Dappled lighting - what to do?

This I would be interested in also, there are times when trying to do formals, you try to find shade and only get dapple areas.

I've always just done what I could with fill flash. Make sure the faces are well lit, and you just have to put up with the background being spotty. If there's a trick to it, I would love to hear it.

If you've got enough flash power, you could try upping the ratio of flash to ambient light. Over power the uneven light. Your backgrounds are going to go dark though.

is this for portraits or the actual ceremony?

fill flash is definitely the best answer...IMO when you say "only does so much" what exactly do you mean?

if your talking about pictures that are already shot, try using photoshops shadow/highlight tool.

Nope. No trick can really eliminate the dappled pattern. If you have a brighter background than your subject, you can overpower the ambient light on the subject with the result that the background will be more well exposed but the subject will look "flashy". It might be OK in some circumstances. If you have a darker background, it will go darker and the result will not be very pleasing.

At anytime of day (other than high noon), when you are forced to shoot in the sun. Use the sun as back light, and light the faces with flash. Dappled, or direct, sunlight is bad news for photography.

What Steve said.

Dappled is cool on horses, not people.

When forced to use backlight, take a look a positioning the subject so the sun behind them is coming at a slight angle rather than dead behind them. It helps add form with a bit of cross lighting so you don't get that flat flash look when using fill.

This is one where the Bride wanted some shots in the Church garden because time was tight ... not much shade in the open garden area, so I did a couple like mentioned above. My on camera flash failed to work, and I had to use the camera's pop-up flash ... which sort of proves you don't need diffused flash in bright conditions.

Steve, Marc, what about white balance? Do you just shoot in raw, and fix it later? Any particular in-camera WB setting? Thanks.

Marc, just curious, where was your backup flash? And what camera were you shooting that even has a pop-up flash? I'm not knocking you, just thought you usually shot top level Canon's, Leicas, etc?

Could that post have been any worse? Marc put what camera he was shooting with right there in his caption and I upload a postage stamp of an image..

Better go to bed.

This is why I never write.

Once more.

Nice shot Rob.

I don't have a back-up flash for the H2D camera ... the backup is in the camera itself. The primary flash is a dedicated Metz 54 whatever, and this was the first time I had used the combo which worked perfectly well until we walked all the way to the Garden area and it didn't. I didn't panic and run for the Canon in the SUV because my second shooter was there with a 1DsMKII and 24-105L ... which I didn't need.

White balance was set for Daylight and tweaked in Flexcolor RAW processor. There is no jpg shooting option with a MF digital back. It's RAW all the way.