I recentely shot quite a few shots with the Peleng 8mm fisheye at the wedding of Gert & Liv.

That’s the first time I saw a Hummer with a picture of me on the door.

The photography rules police will probably put me in a dark dungeon untill eternity when they find out I broke so many rules in one picture: lensflare, vignetting, subject in the center and the distortion of a wide angle lens when used close to the subject. But I like the picture so I’m showing it anyway and I’ll just dissapear to Mexico with a new identity.

Balancing flash and the ambient light can be tricky and it’s often hard work because you may have to change your settings for every picture. I used a small strobe (triggered with a pocket wizzard) on a stand to camera left.

I used the same setup for the first dance but from the opposite side. To add a bit more drama in the picture I included the flash in it. It’s actually quite easy to use a flash on manual for this kind of work. Just remember the right aperture (and iso) and turn switch on the pocketwizard transmitter on the camera whenever you need the remote flash. If you use this technique enough, you’ll be able to guess the right f-stop when your subjects move towards or away from the light source.

the DJ asked me to take a quick picture of him. This is probably not what he had in mind, but I think it’s rather cool. You can see the flash that’s lighting the guy on the right side of the picture. I used a Canon 580EX and controlled it with an ST-E2 transmitter. Usually I prefer going all manual and using the ultra reliable Pocketwizards. But sometimes the wireless TTL capabilities of the Canon system can be very usefull.

In case you are thinking by now, that I only use a fisheye lens, here are some other pics. The next one is with bounce flash on camera. I pointed it to the wall on my left and behind me to get a huge soft lightsource.

I often work with out of focus backgrounds but when I use a sharp background I like it to have texture. This wall had a lot of texture and to make it stand out, I placed a flash to camera right, next to the wall. The shadows get the definition in the texture. I used the flash at 1/2 power to overpower the ambient light (this pic was made at noon).

If you saw the first video episode of Confessions of a Photographer, you will know that I like to use a flash to create a little hairlight. And that’s exactely what I did here.

And if you think I use flash all the time, here’s a picture with only natural light. This picture was shot at 1/40 of a second at 200mm. It’s amazing what the Image Stabilisation of my 70-200 F/2.8 IS can do.

Thanks Gert & Liv for letting me be a witness of you fantastic wedding day.