Indoor Venue Lighting Explained
By Omar L Martinez




The purpose of this thread is to explain the different sorts of lighting approaches that are available to photographers inside venues.

First, some principles about using flash light:

1) Light travels in a linear path that spreads like a V. This means that light is predictable. This also means that anything that blocks this path will inevitably create shadows.

2) A general rule is that aperture controls flash exposure (how bright, etc), while shutter speed controls ambient (along with iso, this is the background on a venue. If you want it pitch black, close the aperture).

3) There is a limit to how fast you can set your shutter speed to sync with your flash. Consult your manual to find your flash unit’s limits. If it’s too fast, you get something like this:

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Our goal is to take photos like the above using a combination of lighting methods. In inside wedding venues (or venues in general), the most common lighting approaches are:
(1) direct flash
(2) diffused but otherwise direct or diffused + bounced flash
(3) natural lighting without flash
(4) bounced flash, and the window alternative (which is bounced anyway)
(5) Gels and other goodies

I will explain the methods of each to the best of my ability and provide examples and reasons why I prefer a method over the other. Most of these photos aren't mine.

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This post was edited by onepagememory on Jan 26 2011 06:38pm

1) Direct flash

Direct flash is the ugliest, harshest, and least professional option available, and it involves aiming the light directly at the subject. This comes as either your camera's pop-up flash or an attached external flash that faces the same direction as your lens.
Problems with direct flash:

I) red eyes
L) washes out colors and skin tones (which makes people and clothes look pale)
S) creates akward shadows and often makes the background look very dark(especially if you're using auto mode).

Direct flash looks like this:



You'll notice her skin looks too white (with slight blue tones), the tones of her otherwise-painfully-colored blouse are washed out and pale, and there is an ugly shadow to her right. These characteristics make direct flash look like a point-n-shooter's photo and very snapshot-ish. If your aim is to produce professional quality images, then you must NEVER use your camera's popup flash out-of-factory. There are some enhancements you can do to make it usable, but that's left for some other time.

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If this is your only option, there are things you can do to improve your direct flash photography:

First, make sure your camera / flash and subjects are in a straight line.

You----> Subject------> Wall.

What causes shadows is an angle between you, your subject, and the wall. If you shoot straight foward, you can get something like this:



The problem is that these photos still have ugly, washed out colors and blue/purple tones. Remember that your camera chooses colors largely according to white balance. Change your camera's white balance settings to 'Flash' to avoid some of these problems. Flash lighting is often blue (either as a tone or in comparison to your surroundings) and not a neutral tone. By adding a tad bit of saturation or vibrance (to reduce the washing out of skin tones) and shifting your white balance to more yellow ranges (for both skin tones and the removal of the whites / purple) in post-processing (photoshop and similar products all have this option), you can improve it a bit to something like this:



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A few things to note:
Your camera's pop-up flash is too close to the lens, hence the origin of these problems.
If you kneel, you are creating an angle between you and your subject, so you'll get shadows in the ceiling. You must shoot at around eye level to avoid these shadows.
Cropping (or using a longer lens) helps if there are ugly shadows you can't avoid.
An ugly, direct flash, shadowed photo is better than no photo at all.

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This post was edited by onepagememory on Jan 26 2011 06:39pm

2) Diffused lighting

Diffused lighting is light that is softened by a semi-transparent (or transparent) object by blocking and re-distributing some of it, and arguably light that is bounced from anywhere (and thus reduced in power, or softened). It comes in several forms:



I will be talking about diffusers that get attached to your flash unit. Remember that look on the direct flash section that made everything look washed out and too bright? A diffuser removes that look. You’ll see some examples of it below.

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How Important is a diffuser?

Low-to-mid range wedding photographers claim that diffusers are essential to softening the harshness of flash inside venues. This is most true if you intend to flash at your subjects directly or when walls aren't available to bounce. If this is not the case and there is a wall/roof/ you're not alone (prepare to laugh when I introduce the shirt bouncer), this chart explains it better than I can with words:



I don't use the Gary Fong lightsphere anymore (which was presumably the 'best' diffuser around, even though you can make one that is much more effective by using a gallon of milk).
Yes, the lightsphere sends light all around in every direction and helps soften shadows, but a large part of the light will still come directly from the relative area of your camera. Therefore, still looks like on camera flash. Diffusers suck if there is no roof (or the ceiling is too high) because they can't be bounced and work properly. You can diffuse direct flash and reduce some of the flash's harshness as well.

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A good on-camera / flash unit diffuser (and not just a bouncer) works this way:



To be honest, the whole 80% light is too much. I'd say 40-60% is accurate. You lose A LOT of power / batteries. Not only that, but if you're using ETTL (the auto mode on your flash), your photos will come out underexposed. What the diffuser is doing is reducing your flash's power by redistributing it. In order to get effective diffuser photos, you have to set your flash on manual and control how much light you want to produce out of your flash unit.

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So what does it look like?

The sellers of this product claim to have this sort of improvement:



Those claims are true, but you get the same thing from bouncing the light from the ceiling (since they post-processed the eye shadows in this photo).
When you bounce light from the ceiling, the only negative aspect is that you sometimes get darkened eye sockets and dull-looking light, but these are fixed in post processing easily.
If you look closely, there are still shadows produced behind the subjects that don't belong there (due to the distribution of the light by the diffuser), right next to the guys' ear on the right side of the photo. Remember the angle you're supposed to shoot? Because a diffuser changes the way the light path moves, you'll be getting these shadows, although they will be hardly visible.

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A better idea on the drastic improvement over direct flash photography can be seen here:



Unless your lighting conditions permit it (which is not very often), your photos will probably not have light looking like #3. They purposely under-exposed the middle photo to make their product stand out, since bounced photography isn't that bad. They probably also aimed at a diagonal angle where the light is hitting behind the person instead of straight above or they made the girl tilt her head so as to create these excessive shadows.

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Here's an example of a real diffused venue photograph:



This looks good right? To me it looks boooooring!. The light is uninteresting, the colors are bleh, and there is no dynamic anything. Most of your average photographers produce results such as this (in fact, I did just a few months ago). However, using this kind of lighting doesn't produce outstanding photos (the eye opener, world-class pro kind) like the ones I presented at the beginning of this thread.


Compare it with this:







Which would you rather have? You can get better results from a flash unit by bouncing the light, diffusing/bouncing some of it (if necessary), changing your shutter speed /aperture settings, using more than one light source, controlling the power manually, and managing your iso. The rest comes from having a well-lit venue and A LOT OF LUCK.

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Parts 3+ coming soon!

This post was edited by onepagememory on Jan 26 2011 06:49pm

I have read half of it, the other half I will leave for when I am not ready to fall asleep at. It sounds very informal so far I am enjoying it.

wow dude this looks awesome
will read it throughout the day
a huge thanks!!!

a sticky is in order i think



lol @ 80+20+20%

This post was edited by jayandnix on Jan 26 2011 11:43pm

Thank you for the guide. Well written and understandable of course.

What setup and light sources were used at this photo:



btw is this your photo?

This post was edited by ace07 on Jan 27 2011 03:12am

Will explain in Part 4 + 5. Sorry, since I'm writing it from scratch in my spare time, it will take a little longer.

np i hav a couple months
thanks again

You shootin a wedding?

This is great Omar. Thank you for all this.