Dance Floor Cross Lighting

A recent fun and exciting Bat Mitzvah is lending itself well to discuss several lighting techniques, so I'm going to break it up over a few different Posts.

This dance floor was lit with a combination of 3 lights. Two lights on opposite corners facing eachother (cross lighting). These two lights were remotely controlled in manual using a radiopopper JRx remote. The third light is on camera TTL (dialed back a few stops) and flagged to create all directional light. The on camera light was pointing back and to camera right almost perpendicular to the guest of honor's left shoulder and into the ceiling.

The motion blur was created by freezing my subjects motion with the flash and then dragging the shutter .4 seconds while panning the camera to keep up with the subject. Ideally I would have switched over to rear curtain sync, but I saw the photo and had to take it rather than button mash for 5 seconds. The final photo was taken at ISO 500,0.4secs @ f/4, 16mm.

I'm going to have more on the cross lighting in the future, but here's another fun one from the evening.



ISO 500, 1/60sec @ f/4, 16mm

You can see the cross lighting exemplified by the shadows coming off of the balloons on the ceiling. You can see one of my lights in the lower right hand corner of the photo. Not quite as much fill here because she was higher up and more light was reaching here so I dialed back even further and bounced my flagged light over my left shoulder into the wall/ceiling.

If I would have just used a standard bounce card, or 45 degree with a plastic diffuser, the gentleman in the front would have been lit up like a rocket ship. By flagging my light I keep control over it and make the photo I want to make.

Soon I'll be giving more examples from this event with single lighting, a makeshift studio, and more cross lighting examples....stay tuned.