When life gives you lemons, make lemonade

f/2.8 @ 1/200 sec ISO 400 at 130mm	f/2.8 @ 1/200 sec ISO 1600 at 200mm
f/2.8 @ 1/125 sec ISO 800 at 70mm	f/2.8 @ 1/125 sec ISO 6400 70mm

In January I was invited to a Masquerade Ball Fashion Show at a local club / restaurant to photograph 50 beautiful models. Despite the fact that I don’t really do event shooting, I thought this might be a good opportunity to practice my lighting skills I picked up after reading On-Camera Flash Techniques under some very challenging conditions.

When I arrived, it was worse than I thought when I found myself with 9 other photographers and 30 models in a restaurant private dining room that had to be no more than 300 sqft. To make matters worse the furniture had  been pushed to the side making the place even more crowded, and the red walls and no overhead light made for challenging conditions to say the least.

Making the best of a bad situation, I proceeded to line a few models up literally in a space between some tables and take pictures of them against a red wall. I was hoping for the best, but armed with only my on-camera 580 EX II flash I wasn’t expecting much. The top two photos are some of the fruits of my labor, and the one on the left has a before processing image that shows what I was starting with. I used onOne Software’s PhotoFrame 4.5 and layer masks via channel selection to replace the dull red background with a more festive texture.

I chose to do the same thing with the bottom right go-go dancer shot where my umbrella flashed in the window behind her and the background really sucked. I chose to do a semi-transparent texture here to keep a little of the environment so that it didn’t seem like  studio shot. The red area by her boots are where my flash reflected back very hot. If you hover over this image, you’ll see another lightly processed shot that has all of the flaws of the second shot.

All of these images were shot freehand with a Canon 5D Mark II using a 580 EX II flash with a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens mostly in sRAW mode (maximum 16x11 print size (@ 240 ppi) would be sufficient). For the go-go dancers I had two umbrellas with 580 EX II’s triggered by a Canon ST-E2 wireless transmitter. This helped, but it was pitch black so 6400 ISO was required later in the evening when the dancers weren’t able to stand next to my lights.

Lessons learned here were:

1. Don’t be afraid of high ISO as the 5D Mark II never let me down. This makes me even more excited about my new 1D Mark IV as my early tests suggest that it performs equally well.
2. Small room, too many photographers, poor lighting, etc… – the perfect recipe to pack up and call it a day. However, the real pro figures out how to get something in camera and if things are still suboptimal then he figures out how to take care of the rest in post-processing (please no debates on that almost religious subject).
3. Get the Canon CP-E4 Compact Battery Pack. Despite having 16 Sanyo Eneloop rechargeable batteries, I found myself short on battery life for the grand finale fashion show.
4. Don’t be jealous if another guy snatches the sweet spot for a makeshift studio. Do the best you can with what you have and aim to get a good image of the subject. Backgrounds can be replaced in a pinch, but a bad shot of your subject is useless. I’ve seen plenty of bad shots from others who attended, so I’m happy I had this attitude.

To see more shots from this night (some of which are much less successful, but online as a courtesy to the model), check out this gallery.