How To Photograph Events

How To Photograph Events

By William Lulow

There will always be events to photograph. Weddings, corporate meetings, speeches, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, birthdays…anytime people celebrate anything, there will be a need to document them.

There are a few things you need to know as a photographer of events:

1. Events take place in large spaces. These spaces need to have enough light if you are going to include most details of the event.
2. If you are using any type of artificial light, it has to be able to cover the space.
3. If you are using electronic flash, you will probably need more than one unit. 

With the coming of digital photography and the development of super-sensitive CCDs, photographers have been able to rely less and less on lighting the event in favor of capturing events using available light.  These days, one can shoot at high ISO speeds and still retain excellent detail with very little loss of sharpness. While covering a Bar Mitzvah a few years ago, I was able to shoot some images at ISO 800 and even ISO 1600 with excellent results:

There have even been several events during which I was able to utilize the available light:

Most of the time, however, you will need to add some light to whatever venue you are shooting in to bring the light level up to where you can shoot safely with decent exposures. 

When you are using speedlights or any other type of electronic flash, you have to be aware of several things:

1. Light from flash units travels in a straight line and falls off, that is, is reduced in intensity, in a predictable way.
2. Light from flash units is directional unless it is diffused or bounced off of some kind of reflector.
3. Light that is bounced or diffused is also reduced in intensity.
4. Many portable speedlights are not as powerful as modern, studio flash units.
5. Studio flash units are sometimes heavy and require plug in to a constant current.
6. Speedlights rely on batteries that have a life span and take more time to recycle the more they are used. They also begin to lose some of their power as they are used.

Here are some results using speedlights to photograph events:

Here, the remote speedlight was used by itself (with the unit on the camera turned off), to illuminate the scene.

Here are a couple of children playing, lit by the light on the camera bounced into a reflector and a light placed to the rear of the scene and on the left. Notice the nice highlights on the hair. 

This is party setup. You can easily see the position of both remote lights, and the flash on the camera was used as well. These images can be cropped so that the lights are not visible, but the interesting highlights they create add interest. 

When using multiple speedlights for an event, you can control which ones flash at which times. They can be gelled (colored gels can be used over them to add color effects). Plus, you can always control the flash on the camera to let the other remote speedlights provide all the illumination. The reason for using three lights on location is also because the background has to be lit if you want it to show in the picture. 

Having the ability to make good images with very sensitive digital cameras does not take the place of learning about light and what it can do. If one learns the various lightings I have sought to teach in some of these articles, he or she will be more able to notice these effects when observing them in the real world.