How to Fake a Sunset for Wedding Portraits on a Gray Day

Gray skies on a wedding day leave you with flat, shadowless light right when the couple expects their most romantic evening portraits. Faking a sunset with a single gelled flash is one of the few ways to rescue that hour without waiting for weather that may never show up.

Neil Redfern walks through a real wedding where rain came and went all day, and where the venue offered very little for creative evening work. He also set himself a challenge: shoot most of the day on the Sony FE 50mm f/1.2 GM instead of his usual pairing of an 85mm on one body and a 35mm or wider on the other, sometimes a Sony 16-35mm f/2.8 zoom or the Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE. Redfern explains that the 50mm has always felt awkward to him, too tight for documentary frames and too wide for portraits. That discomfort is exactly why he picked it. Years of using the same two focal lengths built muscle memory that lets him place himself without lifting the camera, and he deliberately broke that habit for a day to see what changed.

The second-shooter role shaped the day as well. With less pressure than a lead shooter carries, Redfern climbed to a balcony to catch the groom's reaction as the bride walked in, starting wide and then switching to the 50mm for a closer crop. He makes a strong case for second shooting as a way to improve, since you end up trying angles and taking risks you'd avoid when the whole job rests on you. A bubble gun stood in for confetti on the exit, and a gust of wind meant a second take was needed. Small moments like that show how much of a wedding comes down to quick adjustments.

The evening portrait setup is simple on paper. A Godox AD200 with a half CTO gel sits on a very tall light stand behind the couple, standing in for a low sun. Redfern positions the couple in a clear patch of a field so they stay out of the long grass, then crouches low and shoots through that grass at f/1.2. The out-of-focus blades in the foreground catch the warm light and turn into glowing blur, which does most of the work of selling the sunset. He first takes a frame with the trigger off to check the ambient exposure, which he calls "layer one," and only then fires the flash.

The Sony a9 III bodies explain why such a small flash can carry the scene. Its global shutter syncs flash at any shutter speed, all the way up to 1/80,000 s, so you can pair a fast shutter with a wide-open aperture and still get the flash's full output. On a camera with a conventional focal-plane shutter, going past the sync speed means switching to high-speed sync, which pulses the flash and costs you a lot of its effective power. In that case, you'd usually reach for a stronger light, stop down a little, or add a neutral density filter to keep the ambient dark enough for the gelled flash to read as sun. The principle holds whatever you shoot with: underexpose the ambient first, then let one warm, hard light from behind and above define the frame. A half CTO shifts daylight-balanced flash to roughly the color of late-afternoon sun, and warming your camera's white balance pushes the whole scene further in that direction.

Redfern also shares a setting he rarely mentions: he typically shoots with a manual white balance of 5,800 K, and for this setup he raised it to 7,000 K. As he points out, raw files let you change it later, though a warmer setting in camera previews the look while you shoot. Placement is the other key. When the flash appears in the frame, it looks obviously fake. When it sits just past the top edge, the light reads as sun. He raised the stand to its full height to keep the head out of the shot, and notes that the look comes together more easily at 85mm or 135mm than at 50mm.

The clearest proof that the sunset was never there is Redfern's test frame with the trigger switched off, which the video shows just before the flash fires.