RT have said. As is always the case in wedding photography, you have to work with what you got...and make her look beautiful every time!

Bryan

bnlearle wrote in post #9654725
The photojournalist in me would never touch a thing. If THEY change it -- add things, pretty it up, or whatever, great! If not? That's where they got ready and I want to document it!

One of my favorite weddings got ready in almost the exact situation. Rent (if you don't have) a 50L and shoot at f/1.2 most of the time (your 85L would probably be fine -- but it would be too tight for me in that room). Everything will look awesome, and you'll preserve the integrity of the day by not manipulating the events

Just my two cents. You can do all these other things or just shoot wide open and it'll look just fine

Bobby

I agree. Some of my brides get ready in the church's nursery. That's how it is and I shoot it as such. One of my grooms got ready in the church kitchen. I didn't hide it. I shot it.

Well, yeah I wouldn't try and disguise where it is, but the fluorescent lighting probably wouldn't be great. I don't generally use a lot of off camera flash, but in this case I would probably fire them through the curtains to make the lighting better.

It's a small room. IME, simple on-camera bounced flash works fine in those situations. No need to over-complicate things.

Bingo about bouncing if necessary.

Also, I'm fortunate enough to have many of my clients be low/middle income (that spend nearly all of their budget on photography). I love high end weddings where everything is so well planned out and beautiful -- but there's something about weddings where you can see that they aren't "ballers", so to speak -- as long as there's real love (for each other and my photography). For whoever said that they had a guy get ready in the kitchen -- man, that's the stuff I freaking love.

I don't mean to start an assault on people who made other suggestions -- I have no problem with people suggesting a hotel room, for example -- I just wanted to give my 2 cents. I happen to love things like this, but no one is a "lesser photographer" if they would prefer it be in a nicer place