We're putting the spotlight on our pal Easton Reynolds in advance of his bomb diggity workshops at WPPI 2018. He's a wizard with speedlights, and he'll be teaching One Light Storytelling: How to See the Second Shot. He'll also be teaching a business & marketing workshop, How to Attract Your Ideal Client for Less Than It Cost You For a Night Out. Easton's crazy talented and an awesome educator, so get in on that! Can't make it to the show? He's sharing a peak at his process in this blog. Enjoy!
Hi! Easton Reynolds here! My wife, Laura, and I own LuRey Photography, a Philadelphia-based wedding studio. We are extremely excited and honored to share with you how we shot this sweet image, so let’s dig in!
For this image we used 3 Yongnuo 560 IV speedlights. One was on the ground behind the couple pointed straight up with a Full CTB MagGel. The second was placed on a stand to camera right with a ¼ CTO Standard Gel. The third was placed on a stand about 30 degrees to camera left with a ¼ CTO Standard Gel stacked with a MagGrid and MagSphere.
This diagram illustrates the setup:
We started by getting our settings for the available ambient light. We want to slightly underexpose the ambient by 2/3 of a stop when we add flash to an image. Next, we add in each light one at a time until we like the look it’s producing. In the image above, we have our ambient settings and we have our flash exposure set for the light behind the couple. We then add the light from camera right into the mix. We added this light to the shot simply to light the horse that is in front of the image so it wasn’t silhouetted.
Lastly, we added the main light to light up the couple. You can get a better idea of light placement from the diagram below. We also added some Atmosphere Aerosol behind the couple.
We shot on a Nikon D750 using a Nikon 24-70 f2.8 lens. The final settings for this image were f3.5 Shutter 1/100 ISO 1600 26mm focal length.
Here's the finished image: