Catching up

A few weekends ago I accepted a last minute gig to cover an engagement party that my wife's co-worker was having. Having little or no expectations in terms of what the client wanted, or what i was truly working with in this situation, I boldly thrust forward....into near panic.

Let me try to explain to you the difficulties of this shoot

1) The reception area where the happy couple greeted guests was a bottleneck.. It was dark where they were standing, I had almost no choice of angle, distance from subject. Solution: Photograph what *is* working at that moment, even if you didn't plan on it. In this case, kids being ridiculously cute worked better than horribly crowded and poorly framed shots of the couple in bad lighting. However, it wasn't soon after this small triumph when I realized...


2) Everything was reflective. Stainless steel doors, plexiglass display cases, even the wooden walls had a sheen to them, I constantly had to deal with shooting a flash, and having the environment flash back at me. Solution: Angles are your friend. If you're you're in a room where practically everything is acting like a mirror and you have no choice but to use flash, minimize the damage. Avoiding, as much as possible, being perpendicular from the wall while maintaining proper composure seemed to work best for me.


3) The lighting that was available was very yellowing. Combined with the hue of the walls, choice of clothing, and natural skin tones, people were looking a bit jaundiced. Of course when I say "a bit", I mean "oompa loompa". Solution: Go with the flow, because there's almost you can do short of on-the-fly white balancing etc, so I let LightRoom take care of this one after I was done.

4) No working space, and competing photographers. I was the only hired photographer there, but when people lined up and posed for me, enthusiastic family members would quickly fill any spot that was left empty around the seemingly shrinking room. I also had trouble navigating from one end of the room to the other once all the seats were filled. Solution: If your environment is hindering you, think of ways you can use it to your own advantage. In this case since i often couldn't move to get where I may have wanted, I was forced to take the time to see what was immediately around me that I could make the best of. This led to a bunch of the party's detail shots that may have otherwise not been captured (which my client ended up loving)