TTL on a wedding – part 3

Thanks to HSS, you can now control your environment.

Many natural light photographers fear artificial light because it requires more time to setup and it can be technical. With the ELB 500 TTL, you can just focus on the fun and let your imagination go.

No need to think about your X-Sync speed.

In seconds, your lighting is ready to work. With the ELB 500 TTL, the power and ease of creating world-class images are in your hands.

Before HSS, flash photographers had to fiddle with fragile ND filters or buy an expensive medium format system to achieve a dreamy and shallow depth of field. With the ELB 500 TTL, that’s a story of the past.

With TTL, just focus on the moment.

HSS is all about creative freedom.

In these images, I wanted to kill the ambient light almost entirely to make my couple stand out whilst retaining details in the background.

To capture the bride and groom dancing, using HSS with an extremely fast shutter speed will avoid any motion blur.

The first step is to adjust my camera settings and make sure the environment is as dark or as light as I wish. Using Live View to speed up the process, I check the histogram as well as the live view feed and adjust the shutter speed, ISO, and aperture.

All the information you need is shown on the Elinchrom Transmitter Pro display.

Once my exposure is set for the background, I switch on my Elinchrom Transmitter Pro and press the TTL button.

By doing this, I can concentrate on the story happening in front of my lens instead of worrying about the technical details. I’ve decided to enable one more option on my Transmitter Pro to make sure my bride and groom are perfectly sharp at the end of the exposure: the 2nd curtain sync.

The modelling lamp settings are easily adjusted in the ELB 500 TTL menu.

Empowering freedom for the most creative.

Enable 2nd curtain sync.

To activate the 2nd curtain sync, press Setup and then scroll down to SC Setup and make sure it’s ON. On some cameras, such as Nikon, you may have to enable it on the camera body as well.

With my camera set, the battery pack on, and the Transmitter Pro in TTL, I can move around my couple to shoot multiple angles without having to readjust my light even if they move too much. The ELB 500 TTL and Skyport System will take care of everything for me.

Shooting the first dance can be very stressful. It happens fast, it’s not always easy to move around the crowd to change angles and, sometimes, someone may block your light. But thanks to the Groups feature, when using several ELB 500 TTL heads or battery packs, you can capture multiple lighting setups within a matter of seconds.

Tip: Use the AF assist of your Transmitter Pro in dark configuration.

In dark situations, using the modelling lamp to help focusing is a great idea. But this can drain the battery and depending on your light-shaper, it might not be powerful enough.

Instead, you can use the AF assist feature of your Elinchrom Transmitter Pro to help you achieve precise focus.

How to use TTL – Part 1
How to use TTL – Part 2
How to use TTL – Part 3