OK now I’m far from being a master of wedding dance shots, they are something a lot of people find challenging, especially with the Fuji series which is not known for it’s strong flash support. Back in the early days I used to get by just using natural light and lens wide open ( the 56 1.2 even got used a few times, which I would never even consider now ). A couple of things happened in recent years that have helped me personally.
Fuji released the 16mm 1.4 lens. This for me is the perfect lens for dance shots, you can step back and get a wide angle view…
Or you can get in close and get some cool close ups ( you will get elongated limbs but sometimes that doesn’t matter ).
But mostly I’d end up bouncing the flash off the ceiling to raise the ambient light. This worked well sometimes, and then along came the Godox 360..a flash system so powerful that you could bounce flash off even very high ceilings.
It’s recycle time is also great, you need to take a lot of pictures on the first dance, as you never know how it will turn out. So what do I use now? Well, it can be a mix. The xpro-2 is so good at focussing and its high ISO shots look so good that it’s tempting just to tick the camera on burst mode and fire away using natural light. Sometimes I use both flash and natural light to give a mix of results. The last wedding was a good example. I started off with using the Godox and looking at the back of the camera it didn’t seem to be working that well. Luckily the dynamic range of the Fuji is awesome ( thanks to the Sony sensor ) so when I got the shots in post they turned out pretty good. Here are the flash ones.
At the time I took these I was having a mild panic, as I thought these had not turned out very well. So I grabbed a Cactus flash and a sync cord and tried that next. For some reason the batteries which I’d fully charged the previous night were now showing as flat. Curses followed! So I switched the xpro-2 to auto iso, spray and pray mode ( continuous focus, 8 frames a second). Most of these were shot at between 8000-12800 iso.
Some people will prefer the atmosphere of these, some the cleaner look of the flash shots. I like both and in future will try and shoot a bit of both. I’ve also got to try dragging the shutter more and getting some crazy light trails, that’s next on the list:)