I got a call from another popular metro Atlanta wedding photographer asking me to photograph her wedding. Naturally I was flattered, but I asked why? She said that she had seen my work, loved my unique approach to lighting and was confident that I would do a great job.
I visited with her at the hotel where she would prepare and the wedding venue and talked about lighting, wedding flow, rehearsals and so on. When all in order I got to the hotel on time and started photographing the preparations and then drove to the wedding location, Flint Hill in Norcross.
The wedding went very smoothly, with only one technical glitch, due to the venue’s professional staff and I got a lot of really good images, so good that when I emailed some proofs to the bride she wrote back - “Allan….they are BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!! Thank you soooooooo much!!!”
The glitch was simple… I didn’t fully plug in a cable so I had to quickly switch to the on camera strobe that most wedding photographers rely on (not me) and take a few shots. I then fixed the problem in under 30 seconds and used my standard lighting thereafter. Here is a typical on camera flash photograph and a shot using my lighting technique, both as proofs, in other words right out of the camera. You be the judge. I’ll post a slide show later.
| Off-camera flash. Look at their feet, they are jumping for joy! |
 |
| On camera flash (typical photographer’s kit). Notice the background is dull and dingy |
 |
It’s the photographer’s worst nightmare. The camera locks up just before the first kiss! Does the photographer -
1 Freeze like a statue and start to sweat?
2 Reach for his other camera and keep shooting?
3 Switch off the camera, pause and then back on again?
4 Switch off the camera, take the battery out, count to five, replace it and back on again?
5 Start thinking about his blood pressure going through the roof, and panic?
The right answer is 5, then 3, then 2, and finally 1 or 5; take your pick.
Cameras are modern marvels, packed with computer electronics and slivers of optical glass in the lenses. Unfortunately, we all know about computers that freeze from time to time. It’s not a disaster if your computer freezes and requires a reboot. It can be if the wedding photographer hasn’t thought through a quick recovery process and practiced the moves.
After all, the chances are that the wedding photographer will have an equipment malfunction sometime during a wedding. It’s just he should be prepared to take remedial action… FAST.
I suggest 5 (or 3 if you only have seconds) first in case an image is being written to the card which may be the “freeze”; then removing the battery which should always clear a freeze… unless the camera has failed. In which case, 2 as good photographers will always have a second camera to hand so they can move smoothly from one to another. And its likely that the second camera will be identical to the first as the controls are the same.
The only problem is that the preferred lens for that moment will be on the camera which just froze, so some deft lens changing may be in order. Personally, I keep a third camera in the trunk just in case.
You can’t shoot a wedding twice, so getting it right the first time is critical. And having a plan, practicing it and having backup is vital.
As a photographer, I work with light. Forgetting all of the fancy camera ads we’re all bombarded with, it all comes down to light – where it comes from in a scene, its intensity, color quality, reflections and so on.
As such, I compulsively pay attention to lighting when I enter a new room and almost always start looking at the ceiling to mentally calculate the correct exposure of a typical reception where flash is bounced off of (hopefully white) it. Sad isn’t it? Typically white is always good, and high ceilings much easier to work with than low ones.
On the other hand, I can see the effect of different types of lighting in a room without even turning on the lights, so I see it as a plus. Now if I can only stop doing it all of the time and just when I’m actually working on a project.
Here’s your homework if you’re interested. The next time you see a movie at the theater pay attention to the lighting in the film. You’ll quickly understand what lighting is romantic, dramatic, dull, edgy and so on and why the director wanted that effect in that scene. You may even start looking at ceilings when you enter rooms to see if they are white and how high. Sorry. 
I use Speedlights a lot, although I prefer studio flash, but as Speedlights weigh 1lb and studio flash 10, I tend to carry Speedlights. So much, you’d think that I really understand how they work to automatically set the exposure. I don’t. Here are my observations. The Nikon (and most likely, the others brands) have an electronic brain that detects the light bouncing off of the subject and then attempts to calculate how much flash to provide to properly light a scene. Unfortunately, from my experience they don’t work half the time and for no specific reason that I’ve been able to observe.
Let’s start at the beginning. Way back when, you’d but a Speedlight and note its full power GN or guide number, based on the ISO or ASA speed of the film you use. For example, you would use Tri-X which is rated at 400 ISO or ASA. The guide number of the Speedlight would be (fore example) 125 which required some simple calculations to get the correct exposure. If your subject in this example was 40 feet away you had to shoot at about f/2.8 to get the correct exposure. If 20 feet, the f/5.6. You just divide the guide number by the subject distance to get the basic aperture setting. In other words, divide the GN by the distance to find the approximate aperture setting.
I’m assuming that the flash is the only light source, so if you wanted lighten the shadows in daylight, you’d stop down (reduce the aperture) by a few stops to get the correct lighting balance. In the above illustration, to f/5.6 and f/11 respectively. Of course, you would need to modify the exposure based on experience.
Things got more complicated when the flash manufacturers developed methods to change the light output on demand so the GN would vary, and complicate your life. Eventually the GN concept went away in favor of automatic flashes… the only problem being that they don’t work very well.
Broadly speaking, just as you press the shutter release the flash fires a pre-flash (with a sensor) to gauge the subject distance and the surroundings to determine the correct flash output depending on the lens aperture. Sometimes it works well, and sometimes it doesn’t.
What I don’t know is why the flash tries to read the subject distance from the light bounce when it could read it from the focusing mechanism which should tell it how to set the GN. In this example, you’d point the camera at the subject 11 feet away and press the shutter release, the camera should tell the flash that the subject is 11 feet away, the ISO rating is X, the main subject is Y and the aperture is Z and set the corresponding amount of light output. Instead it uses its pre-flash to judge the distance. I just don’t know why.
In any instance, the Nikon Speedlights tend to overexposure the main subject, completely washing them out. Some time ago, I went back to manual flash exposure using either 1/2 or full power and having memorized the GN for each setting. It works fine almost every time.
I happened to visit dxomark.com and was surprised.
The DXO company produces a remarkably good software package for professional photographers that squeezes every bit of quality from the digital negatives, known as RAW files. If your wedding photographer says that he or she only shoots in jpg, doesn’t hire him or her. Jog image quality is severely compromised as the camera converts the image from the original RAW image it produces and saves the photography as a much smaller file, a jpg. Modern PCs are infinitely more powerful in their ability to squeeze out quality, and DXO is one of the best when they do the conversion and not the camera. Back to the story…
The DXOmark website shows the technical variables that go into the quality of the RAW files that each “pro” camera can produce, and the DXO Mark is a simple scale for the bottom line result. Here’s the surprise. The standard wedding photographers camera is in many instances the Nikon D300. It came out a few years ago and costs about $1,600 for just the body, without a lens. The new Nikon D5000 came out a few months ago, and its body sells for as little as $500 or about a third of the cost of the D300.
So you’d think that the image quality of the D300 will be up to three times better than the D5000 as they have the same 12.3 megapixel sensor size? Wrong, the D5000 is nearly 10% better at a quarter of the cost! Technology marches on, and very quickly. I know that the D300 has a better build and is more “heavy duty” (whatever that means to wedding photographers) than the D5000, but the D5000 has features that the D300 doesn’t have either.
So what’s the moral of the story? It’s that newly released cameras offer far better price/performance than the “old” cameras when comparing image quality versus cost. I’m not saying that the D300 is junk, but justifying its cost is getting more and more difficult even though it produces very high quality images.
I work with histograms. They are the funny looking bar chart on the camera’s LCD screen showing a graphic representation of the image’s exposure. I’m not going to spend time describing how to look for the best histogram, but suggest that you develop your technique by working from the end to the beginning.
The usual technique is to adjust the exposure so that the graph doesn’t clip at either end, particularly the right which will show that all detail in highlights are lost. That doesn’t matter if the sun is in the photograph, but it does if you photographing a white dress with lots of details. And wedding dresses are white.
The problem is that the histograms aren’t really that accurate in-camera. Cameras are like miniature computers. They do a lot of things well but they have only a fraction of the horsepower of the laptop or desktop PCs. So here’s what to do…
First, review the histograms on your LCD screen, and then review the same image histograms using your favorite image processing program. You can have your camera on your desk and just look at both images at once. If you’re lucky, they will be very similar meaning that the exposure histogram on the LCD screen is accurate relative to the PC. But, for example, if the PC shows that the histogram is skewed to the right, and the LCD shows it in the middle it would indicate that you need to keep the histogram to the left of where you’d normally want it when you take photographs, as the camera’s bar chart is not accurate.
Further, after you have developed a wide range of images on your PC, you can find the best exposed samples. You should then turn off all of the adjustment switches you used to detail the image to print quality and look at the original histogram. For that type of scene, that’s what you need to duplicate in camera. And to see what the perfect, ready to print exposure is just copy the file back to the original camera and view the histogram on the LCD screen. You can see what that type of bar chart looks like.
Sometimes, you have to work backwards to move forwards.
You no doubt know that by simply using flash you can brighten, or even turn night into day. But did you know that by using flash you can actually turn day into night.
Over the years I used many, many cameras from Robot, to Leica, to Sinar, ro Hasselblad, to Nikon and so on. Currently I use Nikons, not because they are any better than the many other brands. It’s just that I’m used to them, and they have never failed me. Come to think of that, neither have the others. They are all precision instuments. The trick is knowing how to light and when to press the button. And I don’t mean shooting 8 frames a second. That may be fine for sports photography, but it’s going overboard for weddings.
In recent years I’ve owned two Nikon D300s, a D90, two D70S and two D40. You can guess which model is my favorite. You may be suprised but keep in mind that wedding photography doesn’t demand much from a camera. Super sophisticated tracking capabilities is not important, being able to crop acceptable images from tiny sections of image files is not important, having time lapse capability is interesting but unusable and so on. There are only a few capabilities that are important to a wedding photographer. And turning day into night is one of them.
I’ll address the camera issue and describe how its done soon. Here’s an example taken in the mid-day sun. Or was it nighttime?
It has been said that travel broadens the mind, but shrinks the wallet. Broadly speaking that’s true. We are just finishing a trip to the Los Angeles area visiting my wife’s aunts house. She is married to a world renowned heart surgeon and they live in the Pacific Palisades, the next town south from Malibu. Needless to say, I am still getting lost in the house, it’s that big, which overlooks the Pacific. A million dollars will buy you a one bedroom house (with street parking) or smaller, another world from the Atlanta marketplace. Oddly, prices haven’t dropped here, they have just slowed in the growth rate.
We just took a walk down to the Farmers market in central Pacific Palisades and were sitting on a bench listening to the local high school band playing, while they were asking for donations so that their teacher didn’t get laid off due to California’s imminent bankruptcy.
I was looking around marveling at all of the photographic opportunities for neat bridal shots when I realized that if I lived here, I just wouldn’t see them. After all, familiarity breeds content… or that’s my version of the saying. It’s just that when you live in an area for long you just stop seeing it.
So why should that affect you hiring a local photographer for a destination wedding? Well, there are several reasons why you should not.
One, is that you’ll never see the photographer again, and he or she knows it. So he or she may not be concerned if the wedding photographs aren’t that good as you’ll be long gone when you get them.
Second, the local photographer will not see the location opportunities like a stranger will. A stranger will be excited by the look of everything and pick out interesting locations. Remember, the couple will also find the locations interesting as they are unique for them as well.
And third, your destination photographer will work like a dog while with you. I don’t think that you’ll like to pay for a destination photographer and have him lay on the beach. No, he’ll work, work, work. So you’ll get tremendous value for the money.
And that means many more images to review and add to your once in a lifetime wedding day album and prints.
I had two recent incidents that made me smile. One was during a shoot of a bride at a Kennesaw race track on Sunday. At the end of the shoot one of the photographers was looking at the photographs I took, and exclaimed to the bride … “Use his photographs, they are much better than mine!” Now that was flattery.
And as I run the Atlanta Wedding Photographers Association – www.atl-wpa.com I have gotten to know many metro Atlanta photographers. I’d say that a third a really good, a third are fair and the final third should quit the business and give the booking fee back to their clients. I’m sorry that couples wind up with the bottom third, but that’s business.
Anyway, one of the really good photographers called me a few days ago excited that she was getting married next year at the Chateau Elan, a really nice venue north-east of Atlanta. She said that she also knew a lot of photographers (she was and old hand at the business) but she wanted me to photograph her wedding.
I was honored, and sincerely flattered. When I shoot it, I’ll post some images under this post.
This may seem like a strange question, as your first response is to take pictures, but it isn’t. When you book a wedding photographer, you obviously want him or her to photograph your wedding. But how and why? Although your think that your photographer will take the pictures you want, he’ll actually take those that he thinks you’d like. Fortunately, often they are coincident with what you are expecting, but not always.
What should you do? It’s very important that you and your photography are on the same page. Although you may write your shot list, you need to have a sit down meeting just before the wedding and go over the details just so it sinks in. You have to remember, that a busy wedding photographer has a number of weddings lined up, and so it would be prudent that they become very clear about your wedding just before it happens. There will be fewer errors.
A key suggestion is to have all of the guests who will be in the formals close by, and have one person go down the list of each group to help the photographer. The assistant clearly announces who is in the next group, and the guests move smoothly through the formals cycle.
One last point. You can have your photographer shoot the formals outside in or inside out. If the reception is NOT at the same location as the wedding, he should do outside in. That means the largest group is photographed first and then smaller groups until just the bride. You do this, so some of the guests don’t lose interest and leave for the reception. Once they are gone, they are gone. Inside out, means starting with the bride and working towards the big group.
I prefer outside in as guests like to gravitate towards the bar and the snacks as soon as they can.