Shooting Dark and Light Skinned People TogetherI

lightdrunk

One day soon I am going to be shooting a wedding of two friends. The bride is a very dark-skinned black woman, the guy is white. Clearly, this is going to create an exposure challenge. The only thing I can think of is take a reading of each separately, average them together, and hope for the best. This, of course is impractical because of the constant changing of lighting situations and it's too complicated for an auto matrix meter.

I'm interested in hearing from someone who has encountered this problem.

Thanks in advance.

Wil Davis

Use a gray card† and bracket if you're worried.

HTH -
- Wil

† Gray Card

JohnBiggs

lightdrunk wrote:

One day soon I am going to be shooting a wedding of two friends. The bride is a very dark-skinned black woman, the guy is white. Clearly, this is going to create an exposure challenge. The only thing I can think of is take a reading of each separately, average them together, and hope for the best. This, of course is impractical because of the constant changing of lighting situations and it's too complicated for an auto matrix meter.

I'm interested in hearing from someone who has encountered this problem.

Thanks in advance.

If you are exposing to cover a white dress and black tux I would imagine that they would fall in line?

Tim Kamppinen

"The only thing I can think of is take a reading of each separately, average them together, and hope for the best. This, of course is impractical because of the constant changing of lighting situations and it's too complicated for an auto matrix meter."

This is exactly what matrix metering is made for. It averages everything together and exposes for middle gray. Now, that's not to say it will do a perfect job, since your background and anything else in the frame will affect it as well, but it's a good starting point. Go manual, get the exposure where the meter tells you it's good, then check the results and adjust as necessary.

Remember, their skin isn't supposed to look the same. The bride has dark skin in real life, so she should have dark skin in the photo. I would probably make sure that her face looks good, with plenty of detail, and use that for my exposure. If you end up with some blown highlights on the dress you should be able to take care of them in camera raw or lightroom, but if you underexpose skin that is already dark there's not going to be a lot of data to work with and it will probably look pretty ugly when you pull it up in post (noise, etc.)

lightdrunk

Thanks, folks. This is a great help.

harvey3

never mind it!
your wonder camera will do everything for you...

good luck.

ziggy53

Shoot RAW.
Use DR extension, if your camera provides it. (Highlight Tone Prority (HTP) for Canon, Active D-Lighting for Nikon)
Do not blow out the highlights. (Very important)
Provide soft, low contrast lighting. (Very important)
Process with reduced contrast when the couple are photographed together.

Sam

When i first saw the title of this post an answer popped into my head, but I didn't post it, but since it won't die and keeps jumping to the top here is my solution.

A couple of days before the wedding put the groom in a tanning booth over night................problem solved.

Sam

adbsgicom

ziggy53 wrote:

Shoot RAW.
Use DR extension, if your camera provides it. (Highlight Tone Prority (HTP) for Canon, Active D-Lighting for Nikon)
Do not blow out the highlights. (Very important)
Provide soft, low contrast lighting. (Very important)
Process with reduced contrast when the couple are photographed together.

Is DR only on the 1D type cameras? I don't see any reference to it in the 5D manual.

Nikolai

adbsgicom wrote:

Is DR only on the 1D type cameras? I don't see any reference to it in the 5D manual.

Highlight tone priority been around since 40D methinks (if not 30D, I don't remember). As such it's on 40D, 50D and 5D2 (and I think/hope on 7D)
But if you have the original 5D (not MkII), which was released in 20D times, you probably don't have one

Mind you, I'm on the fence of using HTP in this case. I find it works great for certain High Key scenarios, but in all other cases it packs everything below mid grays into the lower quarter of the range, thus pretty much eliminating any details in shadows (and especially blacks). In this particular scenario I'm afraid OP will end up with fine details on B's dress and G's face, but will totally lose B's face and G's tux into a black void...
I'd say - shoot RAW, expose for the right and then pull out the details with the adjustment brush in ACR/LR. You'd need to have CS4/LR2 or better to do that, CS3 and LR1.x doesn't have the capabilities.. Of course you can do the old fashion way (two exposures from the same RAW, load as layers and then blend in PS), but it's not nearly as flexible as first method.

HTH