Today's post comes from an amazing team of photographers located in Atlanta Ga, LaCour Photography. I asked my friends to submit an image or two along with a dramatic story to go along with the theme of this blog, creative off camera lighting. Mark Adams has one killer image along with a unique story and tops it off by shooting in one of the most challenging of all shooting conditions: Beach Ceremony at night with NO available light. Mark Adams writes: When we were asked to photograph a small, intimate wedding ceremony at sunset in Laguna Beach, we expected beautiful California light. But a few hours before sunset, we learned that the minister's flight was delayed. The bride and groom made the decision to still have the ceremony on the beach at whatever time the minister arrived, which was definitely going to be after sunset. So we were presented with the challenge of photographing a beach ceremony at night with no available light. Before becoming a wedding photographer, I worked for newspapers and magazines, shooting assignments all over the world. One of the things I had to get good at quickly was learning to adjust to any situation no matter what the challenges and no matter what the lighting conditions. As a news photographer, I simply had to make sure I came back with good pictures that documented the action without interfering or altering the mood. The problem with flash is that it can be a distraction, especially when you're photographing in complete darkness as we were. But in situations like this, there's not much you can do about that pop of bright white light. The ambient exposure was between 20-30 seconds. That doesn't work for capturing expressions on people's faces. But what we did do was simply minimize the amount of flash we used. Rather than shooting a ton of photos and creating a strobe-like disco, we simply waited, anticipated the key moments and shot those moments, which were just a handful of photos. My wife Erin stood back near the rocks behind the minister and shot photos with direct flash to get the "safe" shots of the bride and groom's reactions and emotion. That freed me up to try to make a photo that showed the uniqueness of the ceremony. I wanted to make a photo that captured the mood of the moonlit scene. So I steadied my Canon 5D with a 16-35mm f/2.8L USM at 27mm on my Gitzo Mountaineer tripod. I set a base exposure in manual mode for 10 seconds at f/2.8 at ISO 400, which was about one stop underexposed from a reading off the sky. I then set my on-camera Canon 580EX to Master and also set it to not participate in the exposure, and then I signaled Erin to switch her on-camera Canon 580EX to Slave. Then I released the shutter. I shot about three frames this way. The Canon E-TTL technology worked flawlessly and allowed us to quickly set up this shot and execute it swiftly without having to fiddle with manually setting the power on the remote flash. Most of the other photos from the short ceremony (less than 10 minutes) were shot with direct flash, no diffusion, but this photo does a couple of things for us. 1) It captures the mood of the ceremony 2) Shows the ceremony environment and 3) Adds diversity to the wedding album. If all the photos from this ceremony had unique lighting, this photo wouldn't look as dramatic when shown next to all the other images. Just as we try to diversify the type of images we shoot, we need to diversify the type of lighting that we look for or create. But most importantly, this image reflects what I felt being a part of the ceremony and this image is an accurate representation of that moment.