Five Favorite MagMod Lighting Techniques for Wedding Receptions

in this video I'm going to show you five of my favorite lighting techniques when it comes to wedding receptions hello my friends my name is Pai welcome to another magma tutorial now when I was first getting into wedding photography one of the most challenging things is just how do you light the wedding reception there are so many different types of environments and scenes and challenges and things happen so quick that it's just difficult so in this tutorial I want to break down and give you just five of my favorite lighting techniques when it comes to wedding receptions I'm going to show you the gear how to set it up I'm going to show you the results all of it so let's get started with number one your Outdoors or your dark environment where there's nothing to bounce light off of what do you do in these moments okay so look the first thing that we would probably think to do is kind of just get our flash onto the camera and go with direct flash now direct flash works but it's not really ideal it creates pretty harsh Shadows really harsh lighting it's just not very flattering when it comes to photographing people so instead here's what you're going to do step one dial in your ambulite into camera a good place to start is 1 160 of a second F 2.8 and ISO 3200 maybe even higher but what you want to do is you want to make sure that you're capturing some ambient light like you see in this image now this was actually extremely dark so we had to go up to 6400 ISO but again most cameras these days they can handle 3200 6400 you still get great results especially when you expose correctly in camera but the key here is that you want to see some of that environmental light you don't want it to be dark in your frame and just rely solely on the flash to light the entire scene because you lose the kind of ambiance of that seat right I like that word anyway step two you're gonna flip the flash up and you're gonna grab your mag bounce and use this to basically bounce light forward now what's going to happen with this is it's going to allow some of that light to go up and kind of bounce around the room but it's going to funnel most of it forward and it gives you a much larger area than just that direct Flash so let me show you the results using the mag bounce well this is just ambulite with no flash right outdoors with just mag bounce this is the result and it looks so much better than just direct flash it's actually quite a bit softer it's a little bit more diffused all of it but one of the other things that I like to do too is this environment so in this scene we're working this this wedding where they have this tapestry that's kind of just painted blue with light so My worry is that if I'm just bouncing in this room I'm going to get a lot of blue light back so I need to push some light forward so I use the mag bounce in this case and say on the dance floor when someone is well this is our performer and actually I think this guy's pretty famous but when I'm lighting him you get some of that light push forward and it kind of cleans up the face and I also still get some bounce as well so it's a really nice in between we get a bit of Bounce we get a lot of light pushed forward and we get a much larger light source than just direct flash technique number two I want you to get comfortable using sectional light when it comes to speeches toasts performances at the reception I'm going to show you exactly what I mean so what we would typically do is we would go into a reception room and let's say that we have a ceiling to bounce off of we'd probably just grab our Flash and maybe we throw on a CTO gel to kind of correct for the light I'm going to talk about that a little more in a second right and maybe we even use like a MAG sphere or a MAG bounce on top so this is the sphere and we start shooting and bouncing light just off the ceiling and we get pretty decent stuff we get stuff like this where most of the light in the scene is kind of being bounced around and kind of coming from directly on our camera now the problem with this though is that you notice it kind of washes the scene out of its natural color right like we see this up lighting but we don't really see any of it because we've filled the scene with flash and then we have like kind of more direct flash which creates nasty shadows and it also washes out the ambient light so what I'm going to show is going to take you from stuff like this to images like this where not only can you shoot and move around freely you also get much more Dynamic images you get images that actually capture the scene and uh and all the amiolite within that scene so how do you set it up okay so we need an off-camera flash right we're going to go ahead and place that onto the mag shoe this is a cold shoe adapter and you're going to put this onto whatever stand you like I like to use the manifrado Nano stands they're great they're small and they're very light and portable the Magic in this is going to be placement but it's also going to be light control which means that you need a grid so this is the mag grid too we're gonna pop this right onto the top and now we're basically good to go now I'm going to show you the setup so if we're looking top down on a dance floor and let's say that we have our subjects kind of right in the center maybe like in front of where the bride and groom are sitting right what I like to do is light from one of the corners of the dance floor and then what I'll actually do is shoot from the opposite side of them so I'm not going to shoot with that flash because then it's going to look like direct flash right I'm actually going to shoot from this Shadow side let me give you some examples in this shot that you saw my flash is placed to the right it's lighting him and because it has that Grid it's not spilling onto the entire scene which means I maintain the ambience of the scene I'm shooting through the crowd right now to kind of illustrate what it looks like from everybody else who's watching this person give the toast this is another example so these are performances right so I have my flash placed right here again on the corner of the Dance Floor on the right side lighting this group and if you'd like you can even use more than one flash but what I'd recommend is gridding each one because I don't want that light spilling everywhere into the scene I want it controlled and just on my subjects again this allows me to shoot wide if I'd like or I'm going to show you a full scene right here check this out so this is an entire scene up on the this is an out door deck on a carrier actually in San Diego so we're on this carrier and we have our whole wedding set up here so there's nothing to bounce off right I've got one light placed right here so it's actually right next to it right behind the video light and it's lighting her up and I've got another flash place right here which is creating that Rim light so if you zoom in you can see the exact setup and I'm shooting from the shadow side right from the darker side now what happens with this is we get this beautiful Spotlight effect and I can move around and shoot so I can zoom in and I can get the same lighting I can move to a different angle when other people come out to give toasts I can go in closer I can go on a wider when it's time for performance here's that same Flash the one that's placed in the corner not our bro right here but the one that's placed in the corner that's lighting the entire group and this by the way is the video light so sometimes you can't control where the cinema team is putting their lights but anyway so we have this lighting the entire group and I get a backlight but also I get that main light looks absolutely beautiful I can move around I can shoot this is from the bride and groom's perspective of this dance through like their decor and detail I can get things that aren't just that front and center Shot where I would need to be there with on camera flash right in the middle getting the same exact shots that look washed out that look like stuff like this right so I can get a very different look by just simply using directional light so remember for that your best friend is going to be the Mad Grid 2 along with a gel and we're going to talk about that more right now so when you want a correct color we're going to be using the mag gels and let me show you what that looks like so early in my career I started to recognize that when you get to scenes like this where there's a lot of orange and warmth naturally in the scene if you're not using a warm light so if you're using just regular flash it becomes kind of difficult to match color in post you end up with kind of Muddy orange tones right now for this one I was actually using a hot light that was pretty close to this uh this kind of ambient light but you'll still see what I mean when you look at the scene the background ends up being too orange like if I'm using just regular Bare Bulb flash my background is going to end up being really orange while the main light is going to be very blue so to fix it in post I'd had to sit here and kind of adjust my temperature and then go into the hsl and do all that but in this example right here I actually gelled just to match the ambient room light so I have just the CTO gel here so this is the magmod full CTO and this is the magma half CTO okay so if it's kind of orange then you use the half if it's really orange then use the full either way though you're going to place this right onto your on camera flash and then you're going to dial your in-camera white balance to around 36 to 3 800 Kelvin in this scene I'm using a CTO gel to match the ambient room light so what happens is if I press W instead of layer classic and click on anything that's kind of neutral it gets me to a really really nice white balance it's very neutral you notice the colors they're not really muddy or mixed everything matches all I got to do is figure out the right white balance and I'll apply say my preset like modern and boom add a little bit of contrast and I'm done compared to trying to fix this in post it's much easier just to gel and get the light set up right I'm going to give you another little idea right here one of my favorite setups is just this so I'll walk into a room and if we're working a room like this where I have good bounce I'm going to go ahead and place the flash onto my camera I'm going to grab the appropriate CTO gel so this is the full CTO and I'm going to grab the max here this is kind of my go-to bouncing setup so I'll actually use this and what's going to have with the sphere is it lets most of light travel up and bounce it's going to push out some of the light kind of towards our subject as well so with this I can very much get close to kind of soft box light look with just that and same thing here I'm bouncing off the ceiling as well as using the mag sphere you get a really great look very simple it works incredibly well so this is my go-to when I step into a room that's kind of Bright Walls it's light it's neutral colored something that I can bounce light off of technique number four let's go ahead and get this flash off camera one more time so again I'm going to attach with the mag shoe and this is my backlighting setup so the key to a backlighting setup is going to be again you want your gel to kind of get well it can be stylistic it can also be colored matching right but usually when I backlight I'm going to use either a half or a full CTO because I like my back lights to be warm the other magic in this is going to be either the Grid or the sphere and each of them are going to do something a bit different which I'm going to show you so with this backlighting setup if you want the light to kind of wrap around your subjects then take the grid off and instead add a sphere and what you're going to do is place it directly behind your subjects and I usually like to kind of point it up or maybe if they're wearing white I'll point it towards the white but you'll see in this scene in this actually links to another magma tutorial that we did this is in a parking lot so you can do this technique virtually anywhere and get absolutely wonderful results but this is that light wrapping technique where the light kind of wraps around the face and creates like this beautiful glow but if you don't want the light to wrap if you just want the light to backlight like we have here then what I'm going to do is take the sphere off and again light control is the name of the game we pop the Grid on and this go around I'm placing light facing them but it's behind them maybe five to ten feet so it's kind of like around where this pile of flowers is sort of behind them and what the Grid's going to do is prevent that light from spilling and just killing the entire scene it's going to push the light forward we get a bit of warmth at it so we get this beautiful shot where we can retain the ambient light of a scene and really get Dynamic images but with that backlight that draws attention in so I use this all the time when it comes to receptions for getting my backlight in on my couple getting that wrapping light look all of it this is a go-to last but not least let's talk dance floor so my favorite technique for lighting the dance floor I call the Statue of Liberty because you kind of look like that when you're shooting so look we have a couple different variations of this setup and I'm going to show you the results for each first I'm going to start with this one this setup why is it called the Statue of Liberty well because you're going to take the mag shoe off the stand and you're actually going to hold it but essentially you are shooting with one hand on your camera and you're shooting with the other hand like this and you're holding it up high and aiming it towards your subjects and because yeah it looks like this you're you know Statue of Liberty so the setup for this is there's some variations depending on the look that you want right but you're going to color match first in this case so in this particular image I'm actually just using the max sphere so the max sphere is going to kind of push light everywhere so you get a little bit of a highlight on your subject which you can control with your zoom on your flash as well but you also get a lot of light that's going to kind of go around the scene so we get kind of everybody that's around our bride here sort of lit and it looks really nice but if you want you can funnel that light a bit more so this setup is taking the spear off and replacing it actually with the grid then putting the sphere back on so we do is now we have it pointed at our subjects we get most of the light on our subjects we get a little bit of light kind of going around everybody else because the grid is going to follow that light forward and again this is the same effect here only without the spear so if I want all the light just on my subjects I'm going to take the sphere off and I'm going to use the grid one little trick here and as you're getting used to this technique I would say you might want to do this but once you're used to it you really don't need to one little trick is to use the modern light so a lot of modern flashes have this modern light built into the camera the only thing that I don't like about it is once you're used to the technique I turn it off because on the dance floor when someone like shines this in your face it's very noticeable especially in a dark environment so it kind of gets their attention in a way that like I don't know it kind of bothers me sometimes they stop they look into the camera they pose her picture and I'm like I don't want that so getting used to this though this will help you to kind of get the angle you just need a little bit of practice until it becomes muscle memory like within one reception you will get this down and then I'll turn off my uh you know turn off the light so you're not bugging people but that's also the same technique that I used here as well now here I'm using it with the sphere so you can kind of see when the light is opening up more then that's kind of the spear but I love it for situations like this because in scenes like this where both people get lifted up right I need to be able to get my camera and my light source up really high so I'm actually lifting everything up and I think in this instance I'm not only lifting I actually stood up on the stage as well so the Statue of Liberty lets you get the camera and the light away from your body which gives you extra height it's a really fantastic way of laying a dance floor and and it's my it's my favorite my favorite way so I hope this was useful and beneficial to each of you if you guys enjoyed as always let me know in the comments I read every one of your comments and I do my best to reply as well the Magma Team is watching too and we're also going to link up all the gear that we used in this video in the description so check out the description or the show notes where you can see all the gear that we use and get links to everything and that's it for me enjoy and we'll see you guys in the next tutorial peace

Channel: MagMod

Views: 28,936

Keywords: MagMod, MagGrip, MagGel, MagGrid, MagSnoot, MagBounce, MagSphere, MagnetMod, Speedlight, Speedlite, Flash, Canon, Photography, Modifier, Magnets, Magnet, Magnetic, Nikon, Olympus, Fuji, Camera, Digital, DSLR, off camera flash

Id: iHUVDThngN8

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023