We are moving towards doing 100% destination weddings, BUT, we are still contracted here and there to shoot in a big church or cathedral, where you can expect DARK dungeon type lighting. I always find it a challenge when the ceremony starts at 7:30 pm in the summer, Catholic service, so you are easy looking at 1 hour ceremony and 15 minutes of formals… Basically, there is NO natural light outside for any bride & groom shots… oh well. Pull out the homemade snoot and make some magic, or at least try to

We use pocket wizards to trigger our remote slaves. However, have you ever have a night where things just didnt work? I can recall one wedding where I was convinced that ALL my pocket wizards were broken, or cables jacked up, who knows as nothing worked. In hindsight, I think there must have been some type of interference that caused total shutdown. Technical problem nights like that aren’t fun. I do find that sometimes, the pocket wizards become tricky as the PC cables tend to get bent, or just dont work. Often, I share the same slave as my 2nd photographer and we steal each others flash when we trigger the slave during a recycle and end up with a frame with NO flash.

I have spoken previously about Happy Accidents before in this post…however, today is all about a totally different type of happy accident!

Sometimes a non-working flash can be a happy accident! In this old church, Sol Tamargo stole my flash recycle, and we ended up with this happy accident.

This is Sol’s image, not the happy accident.

 

Don’t ask me how or why the flash didnt go off, I’m assuming I fired during her recycle. We had the slave set to 1/32 power. I called it a HAPPY ACCIDENT

I was pleasantly surprised to see this shot. My intentions were to see a flash on the couple, 100%….something about the grand background behind the couple that works well against their silhouetted outline. I needed to open my mind and not worry about needing that stupid slave. The lesson here is to think about your resources available, at all times. Ask yourself the question, to light or not to light? Then, try the frame both ways.

 

Anybody have any happy accidents? If you want to submit them to the Flash Flavor Flickr group, please feel free to do so.

Cheers!
matt

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 9:16 am and is filed under Photographers, Matt Adcock, Sol Tamargo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.