At a wedding, it can be an extreme challenge to light everything correctly. You have every kind of possible scenario from the midday sun, to nighttime photos, to indoors in a windowless ballroom or a hotel with ugly tungsten lighting. For this reason, among many others, being a wedding photographer can be one of the most difficult types of photography. You are not working in any type of structured scenario and you have to work fast and under pressure all the time.
There are many ways to light things correctly, and for weddings, even things that are incorrectly lit can still be client-pleasing. You’ve got one heck of a conundrum when you are deciding how to light photos throughout a wedding day. What a lot of people don’t realize until later on in their photography careers is that wedding lighting isn’t necessarily about the photograph itself, or about capturing the moment as it is. It’s about the photography as a whole collective work. It’s about how you mold the light.
Wedding lighting is about creating a mood – really about creating your brand – and then being able to replicate that in all of the weddings that you shoot. Lighting on weddings, and in a lot of other types of photography, is a photographer’s choice. That choice goes on to represent the photographer’s style, brand, and then the expectations that their clients have when they hire that photographer. Learning to light weddings “correctly” is about finding what style is yours, and then being consistent with it throughout a wedding day, despite any lighting scenarios that are thrown your way.
Personally, my brand as a NY Wedding Photographer is a bright and vibrant one. For the most part, I’m using either flat or Rembrandt lighting. If you’re not familiar with Rembrandt lighting, it pretty much just means that the light is coming at a 45-degree angle to your subject so that there’s light in their eyes, and a little bit of shadow below one of the cheekbones and on one side of the nose. It’s a nice, flattering, slimming light for pretty much everyone.
I’m also looking to balance the exposure of the light on my subject’s face to whatever it is in the background, so that I can make them equally exposed without over-exposing the background or under-exposing the subject. To keep this consistent at a wedding reception, for example, I make sure that I photograph the décor with the light either to a 45-degree angle on one side or behind me. If I were to photograph it with the light shining into my camera, then the background would be blown out and it wouldn’t match my style. This is not to say that my way is going to be your way.
There are other photographers, like the one that you’ll see in the video below, who have a more dark and moody style to their photography. For them, they’re usually attempting to put the light at a 90-degree angle to their subjects, so that there’s a little bit of highlight and a lot of low light in their photography. If they’re going to shoot reception details, they would probably put their light all the way to the left, or right, or maybe even slightly behind the subject or centerpiece that they were photographing. The goal being that there’s a little bit of light hitting the subject, but the rest of it is mostly shadow.
It may be easy to create consistent looks when you’re photographing things like wedding details, shoes, reception décor, and things that aren’t moving or responding. But how do you keep consistency with your wedding lighting when you’re photographing things that move? Or when you’re photographing groups of families that need to be lit evenly so we can see everybody’s faces? Check out this video below to hear from Caroline Tran and Susan Stripling, two wonderful wedding photographers with very different styles, to how they create consistency throughout their wedding day.
