Light Source: The Wedding (Not) in the Woods: Part 2

Jim Stinson
October 2004

Gee, Goldie, it was nice of you to compliment me on my explanation of how I lit a redwood grove for a wedding. (Was that "[YAWN!!]" in your reply, like, ironic?) Don't you wanna know how it came out? I knew you did.

Okay, we left our hero (that would be me) in a downpour with five hundred pounds of lighting and batteries and a mile from the park lodge where the wedding would now take place in two hours. The crew took over as pack mules, so I could sprint ahead and case the lodge for light and power.

At first, things looked pretty good (see the included images). A nice big room, with nice high ceilings, a wall of windows on one side and a high clerestory window across the back (Figure 1). The lodge’s staff was setting up guest chairs right where they’d get good side light and a nice back light from the high-up windows. This was fine, because the room went on and on past the wedding area, with no windows to speak of. But the wedding area was showing a good f3.5 exposure from available light alone.

The next step was to check the power. This is a public building with 20-amp circuits, so I’m guessing I’m probably okay. To be dead sure, I plug a 1,000-watt spot into each of three wall outlets. After 10 minutes (breakers don’t always trip immediately), the lights were still blazing away. Outstanding!

Then the bride and groom take their places and I start lighting them because they’re well beyond the side windows. “What are those ugly lights?” says the bride-to-be. “I want the wedding video to look natural.” What she’ll get is either (a) video looking so back-lit that the bride, groom, and pastor are silhouettes or (b) video crawling with grain and artifacts from the exposure gain-up circuits on the camcorders. Uh oh.

But wait! The wedding area can be cut off by accordion doors, the kind you see in every hotel meeting or banquet room. So I pull each side out just about 6 feet and hide the key and fill lights behind the two of them (Figure 2).

Now I can conceal my key and fill lights from the guests, more or less. The bride is still unhappy, but resigned when I promise her a mud-colored video otherwise.

BTW, Goldie, notice that the key light is on the groom’s side and the fill is on the bride’s. How come? White wedding dresses give gaffers fits: Put a hot key spot on her and she’ll look positively radioactive. By spotting the key on the opposite side, I can punch up the groom in his black monkey suit, while partially shadowing the bride’s right side. The light balance will be much better.

“Hey!” says the producer, “That’s great. I’ll spot my main camcorder right under the fill light.” He’s right: the spill from the windows behind the bride and groom delivers just the right amount of backlight.

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