This often happens to me, as someone who also works at a local newspaper company. Some photographers for newspapers would just use on-camera flash to light their subject. Some would have a flash unit attached to the hotshoe on their camera for better lighting by means of bouncing it off the ceiling and onto the subject. I used to do that as well... and in some functions I just can't run away from the fact that I have to settle on using a flash unit and bouncing it off the ceiling to light up my subject. But I HATE to settle on just using that because the result can often be flat. I just hate it.
So what I do now whenever I need to take photos (even group shots of more than 5 people) on the spot at a function is I bring my "studio" along with me. But I avoid from bringing all the heavy and bulky stuff with me because I often need to be on the move and there are often tons of people around. I mean, you don't wanna be leaving your precious equipment in one corner with so many people around right? So anyway, yea, I just bring some of the lighter stuff with me - light stands and umbrellas... everything I need to get a decent shot when I'm at a function.
So a good example of this was when I was invited for a launching of a book on Sarawak Land Law, written by Nasser Hamid. Because there were several other photographers trying to take their shots of the same subject in the same pose, I had to wait until everyone was done and the function had ended. That was when I approached the author, who seemed very pleased that my feature writer and I turned up at the launch because of the "excellent job (his words, not mine)" we did publishing a full-length feature about him and his book, accompanied by photos that I shot of him in the newspaper's head office in Kuching. I asked if I could take some photos of him with his book. I also asked him to pose with his wife and daughter very quickly, just because I like them so much and I wanted to give them the photos as a thank you token for inviting me and my writer to the event.
Anyway, my lighting set-up was very basic - just one flash unit, a reflective umbrella and a light stand. Attached on my camera was a wireless speedlight commander (infrared) to control the flash unit. I had the flash power set to full while my camera was set to F11 at 1/160fps, ISO200 with focal length of around 35mm. I didn't want to do a high-key shot. I like to have shadows in my photos. And I didn't want the background to be evenly lit. I wanted it to have a graduating light effect (as you can see in the two photos below this post). But at the same time I didn't wanna add in an artificial graduation using photoshop or lightroom. I wanted that effect to be in the shots even before I added them into my lightroom for editing. So what I did was asked the subject to move further away from background wall of the restaurant where I shot them to achieve that effect, which I personally call the "spotlight effect". At the same time, I also loved the texture of the wallpaper behind my subjects and I didn't want the wallpaper blurred out. But because I was shooting at F11, it wasn't something I should worry about (as you can see below).
So my point here is that you can take great looking photos anywhere, even in uncontrolled environments such as public events and functions, so long as you have some basic lighting equipment with you wherever you go and you're not afraid to "steal" your subjects from the huge crowd for a tiny moment.
Thanks for reading our blog and we'll see you next time. This is Mark signing out...
p/s: No additional editing was done on the pictures below, except for some colour adjustments.
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| Author of 'Land Law In Sarawak' Nasser Hamid with his wife and daughter. |
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