Fill Flash Practice

A friend of mine has asked if I’d take pictures at his wedding. Every once in a while I like to give myself a challenge. Apparently, I must have been in a challenging mood when I said ‘yes’. I’ve only taken photos at one other wedding, my cousin’s about three years ago. Weddings are tough because you only have one chance to get the shot. It’s not like you can stop everything and ask them to do the ring exchange again. Also, you never quite know what the conditions will be, when shooting the ceremony. For this wedding, it’s in May and will be taking place in Maine. If the weather is nice the ceremony is outdoors and if it rains it will be indoors. So, I won’t know until that day where I will be shooting and both conditions can be tricky. Outdoors I’m at the mercy of the sun and trying to diffuse the harsh light. Indoors, is typically lower lighting but also I’ll probably be shooting into windows, which is not a good thing. 

So, this past weekend I bought a Flash bracket. This allows me to take the flash off the camera and moving it up higher. This helps with red eye and with harsh shadows. I decided to test it by doing some fill flash practice. I figured I may be shooting into windows or if outdoors they could be backlit by the sun. The first photo is with the camera on “auto”. You can see that it didn’t really know how to handle the harsh light coming in from the window. The second shot is adding in the flash to fill in the foreground light and cut down on the back light. Both shots are straight out of the camera with no adjusting of the images. The fill flash worked really well but I’m not exactly sure what I did :-). So, I will keep practicing until I do.