Photography Lighting “Tidbit” by Al Gordon

 

One thing I know for sure. Manatees don’t listen to me when it comes to posing, and they always seem to sleep right at the time when you want a bride and groom  to pose for you. At my wedding last week at the South Florida Museum, we came up with a better way for the photo with better lighting than I had in the past. While the couple were eating, we placed a flash outside the manatee tank on the side. about 10 exposures were made of the manatees swimming around. To avoid reflections in the glass, we turned off the lights in the room we were in (Separate from the wedding). About 30 minutes later we brought the couple in and made numerous exposures of them in the same horizontal format. We lit the couple with a Doug Gordon Torchlight and a silver reflector. It did not matter that Billy was in the second shot, because it was easy to layer mask him out in the final version. There was no way to get the shot in one frame. The light gave us just the romantic look we were desiring, which was impossible any other way. We had our couple in and out in 5 minutes, If we had waited for the manatees to get in proper posing position, it could have taken 30 minutes or more! We cloned out all the pipes, floating food, and other stuff for the fimal image./ Total Photoshop time- 20 minutes. Well worth it.

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