So yes I promised I’d do a post going into a bit more detail about how to light the 200 odd people of the London Lindy Exchange. Dancing fast. In a large (70x40ft) hall. With only three speedlights…

If you’re not a camera nerd I suggest you leave this post alone. Otherwise find out after the jump…

Okay, so let’s start off with a base. This is what Old Finsbury Town Hall looked like with no flash.

It’s quite a mix of different colours; harsh pinks and blues from gelled hot lights then some strong yellows on the stage. The dancers are generally in shadow with very little light hitting them. This was taken at f/2.8 iso 4000. If I wanted to get the dancers correctly exposed via natural light I’d be down in the ‘hail-Mary’ shutter speeds…

Okay, so I had to do something. Some options I came up with:

1. Use a very fast prime and be glad you have a D3 – Well yes that could have worked. However all I’d have done here is swap the hail-Mary shutter speed range for the hail-Mary aperture range. With subjects dancing, performing fast swing outs and aerials getting anything in focus would be next to impossible.
2. Use on camera direct flash – Well yes that would work. It would end up looking icky, like they’ve just come out of a point and shoot, and people would start throwing rotten fruit as my flash pummeled them directly in the face. Not really an option for the discerning photographer.
3. On Camera Bounce – Could work a bit but getting consistent results would be a nightmare. The ceiling is high and a mixture of blue and white. As such I really wouldn’t be able to be sure of the colour temperature of the light coming back. Also it being so high my flash would be working overtime trying to get any light to hit the subject. Chewing through flash batteries is not a good way to tackle global warming.
4. Off Camera, hand held  – This seems to be pretty popular with dance photographers and can produce some quite good results. By holding the flash in the left hand and camera in the right it allows you to position the light anywhere you want for each shot. There are drawbacks with this though. It’s very inconsistent. You really don’t know what you’re going to get from one shot to the next, you could get lucky, you could completely miss. Another problem is that most photographers using this method use a stofen on the top of the flash. The idea here is to bounce the light around the room and hopefully fill some shadows/create some cool effects. The problem is that it robs your flash of power and ultimately drains the batteries pretty damned quickly.
5. Off camera, pre setup flash – Yep this is the method I used. It allows you consistent lighting (important when trying to photograph pretty much everybody on the dance floor) and allows you to create different lighting zones to give different effects.

Here’s how I chose to light the hall:

Light one is an SB900 with a 1/4 CTO Gel on it. This is fired through a white window curtain to the side of the hall. I think my diagram is slightly wrong here in that it was actually more central to that wall. Anyway the curtain was big and white so by firing a flash into it I effectively created a huge soft box. This was my main light and threw quite a nice, even light over all of the dancers. The CTO warmed it a touch, just the way I like it. Since it’s so diffused and quite high most dancers don’t even notice it firing.

Light two is on a high light stand in the stage. This is pointed directly at the dance floor. This creates quite a harsh light spread evenly over the floor. Since it’s so high it’s out of most dancers’ sight lines and again they don’t really notice it going off.

Light three was clamped up high to a massive curtain rail. Quite handy that being there: it was being used to hold a heavy curtain to help with the acoustics – I simply re-purposed it to also be a make-shift light stand. The flash was pointed at a white patch in the ceiling creating quite a nice fill.

Here’s the room with all the lights in place:

The key here is that I have now created different lighting zones to work in and have boosted the exposure so I now have some room to walk the aperture and get the different exposures/depth of feels I require.

Right so onto the lighting zones. I’ve effectively created three zones here, one by light one, one by light two and (yes you guessed it) one by light three.

As I come close to light one, light one becomes a really nice big diffused key light. I can then use flash three (the one on the stage) as either a hair light, to create separation from the background or as in the case below as a special effect light. All I have to do is move my position relative to the flashes and walk the aperture as required.

If I move close to the stage, the bare speed-light really takes over as the main. Here we get quite a harsh light creating big shadows. Lights one and three act as fill and hair lights but generally it just all gets a bit harsher with a much quicker fall off into the shadow areas:

If I move between flash one and two I get quite a nice combination. Here you can see that the male lead dancer is lit by the bare stage flash. This creates quite a harsh light with fast shadow fall off. It also acts to rim light the female follow. The follow, in contrast, is lit by flash one fired into the curtain. This creates a much more diffused light source slightly below (in exposure terms) the main stage light. Flash one also rim lights the male lead’s hair and arm. Flash three here creates the baseline and helps prevent areas from falling into deep shadow.

So yes anyway, that’s how I chose to light London Lindy Exchange. Any questions, feel free to hit me up in the comments below.

Alex