AZ RollerGirls Annual Banquet

As an on-location event photographer, I had the opportunity to help the Arizona RollerGirls professionally document their annual awards banquet. 

So besides just showing off the gallery images, in today's blog post I want to talk about the camera settings and and lighting setup that I used.  No professional posing required for this event.  Nobody here was camera shy as you'll see in the gallery images.  

I knew the party would be for about 100+ people. That included the skaters and their +1 party attendants. That also meant that there would 100+ photographers with their cell phones and a few nice cameras in the group to boot.  So with any event like this, I knew that my job was to ensure that I captured the best pictures I could for the evening. 

Lighting is King

I had a few lighting challenges to overcome to pull this off successfully.  

• The stage where the awards were handed out was behind a house, just off the patio. I was looking into the lights on the patio and in the house, which would mean that my subjects would be in dark shadows unless I provided fill-in flash.

• Out in the desert on a moonless night, there is virtually no ambient light to work with.  So the camera's auto focus can't see enough to lock in on. 

• Outdoor windy conditions (even the slightest undetectable breeze) will knock over light stands with umbrellas. So I carried extra weights to hold down the stands.

I chose to use a 3-light setup for most of the evening. Typical for me is main light on the left, on-camera axis for fill lighting, and a hair or rim light behind and to the right of the subject, directly across from the main light to get a good cross lighting look.

As for my Canon speedlights then, I used my 580exII camera mounted as the master and group A.  The main light on the left is a 430exII set up in group B. Finally the hair/rim light was my older 430ex and set for group C.  All of the speedlights were in manual power mode. Depending on where the subject was along the stage, I can quickly adjust the power outputs of each of the flash units from the back of my 5DmarkII. 

As activities ventured from the stage out into the yard, I simply grabbed the hair light from the stage area and used it as my main light out in the yard. Easy to follow the group as the festivities unfolded.

Manual Everything On The CameraAs for the camera, I had everything in manual mode.  The white balance was set to "flash". ISO 1600 due to the dark conditions, even with strobes. I kept shutter speeds between 60 and 200 depending on how much I wanted to expose the background activities and balance exposure against the changing apertures. Finally my f-Stop settings varied between 5.6 and 11 depending on the size of the group in the shot and the depth-of-field I wanted to manage.

So there's the basic setup.

The Images

Here are the resulting images. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.470562209733552.1073741846.282449235211518&type=1

More Fun
The next day I felt like getting a bit creative.  This group of fun-loving gals deserve the special treatment, nothing boring and family-portrait looking for them. It just wouldn't be right.

I glanced through the gallery and selected an image with some motion and action, one that could tell a story.  I came up with this one:

Next, I jumped into Photoshop and began to play.  Falling into water seemed like a good idea so I started there.

But why? Big fire behind the group. So I added the flames.

But why? What caused the fire?  An explosion seemed good.  Okay, add an explosion.  It needed debris, motion, etc so all of that came next.

Here's the final fun image explaining what a Saturday night party at Dizzy's house looks like:

The Future

The Arizona Roller Girls are starving for promotional products. The league can use the visibility and each team's fan base can use the products and swag. Watch for future blog posts on the products I'll create for them and the process I go through to create those products.