More About Shooting Events

More About Shooting Events

by William Lulow

I have written about shooting events many times, but one thing I like about shooting different subjects at different venues is that you never quite know what kinds of conditions you will find. A shoot this week presented the following: a large auditorium-like space with a gym set up for toddlers. My assignment was to shoot the space as well as create some interesting images of the children there. This is what the space looked like after I decided to set up two of my lights on either side of the room:

My thinking here was that I didn’t know where most of the action was going to take place. So, I wanted to make sure that the room was covered and that the lighting on either side would be at least with two lights, because I also used a diffused light on my camera.

Here was a shot of a child playing on the bars to the left of the room:

You can see the effect of the light on that side. It creates some nice highlights because with the main light diffused, my accent lights on either side of the room are now about one f/stop brighter thus providing a white highlight. Here’s a shot with the right-side accent light:

My initial assessment of the light needed for this space was correct because I could cover action on either side of the room with similar lighting. Again, the light on the camera was provided by a white bounce card.

This is enough to keep the on-camera flash soft and reduce its intensity enough to have the accent lights register as white on the subjects. Most exposures were around f/5.6 – f/7.1 @ 1/80th of a second with the ISO set at around 1000. This provides clear enough images for website use and lets me stop action if I want to. With ISO settings at 1000 or so, it is tough to get really crisp images that will enlarge well, but for web use, you can see how clear they are.