Photo recipes: Scott Kelby on dealing with bad weather on a wedding day

In his series in Digital Camera magazine and Digital Camera World, the legendary Scott Kelby reveals some of the behind-the-scenes secrets of some of his favourite images.

This month Scott shares his experience on making the best of gloomy weather when photographing a wedding.

Words and images by Scott Kelby. You can follow Scott and his work on his blog or on his live photography talk show The Grid. You can also find Scott and his KelbyOne team on their Facebook page and on Twitter as @KelbyOne.

Recently I was shooting a wedding, and had a ‘wedding day disaster’. It wasn’t caused by the usual problems (like equipment failure, dropping a lens, or forgetting a key piece of gear), but simply by bad weather.

We’d scoped out the wedding location well before the event. It was a hotel right on the river with beautiful grounds, and it had this gorgeous outdoor terrace lined with beautiful columns – perfect for the bridal formals.

With the river right there, and the beautiful landscaping around the hotel, we knew we had plenty of places to shoot, which was great because the interior of the hotel itself was… Well, it really gave you nothing. A small lobby and a dark bar filled with other hotel guests, and that was pretty much it. But luckily, we had all those outside areas.

Well, that was until some of the worst thunderstorms in years arrived in the morning. They stayed around so long that they had to close the streets leading to the hotel due to flooding. In an instant, all our outdoor shots went away, so we were forced to shoot in the ugly lobby and the dark bar. Ack!

We went to the hotel’s event manager and asked if there was any other place we could shoot. The only thing he could come up with was to give us access to a small conference room, where you’d normally host a small business meeting. He said, “At least there’s a window.” It was all we had, so we took it.

This tutorial is based around what we did there, and how we used a technique I shared on these pages a few months ago for shooting sports. We applied that same idea to our wedding shoot.

SEE MORE: 8 survival tips every wedding photographer must know

Step by step: How to get good wedding pictures in bad weather

1 Hide the background
My assistant Brad and I walked into the ground-level conference room the hotel let us use, and saw floor-to-ceiling drapes. We were hoping there would be a nice view, but when we opened the drapes we were facing a car rental agency, a sandwich shop and a concrete multi-level parking garage. It was anything but nice.

It was grey and rainy outside, but at least there was enough light coming in to light the bride. The question was: how could we prevent that awful junk outside the window from winding up in our shot?

So I decided to let it blow out to solid white. That way, you weren’t really able to see anything out of the window. It would appear solid white on the other side of the drapes, and it would look like a wall of beautiful natural light was greeting the bride, instead of a car rental agency on a grey rainy day.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes: Scott Kelby on how to control harsh natural light

2 Choosing the settings
When I shoot in natural light, I use Aperture Priority mode, and in such a low-light situation I chose the lowest-numbered f-stop I could. Here I was using a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, so I used f/2.8.

But the trick was to overexpose the shot by at least two stops, so I used the exposure compensation dial on the back of my Canon 5D Mark III to increase the exposure by two stops. I took a test shot. It wasn’t enough to make the outside completely white, so I increased it to three stops and took another.

For shots like this, I prefer not to use a wide-angle lens, and instead stand back and zoom in with my 70-200mm so I get the benefits of lens compression. I had to shoot at ISO 2,500 to get my shutter speed to 1/125 sec, because it was dark in the room and I was using three stops of exposure compensation.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes: Scott Kelby explains how to shoot on location with two lights

3 post-processing
I converted the shot to black and white in Lightroom, then dragged the Contrast slider to the right. I always convert to black and white when the colour in an image is kind of bland.

The colour wasn’t great in the wide window shot, so I converted this one to black and white as well.

However, it looked a little cold, so I used Lightroom’s Split Toning panel to add a duotone effect. I used the Shadow sliders – I don’t touch the Highlights or Balance sliders when making duotones. I increased Saturation to 15, and set Hue in the low 20s to get a brownish sepia look.

SEE MORE: How to make your images more tasteful and sophisticated

4 Softbox lighting
Once I realised that we were only going to be able to take one or two shots at the window, I asked Brad to bring my go-to softbox, an Elinchrom 53-inch Midi Octa, into the conference room. I had brought it with me to do the group formals after the wedding, but its large size would also make for some nice, soft portrait lighting. I had the bride set up in a profile, and just let the edge of the light skim her to create a rim light effect.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes: Scott Kelby on how to blend light sources

5 Settings for the rim-lit profile
There was very little ambient light at all in the room, and I wanted the background to be solid black. I switched my camera to Manual mode, as I always do when shooting with flash, and I set the shutter speed to my standard 1/125 sec.

I set the ISO to 100 because I always try to use the lowest native ISO when shooting with flash in order to get the cleanest shots possible. I shot this using an aperture of f/5.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes: Scott Kelby on how to balance camera settings and flash

Sports technique at the wedding

Recently, while covering an American football game, I used a home-made rig for shooting over the players’ heads in order to get a wide, sweeping shot of the action on the football pitch. I made it by mounting my camera onto the end of a monopod, and triggered it using a Pocket Wizard transmitter.

I thought it’d be a good idea to use the same technique here at the wedding to shoot the room where they would hold the ceremony, and the reception area before the guests arrived.

Reception room previews by the bride and groom are pretty common in weddings these days, so they can take some time to enjoy one of the things that took the most planning before the event.

You can see me holding the Pocket Wizard remote in my left hand. Each time I press the Test button on the remote, it takes a shot using a Canon 8-15mm fisheye zoom at 15mm.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes: Scott Kelby shows how remote camera mounts can help you take more creative photos

Here’s the empty reception hall, once everything has been set up and is in place, but before the bride and groom get their preview of the room.

This is the fisheye shot of the empty reception room on the monopod boom. I simply pressed the Test button on the remote to take these lovely shots.

I took this just before the bridal party entered the ceremony area. I had the monopod set up, so all I had to do was walk in and take three shots (just in case!).

The post Photo recipes: Scott Kelby on dealing with bad weather on a wedding day appeared first on Digital Camera World.