Lighting 550 People!

Sometimes, you have to shoot in low light, sometimes you have to shoot in the DARK, and that means lights.  I was recently asked to photograph the farewell dinner for former University of Lethbridge President Dr. Bill Cade. The dinner was to take place in the late evening, at the 1st Choice Savings Centre for Health and Wellness – Our Gym.  The only problem?  No house lights. None. Just candles.  There was a tiny bit of ambient creeping in the upper windows, but it would have been about f/0.9 at 5 seconds and ISO 800million. Lights it is.

How do you light a giant room of 500 people?  Use as much light as you can, shoot wide open or close to it, and “season-to-taste” with your ISO. Shutter speed doesn’t really factor in because we’re shooting in the dark, and not worried about picking up any ambient. I was lucky enough to have the running track above the gym-floor to use as a place for lights as it gives me a ton of height to work with, and some distance, so that I can utilize the inverse square law to ensure that front-to-back my light is relatively unchanging.

My first plan was to set up three lights about 40 feet apart each, and aim them at the stage (the most important part of the venue to be lit). Here’s what I set up:
(Two pictures to show all three lights, Underexposed so you can see what’s going on)


A key part of this whole setup is the use of my LPA Pocketwizard Plus  II’s.  When you’re roaming around hundreds of feet from your lights, you need reliable triggering, and once again my PW’s came through.  After I had these set-up and pointed at the stage, I wanted to see what it would look like:

Looks pretty good, and I managed to pull out 640 f/4 at a 250th. Once we got some folks into the venue, I noticed a big problem:
If I was shooting off-axis from the lights, I was getting undesirable results. The ability to shoot off-axis was pretty important in this scenario, so I got to troubleshooting. Luckily, My first plan worked.  I headed back up to the catwalk and pointed all lights at the (luckily white) metal roof, so I’m effectively setting up three giant bounce-flashes.  It would mean more light spill, and a loss in light on my subjects, but I was only at ISO640, and still had another stop down to 2.8 if I needed. After getting all three lights off the roof, I got much better results:

Had to push up to IS0 800 and f/2.8 (1 1/3 stops of loss) but It was well worth it for the quality of light!

More to come!

-Rod