As an available light wedding photographer working in a discreet documentary style, I often find myself facing challenging lighting situations. Everything from dark churches to strong directional sunlight can pose problems for an available light wedding photographer if they don’t know how to look for (and work with) natural light. This first dance shot was taken at a recent wedding in Henley. The couple and their guests spent the afternoon heading up and down the river Thames on a beautiful steam boat, bathed in glorious sunshine from start to finish. A great day for the guests but a challenging day for an available light wedding photographer. I could have chosen to use flash and set them up to add a nice bit of fill in flash to lift the shadows caused by the harsh directional sunlight. But I prefer not to use flash. I’m a photojournalistic wedding photographer so I like to stay discreet and unobtrusive, blending in with the guests to capture wonderfully real moments with the subjects unaware I have taken their picture. The minute a flash fires suddenly the guests are alerted to my presence.

Normally I would look for lightly coloured surfaces such as walls or dresses to act as reflectors, bouncing light onto peoples faces. However, on the boat these were few and far between and so instead I spent most of the day shooting into (yes into) the sun and battling with my exposures to achieve a consistent body of work. This way I was able to avoid any harsh contrast on the guests faces and it was then just a case of dodging a little tone back into them where needed.

Whilst I spent the day shooting into the sun, the bride’s father (a keen amateur photographer) spent the day shooting away from the sun with his flashgun positioned appropriately on top of his camera. On more than one occasion we found ourselves in each other’s eye line and so I chose to include him in the corner of this image to help tell that part of the story.

Shot on a Canon 5D mk2 with 50mm f/1.2L, Aperture Priority Exposure Mode, 1/1250 sec, f/4, 100 ISO.