Lighting Tips from Mauricio Donelli
According to Mauricio Donelli, “The most important thing when creating a spectacular and beautiful image of a bride is to be very, very fast. Own the situation and give the bride the confidence to be her most beautiful in front of your lens. The essence of this philosophy is to take the pictures quickly if you lose control and spend too much time evaluating the moment, you will freeze everything and lose the perfect image.” To do this, Donelli uses the D2X and the Leaf back 28 for the Mamiya.
“I don’t work with too much artificial light,” he also notes. “Also, if most of the situations are being taken at night, the fact is that I work a lot with very slow shutter speeds. This gives a good mix between the flash and the ambient light presence. Also, you can work with the single bulbs that you find in ceilings and walls and place them behind the subject to give an effect of warmth and depth. Sometimes we don’t need to use a lot of light. Much of the time, my pictures are taken with natural light and filled with mobile flash from the camera. I prefer the Metz 60-CT4 series. They are the best I’ve used for this type of fill.”
“It is important to have a good, lightweight tripod with you, as well as one or two assistants working around the subject with flashes. Of course, you will need to trigger them from the camera with radio-controlled slaves. They work effectively and are very handy to use with the flash on a monopod. Also, it is important to have a decent-size reflectors (LiteDiscs) to reflect light back onto your subject’s shadow areas.”
As for power, Donelli says that he never uses generators, because his weddings almost always take place in hotels or homes. “When they do the weddings in open areas and put up tents,” he notes, “they need to have light too, so I always ask the wedding coordinators to provide two or three plugs for my monolight-mounted round softbox inside the tent. I never use more than one, but I travel with two in case one goes bad.”
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