Practical wedding lighting

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I had great fun photographing Lauren and Allan's wedding yesterday at The Dog Inn in Wingham, Kent. They decided to cut the cake in the gazebo and I thought it would be more interesting to have the Dog Inn and their guests in the background rather than shooting into the gazebo. Light levels in the gazebo were much lower than the background scene, and as I knew I'd require a good amount of lighting power to counterbalance this, I set up two Canon 580EX II Speedlites on stands with my homemade diffusers (checkout the shot above) - a key and a fill light in a 2:1 ratio. They were controlled wirelessly using the Canon ST-E2 transmitter.

And the shot above is an example of the results from this set-up. Both foreground and background perfectly balanced and with good modelling (not just front lighting with no depth) in the light. It only took 5 minutes to put together.

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