Digital Wedding Photography: Capturing Beautiful Memories

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Chapter 8 ✦ Shooting Indoors

Minimizing Reflections

Shooting indoors requires that you pay special attention to the way your lights bounce back from reflec-

tive surfaces. At the altar area you may have flat panels of wood that are certain to cause headaches. In

the reception hall there may be mirrors and windows to work around. Every one of these can cause a

reflection that can ruin your picture.

Reflections are easily avoided as soon as you understand the basic principle of reflection. That is, light

reflects out at the same angle it went in. For example, as you can see in Figure 8-6, if a light beam

approaches a mirror at 45 degrees, it will reflect out at 45 degrees on the opposite side. You can use this

concept at a wedding to place your lights so that they do not cause reflections to show up in your pic-

tures. For example, if you have a mirror on the wall behind a family group shot, you can easily remember

that the reflection will show up halfway between your camera and your flash. If your flash is mounted on

your camera, then the reflection will be directly in the middle of the group. If you move the flash to the

side, for every two feet you move the flash over, the reflection will move over one foot. If our hypotheti-

cal group is ten feet wide, we need the reflection to go over at least seven feet to get it out of the image.

That means the flash must go over at least 14 feet. Figure ...