Asian brides and line of sight - Jonathan Thompson Photography

Keeping it simple during an Asian bridal wear shoot, using built in optical triggers

I was chatting online to my friend and beautiful model, Holly Moriarty. She’d had an Asian bridal wear photo shoot arranged for a while. It was going to involve Holly’s Mum as a bit of a treat, getting her hair and makeup professionally taken care of. Unfortunately, 36hrs before the shoot the photographer had to drop out, when I heard this I offered my services to help out, after all, it’s nice to be nice, right?

I packed up a bunch of gear because I didn’t have a detailed brief of what the shoot was going to entail. Heading up to Blackburn from Chester, I wondered what I’d be getting myself into, but I also love the challenge and was confident I’d be able to produce good, usable images. As you may have realised, brides aren’t on my radar for photographic work, but Asian bridal wear is something else entirely.

Arrived in Blackburn

Holly met me at the door, fully adorned in her Asian hair, makeup and bridal wear. She looked amazing I have to say, but then she always does. (Just in case she reads this) 😉 I was introduced to everyone and found we were going to start shooting in the living room of a house just up the road. It was a typical family house so room was going to be a limited. Once there and after moving most of the furniture to make space I set up ready to shoot. Everyone was pretty relaxed and soon the giggles were coming more often.

Gear and how I used it

There wasn’t a lot of room so I opted for my Lastolite Ezybox with one Speedlite and a Trigrip reflector to help lift the shadows. I do have a long TTL cord which I often use to trigger the flash and change the settings. Today I didn’t want to have a cable running across the floor, someone was bound to trip over it. I decided to use the built in, line of sight, optical triggers on my Canon 580EXii’s.

One Speedlite was on my cameras hot shoe acting as a Commander only and the other Speedlite, in the soft box, was set to Slave. If you’d like to know how to set this up with your Canon flash, my good friend Brian Worley of P4Pictures has written a great article on just this subject. The Nikon and other systems work in a very similar way.

In order for the optical trigger system to work the sensor on the Slave needs to see the optical command. It does this through pulses of light coming from the Master flash, telling the Slave how to perform. The Speedlite in the soft box was positioned so that the optical sensor couldn’t see the Commander. The ceiling was white so I turned the Slave sensor towards the ceiling and pointed the flash head, of the on camera Commander, towards the ceiling as well. This way I sent all the optical information via the white ceiling. Radio triggers would have worked really well but there’s often no need to use them.

This system works well in rooms and studios, not as well outside in bright sunshine. Although it’s called line of sight, it doesn’t have to be a single straight line, you can bounce the command signal just like any other light. Then you can change the flash settings, from the camera, speeding up the shoot.

Lets shoot some pictures

The dark window curtains would make a nice background to the brightly coloured Asian bridal dresses. I had the soft box about 45° pointing down at Holly but feathered so only the edge of the soft box was lighting her face. I needed to raise it a little more so some of the light caught the top of her dark hair, separating it from the background. This way one light does two jobs, key or main light and hair light, as there wasn’t room to put in a second light.

As Frank Doorhof said. If you think you need two lights, use one and if you think you need three, use one.

I also thought it would be a good idea to get some detail shots of the jewellery the ladies were wearing, making use of my macro extension tubes once again. They have been remarkably useful since I added them to my bag, this shows yet another use other than food photography.