Lighting Gear
Lighting Gear
What we bring to weddings
- Room Lights – We use the Godox AD200 lights for our primary room lights. They have multiple flash heads – rectangular fresnel heads, round flash heads, and flash tubes. We use the tubes for portraits (I think they distribute light better), and the round heads for rooms. The round head with the flash extender (5) produces a perfect circle spot light.
- These pistol-grip style flash holders (we use to call them umbrella stands) are made my MagMod. I’m not a MagMod fan, but I buy the best gear for the job, and own a dozen of these. I think they call them MagGrips, and they’re very convenient.
- On-Camera flashes. Sometimes a photographer has to be mobile, and portable flashes are essential on a dance floor.
- Gels. Shown are two types of gels that MagMod makes, but I also use circular magnetic gels from Godox, and Rosco gel film that I fit onto flash tubes. The Rosco gel film is the least expensive and by far the best, but the MagMod and Godox gels are magnetic and very convenient. This is the most important piece of flash gear at a wedding – far more imporant than the flashes themselves. If you use flash (usually calibrated to about 5500 Kelvin) in a room lit by anything besides daylight, it will not match! Candle light, incandescent bulbs, LED lights, and flourescent lights all have their own color, and you must match flash or room lights to the existing illumination.
- Flash Extenders – another MagMod product, they call these MagBeams. These focus a camera flash and tighten the beam, which makes the same amount of light go further. So cool for party pictures, but also useful at ceremonies or portraits.
- Portrait Lights – We call ours the Portable Sun. For group portraits, a huge amount of light is required to make every face lit correctly. We use two of these, equivalent in power to about 12 camera flashes. We use to use studio lights with a battery; now we use Godox lights that are 400 or 600 watts each.
- Flash clips. Manfrotto makes these fantastic clamps that can attach to a shelf, ledge, or light as easily as a light stand. Good for small flashes, not great for larger lights.
- Softboxes. These work brilliantly indoors, but wind and softboxes don’t mix. I have a couple of the MagMod softboxes I’ll sell to anyone who wants them – I prefer the Cheetah Stand softboxes, which I use in the studio as well. Cheetah also makes a very cool light stand that pops open, but they don’t work on grass 🙁
- 9) LED Video Lights. I use Yongnuo lights which are super cheap, but I only use them in a few circumstances. Outdoors at night my camera won’t focus, and I love shooting outside in the pitch dark.
- Lightstands – mostly a commodity, but I have a few requirements. Ballroom lights I like really high, so I use 13′ stands that are heavy duty. I also use Godox extension cords to keep the battery down at the base of the light, and only have a flash head up high for safety.
Photographers, I know what you’re going to say: “It’s too much. No one needs that many lights at a wedding.” You’re right, most weddings we use 4 lights in a ballroom, 2 lights at the ceremony, and 2 lights for the portraits. You could do everything with just 4 lights, but then you’d be running around on a wedding day moving lights between locations. It’s far more efficient to set up multiple sets of lights before the day begins, and collect them all during the dinner hour.
Twice a year we get a wedding that is big enough that we need everything pictured above, sometimes because the dinner and events are in one ballroom, and the party is in another, and other times because a room is very dark, and impossible to bounce light around.
