Since I don’t naturally have a bride and her dress hanging out with me in my office today, I decided to make do. I pulled out the closest thing I could find: my own wedding rehearsal dress! My goal was to create different lighting examples, using available light, one light, and two lights in different ways. As you look at these photos, please pay attention to the quality of the light…and not the boring location! In fact, imagine this lovely little dress hanging in a grand ballroom or on a spiral staircase! So for this first series above, we’ve got (from left to right), 1. only available light, 2. one off-camera flash 3. two off-camera flashes with one in the frame, and 4. two off-camera flashes with one behind the dress.

1. Available light in this situation provides for a very bland photo. It does not do the dress justice, and the hallway light is awfully yellow. Not ideal.

2. For this shot, I put my flash (with the small flash head diffuser) on a tripod in the room next to me and pointed it at the dress. The color and overall balance of light is MUCH more appealing than the first shot.

3. I left the off-camera flash from #2 at the same place, and set another on the floor with the flash head pointed directly at me. To get the pretty flare, I had to decrease my aperture to f/22, which meant I needed to increase my ISO and slow down my shutter speed. I love the dimension the flash in the composition provides!

4. For this shot, I simply put my 2nd flash on a tripod and set it behind the dress to create my own back-lighting. I always look for natural back-lighting for my dress shots, like many of the examples above, but oftentimes there won’t be a great place to hang the dress in front of a window. That is when I create my own backlighting with this setup! I think it gives the shot a romantic, feminine feel

The two shots above are a great example of the difference between using just one off-camera flash and two with one behind the dress. I love the way the layers are illuminated on the right!
This last example is quite dramatic. The shot on the left was taken with only available light. This is a great example of how different color temperatures in one image can be really unpleasant! The bottom has cool, available window light hitting it, and everything else is very warm from the hallway light. yuck. The one one the right, however, lovely!! I used two off-camera flashes for this shot, one down on the floor and one at eye level.

I hope this post was helpful! I love experimenting with flash, especially when my subject is a pretty white dress!

To preface my before & after examples…I spend great care editing each of my photos to make sure they are as beautiful as they can possibly be. My clients will never ever see an image that was straight out of camera (SOOC). However, I have nailed down my editing workflow and style so that I do almost the exact same thing to each photo, which makes my editing go fairly quick and my photos looking consistent as a whole. So, even though these three photos below are very different from each other, my explanation will be very simple because I apply the same techniques to each one!

Photo below: First, I make all my exposure, blacks and color balance adjustments in Adobe Bridge while the image is still in its RAW form. Next, I save the photo as a jpeg and make any additional adjustments in Photoshop. For the photo below, I softened her skin using Pro Photo Retouch in the Totally Rad Actions set, brightened her eyes and applied one of my favorite color actions (from Colorshift Actions) called Warm 70′s love. These actions are very intense, so I reduce the opacity to between 6 and 12%.

Next up is an example of a black and white photo. It’s not awful in color, but I love it in B/W. I first brightened the exposure a little bit in Bridge, then used a basic b/w action from Colorshift Actions. Next I softened the skin and sharpened the entire image very slightly, using the action called Edge of the World from the Totally Rad Action set. Simple!For the final example: a photo taken indoors that is waaaayy too yellow for my liking. I used the same overall adjustments as I did in the first image of Meridith, and the result is a beautiful action shot!I hope this before & after installment has been helpful! I am off to enjoy a little time outside on this gorgeous humidity-free day!

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