wedding reception lighting

jrmyrnsm

Ok so one area of my photography I've been really trying to work on is my reception lighting. Particularly the use of off camera speedlights. My current set up is 2 SB-600s on light stands being triggered by an SB-800 in commander mode. I typically have my camera in manual mode with settings around shutter 80, ISO 800, and an aperture of f/4. Then I've been setting my two SB-600's at 1/16th power to and then fiddle with the settings if necessary. Depending on my placement in the room I will sometimes have to use the SB-800 on a low power for fill light. I shot a wedding over the weekend with an outdoor dance floor and had my lights set up kind of like this:

Now what I would typically do is shoot most of my shots from the bottom of this diagram(the gray area is the dance floor) with just using the two SB-600s for light. If something was going on that I needed to shoot from the other side I would shoot from the top of the diagram with a weak fill from my on camera flash. Here is a shot from this weekend shot from the bottom of the diagram:


Overall I've been pretty happy with this set up, my biggest complaint being that sometimes the speedlights don't trigger depending on where I'm standing and as a result I'm somewhat limited as to where I shoot from. I would love to see what some other people are doing for reception lighting and what gear you are using. This will probably be the next area I spend some money in and I wanted to get some ideas of options before I went and spent a lot of money on pocket wizards, or strobes, etc. Thanks in advance!!!