how artificial light affects your wedding photography

How Light Affects Your Wedding Photos (Part 2)

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In the last post we looked at how light affects your wedding photos with a focus on the outdoors and natural light. But of course, quite often parts of your wedding day day take place indoors. So today I want to look at the different types of light you find indoors, and how each of them affect your pictures.

How Light Affects Your Wedding Photography Part 2 –
Indoors & Artificial Light

Shooting indoors brings with it different challenges to shooting outdoors. Whilst you are no longer at the mercy of the elements, and the light indoors is less likely to change so frequently, it can bring different challenges.

Window Light

Just because you move inside, it doesn’t mean there isn’t any natural light anymore. Some of my favourite natural light actually is indoors. And that’s window light. Light coming in from a window or door gradually falls away as it enters the room, which means it’s perfect for beautiful portraits like these:

How window light affects your wedding photography by Wild Connections Photography

Artificial Lighting In The Venue

Unfortunately there aren’t too many indoor spaces that are lit exclusively with window light, and especially as the evening gets darker, there will be electric lighting to illuminate the space. There might also be some coloured lighting from the DJ to throw in to the mix as well.  One of the biggest challenges with artificial lighting is that different kinds have different colour “temperatures”. Some types emit yellow or orange light while other types can be more blue. Unfortunately this can cause havoc with skin tones. You may find that if there is really mixed artificial lighting, your photographer may convert a lot of the images from this location to black and white for a more flattering look.

Below you can see examples from a beautiful ski lodge wedding in Austria. The wooden walls, combined with the yellow artificial lighting and candles, created a very dominant orange colour across the photos. Whilst it is possible to correct this to a certain extent in editing, too much colour correction can affect skin tones, and often a simple switch to black & white can be the best solution.

Indoor lighting examples to show how light affects wedding photos by Wild Connections Photography

Flash Photography

When there isn’t enough ambient light, or there’s too much of a colour cast, many photographers will choose to use some kind of on or off-camera lighting such as flash or video lights. Using artificial light can help to correct any unwanted colours in a scene, like coloured lighting from the DJ that turns the wedding dress a different colour, or it can be used to throw some more light in to a poorly lit scene, like the examples below:

Flash photography to colour correct by Wild Connections Photography

Flash photography can also be used creatively with techniques such as off-camera flash and using it in combination with low shutter speeds on the dance-floor.

A Dutch apres-ski wedding party at the Schmiedhofalm by Wild Connections Photography

I hope this and the previous post have given you some kind of idea about how different types of lighting affect how images can look. If you’ve got any questions at all about this topic further, please leave them in the comments below.

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How light affects your wedding photography pt.2 - indoor and artificial light

Missed part 1 of this series?

Read it here.

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