Night Time Wedding Tips?

I'm an amateur/intermediate photographer that has been asked to photograph a wedding. I'm needing good advice on the best (and affordable) lenses and soft box lighting equipment for a dimly lit ceremony and reception. Something that will create crisp photos with minimal noise.

The wedding will take place at exactly 5:30 pm (when the sun is setting) at an antebellum home. It will be outdoors and the reception is in the dimly lit side home. They will have several flood light shining on the bride and groom, as well as hanging lanterns, but not much else. No over head lights as the home is not wired for them.

I understand this will be a tough job with a lot of preparation. I'm merely asking for lens / lighting suggestions.

My camera is Nikon D3100

Are you getting paid for this? If so, walk away. If you have to ask these questions, you're not ready to get paid for doing a wedding and if you've signed a contract then you could end up on the wrong end of litigation. It's happened before and it will happen again.

Seriously, though, weddings are famous for being one of the hardest things to do right. There's a reason that the best wedding photographers charge an arm and a leg to do what they do. Find out exactly what the couple want from you, if they have a second shooter booked or are pinning everything on you, what will happen if your card fails, battery runs out, you don't have enough light to get a good shot, or one of the other dozens of things which could go wrong, goes wrong.

If you're doing this pro bono, you still want to be careful, but the worst thing that could happen is a ruined reputation which impacts the chance of you ever going pro.

With that out of the way…

As you should know, a D3100 is a DX camera, so if you're going to want to shoot wide (which is generally what people do at such events), you need to take that into account and find a wide DX zoom lens, maybe something like a 10-24. However, the minimum aperture on that lens is 3.5 and while I'm sure the D3100 is a competent amateur camera, I can't imagine it being very comfortable past around ISO 1600, so you're going to need some fast DX primes as well if the lighting is as you describe.

Softboxes are usually used, to the best of my knowledge, for shooting static subjects and models, not at events. So unless you're going to get everyone to take time out to pose, I'd stick with on-camera flash, diffused as best you can, or off-camera flash triggered from the hotshoe either by a master flash or a remote trigger.