One thing I can say about shooting weddings is that practice really helps. Once it starts, you have to be on a fast pace and don't have time to do anything over or think through things too much. Almost every wedding I have done has had a time factor problem that ended up squeezing in on the photography time.
As to your questions: 1) Daytime shots are typically fill flashed with about -1.5 stops of flash compensation. Looking to just lighten shadows a bit, put a catchlight in the eyes and warm up the shot. When greater distances are involved then I may not do that. The bridge shots had fill flash on. 2) I only shoot in raw at this point. This is especially important with weddings as there will be times when you will have things set wrong if you are shooting jpg. You will forget to reset them in the heat of the battle and end up doing much photoshop work to fix your wrong settings. With raw, you don't have to worry about any of those settings until after the wedding is done. 3) I don't use any of the automatic modes on the camera for weddings and portraits. I set the camera to manual mode and center weighted metering. I typically meter off a mid toned object in the same light. The Hyper Manual capability makes this very quick to do. Preset the f stop by spinning the dial to what I want and press the green button when pointing at the object. That sets the shutter speed. Then I shoot until the lighting is different. If the lighting is tricky like a white dress, I might take the first shot and then look at a histogram quickly to see if I am way off or not. Evening receptions quite often require full flash. In that case I use an AF400T set on TTL with a Lumiquest softbox on it. I'll take a shot of the bride in her white dress and a shot of the groom in his black and set exposure comp to deal with it. Most commonly it is about -2 stops with that combination. Feel free to ask any other questions you might have. -- Best regards, Bruce Wednesday, September 7, 2005, 1:01:06 PM, you wrote: RW> Lovely shots Bruce. RW> I have a friend at work who has asked me to shoot his wedding next spring. RW> He knows that I'm not a pro but I hope and expect that I can get a few RW> decent shots. RW> Anyway - I'm really interested in you shots and have been thorough most of RW> the proofs. With one exception, serial 192, they are all well executed and RW> some are great. RW> Would you answer a couple of questions ? RW> 1. did you use any fill-flash on the bridge shots ? RW> 2. What settings do you use for contrast/sharpness etc. RW> 3. Did the dress cause any exposure problems (did you use compensation ?) RW> Thanks RW> Rob W
