Weddings are all about telling impactful stories, and wedding photography is one of the ways to document a wedding's fleeting moments. In a photographer's quest to capture these moments, he faces one essential challenge: to make his photography gear work as quickly and as precise as his eyes do.
This is where mastery of equipment comes in. In order for a photographer to create beautiful and meaningful photographs, he needs to work hard to master his photographic gear so it works precisely the way he wants it to. For the budding wedding photographer, here are several crucial things about your camera you should master. With constant practise, you're on your way to taking your photography to another level.
White Balance: your camera's white balance settings will customise how colours appear in your photos. Your objective is to make the whites appear white, and once you do this, every other colour follows suit. You can use the Auto White Balance setting for this, although if you want to better understand how varied lighting conditions change images, use Kelvin instead. Low Kelvin values, such as 3,350, produce cold and bluish photos. Higher values, such as 5,260, warm your images. Play with the numbers until you come up with the accurate product.
Sharpness: aim to come up with tack-sharp photos unless you wish to purposely blur to indicate action or movement. Using a tripod will help stabilise your camera, but this has the tendency to blur people's movement in the process. Should you wish to freeze action, bump up your ISO or lower the value on your lens' opening.
RAW or JPEG: basically, images captured in RAW format contain more data and are thereby better for image post-processing. Since you're most likely printing these wedding pictures, you ought to use RAW for maximum versatility.
Flash: more often than not, weddings are held in low-light areas. If you cannot widen your aperture further, or shooting up the ISO destroys photo quality, use an external flash as an alternative. Bounce flash is also more preferable over direct flash, because the latter creates harsh shadows which are unflattering to anyone and anything. Invest in a sturdy flash unit, plus a set of reliable rechargeable batteries to make it more convenient for you to shoot continuously. You can also browse work of seasoned wedding photographers as well as studios to obtain more ideas to incorporate to your own shooting arsenal.
This is where mastery of equipment comes in. In order for a photographer to create beautiful and meaningful photographs, he needs to work hard to master his photographic gear so it works precisely the way he wants it to. For the budding wedding photographer, here are several crucial things about your camera you should master. With constant practise, you're on your way to taking your photography to another level.
White Balance: your camera's white balance settings will customise how colours appear in your photos. Your objective is to make the whites appear white, and once you do this, every other colour follows suit. You can use the Auto White Balance setting for this, although if you want to better understand how varied lighting conditions change images, use Kelvin instead. Low Kelvin values, such as 3,350, produce cold and bluish photos. Higher values, such as 5,260, warm your images. Play with the numbers until you come up with the accurate product.
Sharpness: aim to come up with tack-sharp photos unless you wish to purposely blur to indicate action or movement. Using a tripod will help stabilise your camera, but this has the tendency to blur people's movement in the process. Should you wish to freeze action, bump up your ISO or lower the value on your lens' opening.
RAW or JPEG: basically, images captured in RAW format contain more data and are thereby better for image post-processing. Since you're most likely printing these wedding pictures, you ought to use RAW for maximum versatility.
Flash: more often than not, weddings are held in low-light areas. If you cannot widen your aperture further, or shooting up the ISO destroys photo quality, use an external flash as an alternative. Bounce flash is also more preferable over direct flash, because the latter creates harsh shadows which are unflattering to anyone and anything. Invest in a sturdy flash unit, plus a set of reliable rechargeable batteries to make it more convenient for you to shoot continuously. You can also browse work of seasoned wedding photographers as well as studios to obtain more ideas to incorporate to your own shooting arsenal.
