Tips for Wedding Photography

The low depth of field is achieved by having the aperture as big as possible (the lowest number you can choose). It may be that your camera can't quite go low enough to get an effect that drastic. You may also have to push the ISO quite high in case the light is still too low, but try to keep it down as you'll get more noise too.

You can't control the lighting but you can be observant during the session and watch where the natural light falls, then position yourself to take advantage. If someone looks good to your eyes, they'll look good to the camera. Set the metering to centre weighted and always try to meter on skin tones. Remember that the eyes are the most important thing in portraits and try to set your focus point there - using centre point focus will help to stop it jumping around.

You can simulate a lot of the softness in post processing by lowering the contrast, same with the sepia tints. Don't rely on the 'black and white' filter on your camera - you can use the colours to highlight different parts of the image when you do the conversion. If you're shooting in RAW you'll have to process each of the images manually, but you'll get more control over highlight sand shadows. Adding vignettes can help to bring the point oof interest back to the centre of the frame.

You've just shown an awareness of all things reflective, so just keep an eye out for it. And if it's any consolation, even pros get it wrong sometimes. Kuang an d I were looking at a professional photographers studio shoot, and the model is wearing sun glasses. As we were looking, Kuang comes out with "and yup, there you can see the photographer standing on a stool, and you can see how he laid out the lights too"...

RAW, isn't that just unprocessed/uncompressed data thats later developed? I thought you needed special software to see and develop them?

Modified twice, last modified by Alicemary on Tue 10th April, 2012 @ 11:04am

When the camera judges how much light is in a picture, it tends to look at the entire scene. This means that if you have a really bright light in it somewhere, the camera will make everything else darker to compensate - this usually means that people are far too shadowed in the final image. Most digital cameras have three ways of measuring the available light.

• Centre point - Only take a light reading from the thing directly under the focus point
• Centre weighted - Measure the thing under the centre point, but consider a small area around it too
• Full scene - Measure everything

The icons often look like this, running left to right in the order above:

To change the setting you either dip into the menu and look for the metering options, or see if you have a button (usually marked with the symbol on the right) and press it, or hold it whilst using your control dial or buttons. Let me just start a new post for RAW in case my fumble fingers lose this one

Alice is about right with RAW. The sensor in the camera sees a lot more stuff than the final JPEG shows; the camera then takes your choices for sharpening, white balance etc and applies them before spitting out a JPEG. The advantage of JPEGs is that you can just view them onscreen immediately and they take up relatively little space; RAW files are BIG. It may even be that the camera can't shoot them, which is reasonable given the space requirements and the time it takes to write to the card.

Imagine though that you were shooting in a place where a single bright light threw your subject into relative darkness (as discussed above). The sensor saw a lot of light and shadow and it may well be that it captured details in those shadows that can be partially recovered - the details that would otherwise be thrown away when the camera does the JPEG conversion. If you have a RAW editing program - cameras come with one, and Photoshop can do it too- you can often pull out these details, tweak individual colours and tones, select the sharpness etc. You take full control over how the picture comes out, like processing a negative in a darkroom.

The downside is that when you first view a RAW image it often looks flat and vague, which shows how much processing the camera actually does - take that, anti-Photoshop purists! The main advantage for me though is that I can choose the white balance after I've taken the photo, so if everything came out with a tint because of a funny light I can re-tweak the image to give it the lighting I saw at the time. For wedding shots that may feature lots of white, this could be the decider.

You can usually switch between the two with no trouble. Lots of cameras have a RAW+JPEG mode which gives you both formats for each shot; if your memory card is big enough that's a good way to start. It'll take a moment to put then on the card so you won't be able to rapid fire, but that's probably not a deal breaker.

Yup. RAW files on a typical bridge camera are around 10MB or so, plus the JPEG. Should get a few hundred on there

I now shoot in RAW +JPEG too. Kuang has converted me haha. I've had it explained to me like this. The RAW file is like a digital negative, it has everything on it, including some stuff you don't even "see". A JPEG is like having a colour slide where everything is sort of "ready to view". Not my quote by the way: This might help

We're all learning together

Ah good old SLR's. Yeah, I used to those too. Twas fun, but you couldn't take as many chances as you can with digitals, or you could, but it would cost you the roll of film every time.

From someone who has no photographic experience other than point and shoot I can't offer much of an opinion. However, as someone who has got married and also had a friend do my photos I feel I can offer a little insight.

My favourite photos were the ones that captured personality and those shots than no one plans and you don't expect. For example, a photo of my dress maker with the sewer machine altering the little ones dress on the morning of the wedding, or the bride falling over and almost falling into a lake. They are the kind of photos that will be priceless.

I think you're in a much better position than a professional photographer as you know her and that makes for much more personal photographs.

Anyway, not helpful in terms of technicality and so not exactly what you were asking for but just thought I would put that out there!

It's not always about technicality, and I think you've summed it up wonderfully there -)

I always hate posing for the camera, but if I'm caught unawares, more often then not, the photo isn't that bad.