It has been a long night yesterday… Marlborough Boys & Girls College students celebrated the annual ball with a Casino Monte Carlo theme.

Around 550 students attended the event. For many of them it is the happening of the year.

Security was tight and not everyone made it in. Also bribing pit bosses and dealers and signalling them when to false shuffle resulted in immediate punishment with a kick in the buttock and a lift to the front door. More serious case got guided to the back door…

Working with four photographers to cover the event, we had set up three big photography booths inside the Marlborough Convention Centre and one small photo booth in the entrance hall to capture the arriving students.

The plan was to use the entrance booth as long as the students arrive and then move inside.
Unfortenatually a short time after we started photography inside the convention centre the main light in one of the three booths fell over and broke and we were down to two sets.

So I decided to continue shooting in the entrance booth which was equipped with two Nikon SB-800 Speedlights as main and fill lights and two ARRI Studio lights for hair and background effect.
I doubted that the Speedlight’s batteries would last for the whole night but they did.
After taking around 500 images on 1/2 power I changed batteries and continued shooting until the event was over. By then the little flashes were almost as hot as the ARRIs.

Small lights creating big results.

See some more image from my mini studio below…