Using flash outdoors at night

Cason

When I say night, I mean there is no sun. I will be taking photos of my niece's 6th grade graduation pool party. I asked what kind of lighting will be available. She said there will be a couple of flood lights, some tiki torches, an what ever lighting the DJ brings.

I plan on using my 430ex. Would the Fong LS (cloud) help even though I don't have anything to bounce off? I will use my 24-70 2.8L because I will be taking some group shots. I may turn to my 85 1.8. I will also have the 70-300 IS. Isn't that too long for the flash?

I'm just worried about the lighting. I want to use the flash without the deer in headlights look.

Has anybody shot in these conditions? Do you think there is enough ambient lighting to drag the shutter? I'm think ISO400-1600, open up all the way (2.8), shutter speed 1\30-1\60 and ride the FEC on the flash all night long.

I want to keep the feel with all the torches and DJ color lighting.

Any thoughts.

SloYerRoll

Hey Cason,

This is about as tough a lighting conditions as it gets.

First thing you want to do is reference an almanac and weather station. See if the moon will be out and if it's a clear night. These two things can drastically change how you decide to set yourself up.

I've shot a very low light outdoor club event that was almost 100% Tiki. So just try the following as a starting point and see what happens:

Lightsphere:
The GF lightsphere will do fine. But you'll need to make the strobe work harder than you would normally need to since it's essentially providing a majority of the light versus just adding some fill. If you shoot w/ it pointed at the sky. Make sure you have the cap on the LS at a a minimum. It would even be better if you could put som foil on the inside of the cap to minimize wasted light spill.
You can also try point the LS towards the ppl instead of shooting it up. Just make sure you don't have any foil on the cap when set up like the latter

Color Temp:
It's common to use a 1/2 CTO gel to suggest warm interior light. Often lighting designers will use 1/4 CTO gels on lights just to give a bit of added warmth to the lighting. Blue tints are used to suggest moonlight for night scenes.
I used a 1/4 CTO and 1/2 Bastard red gel for my event and it was very close to the color I wanted to match. I'm sure I could have gotten closer. But my event was short notice and there were other circumstances out of my control.

Strobe Range:
200mm is not to far for a strobe. I've shot things at night w/ direct strobe and seen a clear outline of a shadow on a building hundreds of feet away. (The subject was about 75' away). The only bad thing about strobes and long range is the shadows are about as hard as they get.
The biggest problem w/ lighting w/ a strobe at night is it is almost impossible to make the scene look like it wasn't' lit by a strobe unless you start working with multiple lights and lighting modifiers.

I'm not sure, but I don't think and Canon gear is well known for high ISO quality. (Please correct me if I'm wrong). So while I do think high ISO is your only option here. I think dragging the shutter in the case would cause too much ghosting at high ISO. I haven't had many reason to drag a shutter though. So someone more versed in this discipline may feel differently.

Oh yea.. Make sure to bring a tripod.. You'll want a few longer exposures w/ natural light and motion blur all over the place.

HTH

-Jon

Cason

Jon, thank you so much for your info.

I won't be able to get some gels by this Wed. night. However, I have access to a couple of Calumets Travelite 750s.

I will plan on using those along with the Pocket Wizard. Now I need to practice with those.