A tent, a thousand string lights and a full moon

The tent went up on a Thursday. By Friday afternoon somebody had strung what must have been a thousand bulbs across the whole ceiling, and when the sun dropped behind the foothills the entire thing turned into the biggest softbox I have ever worked under.

You cannot plan for that. You can only notice it and then get out of the way.

Wait for it, then work fast

The window where those bulbs balanced against the last of the daylight was about eleven minutes long. Before it, the sky wins and the lights look like nothing. After it, the sky goes black and you are shooting a cave.

So I did what I always do: I found the frame in the afternoon, I told them roughly when I’d need them, and then at the right moment I said now and we got four minutes. Four minutes was plenty. It always is, if you know where you’re standing before you start.

The best light of the night usually lasts about as long as it takes to walk from the bar back to the table.

Then the moon showed up

An hour later somebody pointed at the horizon. Full moon, coming up over the ridge, still low enough to be enormous.

This one is a long lens and a lot of compression — 200mm from a long way back, which is what makes the moon read as that size. Exposing for her meant blowing the moon out, exposing for the moon meant losing her, so it’s a flash on a stand at half power camera-left and a shutter speed fast enough to keep the sky that deep teal.

Three minutes, maybe. Then it climbed, got smaller and whiter, and the picture was gone.

What I’d tell you to take from this

• Give your photographer eleven minutes somewhere in the evening. Not a slot on a timeline. Just permission to grab you when the light does something.
• Say yes when they come and get you. Every couple who has stepped away from the party for four minutes has told me afterwards it was their favourite part of the night.
• Nobody notices you’re gone. I promise. The party carries on perfectly well without you.