Wedding Shoot Tips

As promised in my Wedding Shoot post, here is a follow up.

This might be useful to you if you are thinking of doing your first wedding shoot.

Venue - I found that it was well worth visiting the venue before the wedding day to take some sample shots (of the bride and groom if possible). This will give you some idea of the space available and the different backgrounds that can be utilised. It will also give the prospective bride and groom a chance to see how the scene looks in pictures and make choices on where they would like the photos taken. Also, think about where the photographs will be taken if the weather is bad on the wedding day as it was on the wedding shoot that I did (it rained for most of the day)!

Tripod - If you have one then it's worth using. I had to do most of the formal shots indoors. Also a quick tip - make sure you set it up and it's level before you start taking the shots. Mine was slightly off level and although it's easy enough to straighten up the pictures whilst processing it will save you a job if it's right at the time!

Lenses - You're more than likely not going to have time to change lenses, especially during the formal shoot so go with a good all rounder.

Cropping - If you're like me and most of your photographs are used online then you'd probably be more used to cropping to common screen resolution sizes rather than print sizes. I spent a lot of time re-converting my original RAW images and re-cropping photos after making this error initially! Photos that are likely to be printed need to be cropped to a print size ratio (such as 7x5"). If you just hand a printer a copy of all your shots straight from the camera then they will be cropped during the printing process and you may end up with important bits missing!

File Format - If you have a camera which will shoot in RAW format then that's the way to go. The photographs will take up more space on your memory cards and will take longer to process after the day but you will be able to make many more adjustments after the event which is great as you probably will not have time to review each shot in great detail in real time.

I hope that this post has been of use to any prospective amateur wedding photographers. I've got another wedding to shoot later in the year so I will be putting these things in to practice then.

Here are a few photos from my first wedding shoot...

Starry Eyed Surprise

I have been meaning to try out a close up of a human eye since I got the Macro Lens Adapters. I know that getting the light right can be difficult with reflections etc to contend with and wanted to try out something a little different.

I quite like the effect you get from ring flashes so started thinking about making one. After a bit of thought, I purchased some bright white LED lights from a well known auction website. I then mounted these on an old bit of ply board with a cut out for the camera lens and soldered it all up. I thought I'd start small with just 8 LEDs but will be attempting some more ambitious LED projects soon (I have another 92 LEDs to use up after all!).

Here is one of my shots with the DIY ring flash / light.



By the way, it is my bloodshot eye in the picture - Must have been a heavy one the night before :-)

Shuffle Up and Deal

I have made an adaptation to my DIY macro-light which I used with the old Canon Powershot S2 to try out with my Canon Speedlite on the dSLR. I basically used a bigger bit of tin foil and added an elastic band!

I was just wondering what to test it out on when I saw a pack of cards on the side.

Here is a shot of my camera with the hi-tech device attached and the results of a couple of test shots. The second one really captures the action of the shuffle and the merging of the cards (click to enlarge as always).