Shooting Events With On-Camera Flash + Monolights

Shooting Events With On-Camera Flash + Monolights

by William Lulow

Having just purchased my first set of monolights (I hadn’t updated my studio flash equipment in over 30 years), I began looking around for ways to incorporate my EVENT SHOOTING techniques with the new lights. Since the monolights are battery powered, they work in a similar way to my old portable flash units (the Sunpak 120J). They are mounted on the same light stands or can be hand-held, but I needed a way to use my ON-CAMERA FLASH along with them. The way I used to shoot events consisted of one ON-CAMERA FLASH and two external units to provide three constant light sources and produce images like this which would otherwise have just plain, ugly black backgrounds:

This image was made with the ON-CAMERA FLASH lighting the subject and another light aimed at the other people to avoid the really dark backgrounds so frequently obtained with just the on -camera flash alone. This is the setup I used to use with my portable flash units:

Here you can see my two portable flashes set up on either side of a makeshift runway for a corporate fashion show. I also have one unit mounted on the camera so that the main action will be lit. The lights in this position will add some ACCENT LIGHT to the scene as well as serve to throw some light on the background. So, depending on where I stand with the camera, the accents will usually fall on the subject. Here is an example of what effect I can achieve with this set up:

These lights add HIGHLIGHTS to the scene and make the image really stand out. Another example:

Here my accent lights are in relatively the same position so if I move the camera closer to the scene, the lighting becomes a bit more interesting:

In this image, the people in the background are lit up but the focus is on the green beer for St. Patrick’s Day. The beer was shot with selective focus and lit by the light on the camera. The background was lit by the two off-camera flash units.

What is new about my setups for event photographs is that I can now use my MONOLIGHTS instead of my older portable flash units. I found something I called a “DOUBLE HOT SHOE” which allows me to place my on-camera flash AND the wireless trigger for the monolights together on top of my camera. This is what the rig looks like:

It is a little cumbersome, but allows me to use my on-camera flash with as many other lights as I need for any event. Before getting this equipment, the maximum number of lights I could use was three. Now I can make various setups utilizing more than two extra, off-camera lights. Everything is portable and is battery powered. This is possible because the radio receivers are built into all the monolights and I can control all lights from the camera position.

Each one of these lights has its own radio receiver and the power settings can be adjusted from the camera position. Adding the flash to the camera does make the rig a bit heavier, but it’s important to have a light on the camera when you are doing events because it allows you to decide whether or not you want to use it. If you turn it off, but have your other lights on, you can create images like this:

Where figures in the foreground are dark and make a kind of frame for the main subject. Here’s another example:

In this image, the light on the camera was turned off while the other, external light flashed. The shadowy foreground added some depth to the picture as well as framed it a bit and gave it some compositional context. These kinds of techniques make for much more interesting event photographs than just the plain old snapshots.

Since light is the main element that controls what we see, what the camera sees and how we, as viewers react, it’s helpful if we can learn to control it to obtain the kinds of images that are really interesting and compelling to view.