Introduction:
When I am speaking about your on camera flash I am NOT referring to your built in flash. My Canon 5D Mark II just doesn't have a built in flash. I am basically referring to the Canon 580 EXII or if you have it the 600 EX-RT or equivalent.
Now let us move to an advance technique. This is not difficult but if scares a lot of photographers. We are going to change the Color of our flash.
What you need:
1. Sheet of photo gel - CTS (Color Temperature Straw) There is also a CTO (color temperature Orange, but CTS is the preferred one). We have one big sheet that I am sure will last to the end of days. We also bought green, blue and red sheets. Now carefully cut the sheet into small strips that will just cover your Canon Flash. Flip out the wide angle flash deflector (that plastic thing with the cloudy cover). At the same time you cut circular filters for your Quantum and or other flashes. If you bought 1/2 CTS, then you will need two filters to give you CTS. We got ours from Vistek.
2 Your camera
3. Your Canon 580 EX-II or equivalent
4. A room with incandescent or florescent lights at around 2800 deg K.
Scenario:
You recon the church and reception hall to check out the best locations to shoot the happy couple.
You pay close attention to the color and type of lighting in the room.
You do this at or about the same time that your wedding will be occurring.
You take a few shoots to check out the amount of light and to get a ball park exposure setting
You find out that the church has those beautiful incandescent yellow lights.
A.Now you go into your white balance setting and turn it to 2800 K.
B. Gel your flash by putting the strip over the flash and holding in place with the plastic dispersion cover. You may also want to have some black tape on hand just in case you need a bit more force to hold things into place.
Now take your photo of your assistant as discussed in Part I. Notice how the image looks perfect. You are now not fighting with different color lights. It was a bit too much work for me to get a ladder and gel the incandescent lights with a blue gel so I chose the easier path. I mention this because you might run into a Photoshop trick of adding blue filters to remove that orange color caused by conflicting lights.
Summary:
Your digital camera is an amazing tool. The White Balance settings have a large number of different settings that you can use. These are equivalent to adding different gel filters to your camera like we used to do with film. The cost is right where we like it - free. There is another way to deal with different color lights. That is to over power it with flash. You set your camera exposure to use a high shutter speed to diminish the effects of the ambient lights. I prefer to gel our flash as it removes all conflicts with the ambient lighting. There are of course other light sources which you may have to contend with. This is the most common one that I run across.
Masters-Tip: Gel your on and off camera flashes to match the ambient light color temperature.
Masters-Tip: Try shooting using Blue, red or green gels to give a different effect during the reception.
I hope that you enjoyed today's post. In part III we will explore using our Camera Flashes in manual mode. Thanks for dropping by.
Kirk is a Professional Wedding Photographer in Windsor Ontario Canada. In appreciation if you would be so kind as to give a G+ and a Facebook Like KW Masters Photography on his Facebook page. You only have to do this once and add your likes and G+ per post.
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