Wedding and Sunset Portraits

Capturing a wedding couple at sunset makes for beautiful pictures. However there is a bit of technical detail that goes behind capturing such an image. The above images were taken at The Villa, a cool new venue located in East Bridgewater and run by my pal Jonathan Saphire of the Saphire Event Group.

These pictures were shot with a Canon 5D and the following specs: ISO 800, f/5.6, 1/400 or thereabouts. Since the shutter speed registers the ambient light I was sure to look for proper saturation of sunset in my images as I went along.

However the key to this shot was off camera wireless flash. I set my 580 EX II as the master and turned it off (not literally off, but its flash output off). I wanted no light to be shooting forward directly at the couple from my camera. Instead I used my other flash as a slave to provide nice 45 degree angle lighting giving depth and shadow to the faces. Yet there was one more component to the making of these images. I used my Promax System by Lumiquest with gold insert to allow for a nice golden hue to light up the couple. My assistant simply held the flash off to camera-left or camera-right being sure to have the wireless sensor on the slave pointing in my direction. If one doesn't have an assistant one can simply set up the flash on a stand.