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As a wedding photographer the choices available as to which lenses to attach to their camera during the course of a wedding ultimately impacts the creative ability to document a wedding.

The photographer has a decision to make when storytelling – to shoot a wide angle or close-up. The composition and the message that results can be conveyed completely differently with the simple choice of lenses at key moments during the festivities.
There are obviously advantages and disadvantages, some technical to shooting wide or tight.

Overall, there is a preference among wedding photographers to shoot wide angle. A lens under 24mm will capture a real snapshot of any scene, not only incorporating the main point of interest but much of the immediate atmosphere, reactions, and surroundings. Photographing with a wide angle lens enables the capture of more visual energy. On the technical side, a wide angle lens means you can work in tighter spaces, closer with crowds and using slower shutter speeds without introducing camera shake. However, most wedding photographers will stop short of using a fish-eye lenses during their coverage – such lenses render such super wide angles that they exhibit unflattering distortion of people in particular.

An added benefit of the wide lens remains that when mounted to a high resolution camera, the wide angle lens also offers the photographer the ability to crop-and-zoom in post production, providing an opportunity to experiment with different crops from a single wide shot.

Many wedding photographers continue to carry a telephoto lens despite their use being generally more restricted. Longer focal length lenses need more space to use, but can get you ‘in’ to the action with speed and without distraction – providing access to discreet and intimate photographs. For candid shots and portraits a telephoto lens is hard to beat. Of course, such lenses do a super job of isolating a subject from their background with bokeh, providing attractive backgrounds where none may exist. For many situations a long lens will capture detail and emotion and focus attention when needed.

When it comes to portraits and posed shots, a long focal length is preferable to avoid facial distortion and provide compression to the background (particularly in outdoors scenes). A Long lens creates more obvious bokeh, such images take on a very three dimensional feel to them and work very well for bride and groom portraits.

Ultimately, there is rarely a right or wrong choice in shooting wide or narrow for the majority of typical wedding images. Many wedding photographers successfully opt to use wide and telephoto lenses as this compliments the storytelling ability of any wedding photographer.

Often the difficulties of deciding on lenses can be more mundane, such as finding the right time to change lenses and if you wish to carry a second camera body to enable you to flip between wide and narrow shots without a lens change. Similarly a zoom lens is usually decided on as a compromise of speed over quality and low-light ability.

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Taking successful group shots is a challenging issue facing all wedding photographers. Ideally, the weather is nice enough to take the group outside so you can eliminate any problems of space. If it is a bright sunny day, you really need to get everyone into open shade- such as under trees, or the shadow cast by a nearby building. The objective with groups shots is that everyone is evenly lit by daylight. The last thing you want is for your audience to be squinting because of the sun in their face, or some members in shad and some not.

In certain locations you will findthat there is no open shade available so position yourself and your crowd sideways to the sun or shoot into the sun as a last resort. The easiest outdoor group shots happen when the sky is cloudy.
It can be trickier taking group shots indoors. First you have to find a good amount of space to fit everyone and you’ll normally be faced with the situation of having to provide extra light. If you find the ambient light is poor use your portable flash units off camera into umbrellas.

Two of these can work magic, and you might want to use a silver umbrella for maximum light output. To achieve the best spread of light place your umbrellas high on either side of the group and aim them into the middle row of your group (not the front). If you only have one umbrella the best thing to do is place this above and behind from your shooting position. One speedlite firing into a 100cm umbrella on full power can handle a group of 15-20 people indoors.

A trick you might want to try is to start everyone off with their eyes closed and tell them to open on the count of 3. At the moment you shout “open” keep your finger on the shutter for 4-5 continuous shots just to be sure. Before taking your picture it is also worth spending 10seconds quickly scanning the group to make sure you can see all faces without obstruction. Remind them that if they can’t see you the camera will not see the them. What you have to remember also is to position yourself as the photographer in a good vantage point. The photographer will either need to step up on a chair or ladder or arrange the crowd up a staircase to bring all faces into view.

Your final concern for group shots is making sure you achieve a good focus point. As your group will likely consist of numerous rows of people you’re immediately going to need an aperture of F8 or F11 (which also means you get the sharpest quality from your lens incidentally).

As the bride and groom are going to be front row, focus on their eyes. Remember that focus extends further back into the frame than in front, so by focussing on the front rowyour chosen aperture will ensure everyone remains in focus.
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Equipped with a modern digital SLR many photographers learn their trade using natural light. Whether it is artificial or natural the three qualities of light are quality, quantity and colour. Many photographers would agree that the most critical component is the quality of light as this has a marked effect on the photograph. The quality of light is dictated by a number of factors and as we are dealing with available light, the biggest influence is the weather and time of day. For example cloudy and overcast days produce flat and cool toned images. The time of day influences the colour of light and the weather influences the quality.

Wedding photographers have a particularly difficult challenge with light. Venues often have very low light, mixed lighting or just not enough of it. Outdoors, there’s often bad weather to deal with and too much of the wrong light, such as overhead midday sun. Even in a static environment, light can be very varied as the photographer moves around. As a result, exposure compensation and ISO/aperture choices become prevalent in dealing with available light. Thankfully processing in RAW modes is a big bonus for dealing with the problem of colour and light. If you shoot in Jpeg, you’ll need to worry a whole lot more about colour casts and your white balance.

Dealing with low light in particular means you are going to push your technology to the limits and be forced to work within the confines of the availability in light. It is usually at this point that you really appreciate why you should have spent more on a better camera. The key reason why photographers buy expensive SLR cameras is because of the ISO ability – how high the ISO range is and how well the camera handles image noise are the major selling points for professionals. Why? Because high ISO makes the camera more sensitive to low light at higher shutter speeds – available light is no longer a major problem – just the quality of the light.

With the majority of modern photography is taken in colour, the quality of light become even more critical. Many purists of available light photography shoot in colour to later render. A Colour photograph offers plenty of scope for creating a black and white image, as different colours become adjustable as individual shades of grey.
One other trick available for available light work is to bracket a shot and create a HDR imag. The HDR combination of different exposures creates much more dynamic range in the image when combined. The down side of course, is that you would ideally use a tripod and the subjects of the scene need to remain very static to avoid blur.

Faced with the complexities of finding good quality natural light, it’s no wonder many photographers turn to flash photography – at least this puts the photographer in control of the quality and quantity of their light for predictable results.
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One of the reasons why photography has become such a great hobby for many people is that photography is very casual. Most people are used to taking pictures without having to learn the mechanics, and the result is instant. It’s easy to blame the equipment as modern cameras have become very sophisticated indeed in automatic mode.

Regardless, there is no photography without such equipment so it does not make sense to be dismissive about it.

The wedding photographer is a good example of bad learning habits , there are many who are fairly self-confident but who deliver images that have no artistic merit to them – they are simply just snaps. A lot of photographers enjoy twiddling their dials and pressing buttons but fail to appreciate the theory.

Driven by clients who demand more and more pictures, many wedding photographers have become snap happy and have a very itchy finger when it comes to what they photograph. Such intuitive photography results in delivering an immediately good or bad picture, but rarely with any understanding why. Photographers whodedicate time to understanding composition they can evolve as artistic individuals and gain an advantage.

As a photographer, it’s important to realise that what remains important is the image itself and why you take it in the first place.

Because so much ‘magic’ can be achieved in digital post-production thanks to amazing software, there is tendency – even a habit – to approach photography with the attitude that you will fix it later in software. In fact, the opposite should be true because so much can be achieved with the composition in the first place, that more consideration needs to be given at the point the shutter clicks.

In photography there are principles in how you arrange the elements seen through your camera. Of course, these are not hard rules, but guidelines that deliver interesting photography in the same manner as great artists master. While you might argue that only a trained eye will see ‘art’ in photography, the human brain interprets visuals in a certain order and this can be used to emphasis the ‘story’ of every image.

With photography, unlike advertising, getting information across to the viewer slowly is rewarding. There are many compositional elements that can be employed to make a picture more interesting and ‘time-consuming’. You may be familiar with the use of curves and diagonal lines to lead the eye, and their relationship with straight lines and where they intersect each other. Triangles are also helpful shapes to find in a composition regularly. Circles lead the eye inward and rectangles assist in dividing a frame. Complementary to this catalog, the photographer can employ motion, perspective, focus, colour, texture and pattern, and delving deeper you can use scale, shadows, reflections, motion and exposure to tell a story.

The point is, whatever your style of photography there are compositional elements that the human brain appreciates. Learning to apply such approaches in your repertoire will help you create memorable and engaging photography.
This article is copyright of Visualsnap.co.uk.Kent wedding photography Promoting high quality professional wedding coverage. Reputable and established Kent photographer

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The majority of wedding photographers do not work with an assistant. For these people this means the use of flash photography can present real challenges. Why? Because controlling an off-camera flash rig can be cumbersome and time consuming when trying to concentrate on your framing and roaming between guests and locations. The goal of course is to create soft light from your small camera strobe unit – to make the light softer you need to make it bigger.

Without doubt the best quality option is to get small lightweight lightstand and use your speedlite on this with an umbrella. A shoot-thru umbrella is preferable because it can get closer to the subject and so become a bigger light source. When moving about you can also close the umbrella quickly to form a compact unit. If you are taking group shots you can then use the umbrella in reverse for a bounced effect giving a larger spread of light. The disadvantages of the umbrella are that it does naturally waste some lighting power through spillage (compared to a softbox ) and on a windy day, they can prove impossible to use outdoors.

Of course, in tight or crowded indoor locations popping open an umbrella may not be practical and even dangerous, so many photographers without an assistant tend to stick with on camera flash. However, all is not lost because in this configuration you still have the option to bounce your light off walls and ceilings (if available – so no use outdoors). As an alternative you can also use a good diffuser like the Lightsphere2 or the Lastolite Micro ApolloXL – with the later proving more versatile for outdoor use too. What’s important with people photography is to remember to soften your light source to produce flattering photography at a wedding – direct flash is a no no unless in bright sunshine or used from far away.

You will probably also be aware that on camera flash introduces another problem of orientation. If you turn your camera vertically for a portrait shot the flash is now off centre and will produce shadows or red-eyes. The solution is to use a camera bracket which allows you to rotate your camera while leaving the flash in the same overhead middle position for consistency.

Another point to consider is how you are going to trigger your flash. In a fast moving situation like a wedding you don’t particularly have time to calculate the manual flash power or use a light meter. This is why many wedding photographers may prefer to leave the camera and flash to do their automatic flash ETTL metering. Pocket Wizard offer their MiniTT1 radio signal transmitter kit which now allows you to maintain automatic flash metering over hundreds of feet, removing all limitations from where you may wish to place your flash creatively. If you prefer to keep your flash unit mounting on the camera with a diffuser, just make sure the ETTL transmitter of the flash is not blocked by your choice of diffuser or you will not benefit from automatic metering.

In winter months you will find your batteries do not last as long as the cold weather sets in. The solution is to use an external battery pack for your flash. The key benefit apart from increased battery life is that you will also benefit from much shorter recycling times (how long you wait before being able to take another flash picture). Finally, only use NiMH rechargeable batteries by the way – they recycle much faster.

This article is copyright of Visualsnap.co.uk.Kent wedding photography Promoting high quality professional wedding coverage. Established and reputable Wedding photographers Kent

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A wedding photographer should – always- ensure that they have some private allocated time with the couple on their wedding day. No matter what style of wedding photography the couple wants, they will always expect some pretty great shots of just the two of them. You shouldn’t need more than 30mins of their time, but it means you can really compose your shots and lighting with care and attention and have their full attention.

What tends to happen when you start walking off with the happy couple for a private session is that people follow. It really doesn’t work if other people are hanging around and distracting them. Even worse, is that guests assume that because you are taking pictures of the couple it’s a suitable time for them to join in. In this situation the bride and groom will undoubtedly be caught looking at their friends rather than you, the jokes will start flying and the session is ruined.

A good photographer needs good people skills and crowd control. Be firm and polite and explain to disrupting guests this is a private session. If they do not listen, request the bride and groom to tell them.

It’s a good plan to shoot the portrait session right after the ceremony and upon reaching the reception venue. Just ensure the bride and groom have agreed when to do this – there will never be a good time to do this otherwise, particularly at larger weddings where old friends continuously fight for a moment with the bride or groom.

Hopefully, you have some knowledge of the venue in advance in terms of photogenic locations, lighting and so forth. Equally, be prepared with your equipment, particularly your lens choice.

A choice of lenses exist which are often referred to as a ‘portrait’ lens. What defines a portrait lens is primarily the focal length. Anything above 85mm produces a pleasing perspective without distorting facial features. The preference by pros is generally between 135mm and 200mm – this also keeps the photographer at quite some shooting distance to help relax the subjects. Should you be looking at wider apertures than F2.8 then you need to use a prime lens instead and the Canon 135mm F2L is an excellent choice. If shooting Indoors, you might prefer the 85mm focal length for portraits due to working space considerations.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you’re looking to get the sharpest image from your lens, you need to stop it down 2 stops from its widest setting. So for example, a F2.8 lens is crisper at F5.6. Keep this in mind when you move on to group shots later, not only will F8 give you top performance from a lens but it also gives you the depth of field needed to keep everyone in focus .
This article is copyright of Visualsnap.co.uk.Wedding photographers in Kent Promoting high quality professional wedding coverage. Established and reputable Wedding photographers Kent

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As the principle wedding photographer dealing with the ceremony and the customary ‘list’ of required shots – there’s no doubt that these alone can be stressful even for the seasoned professional. However, for larger bookings – there is the more enjoyable side of wedding photographing to come in the form of the reception party.

With the serious part completed, the wedding party is a time for everyone to relax and have fun. Photographic opportunities are more candid, informal and fast paced. Guests are more relaxed and usually co-operate happily. Even so, a good photographer still has to keep agile and have the correct camera settings ready to dial in swiftly.

Lighting will typically be very poor, not just the amount of light but the quality of light. There’s probably going to be mixed light sources too such as candles, coloured spot lights and whatever default lighting is at the venue. You should be sure to photograph in RAW mode as this will give you huge benefits in removing colour casts during post-production.

Given the party atmosphere, photographic subjects are less likely to be still, so a faster shutter (in low light!) is helpful to avoid blur – unless you want that effect of course. (TIP: keep your flash sync on second curtain if you do by the way). Not all venues of course are also going to be attractive, so you might have added difficulties in finding backdrops that are not distracting or plain unattractive.

With so much going on, it’s a convenient time to blend in. The benefits of being able to roam without restriction and use a flash give you creative possibilities for some winning shots. Regardless, it remains important to know the agenda of events, which are most likely running a little late and maybe even rearranged without notice. With noise levels high, events such as the cake cutting can even be easily missed. Some photographers prefer to mock the cake cutting while the couple are fresh at the venue and guests are not so distracting. Remember, it’s up to you to know what is taking place and when to have your camera ready and braced. If you want to use off-camera flash for example you need to calculate set-up time and maybe a little testing time in advance. Make sure your memory card is not about to run out of space too.

As with the traditional cake cutting, the other key moments to follow include the nervous speeches and first dance as husband and wife.

For the speeches a telephoto lens should be your weapon of choice, keeping you discrete while permitting close-ups of faces and wide shots of audience reactions. Look around you for family members (you know who they are right?) and capture their mood – the couple will find it rewarding to later see the reactions of family they may be missing while giving speeches. Using a wide lens aperture with a long focal length to isolate faces is a traditional method used to candid shots during a reception.

Try not to forget to photography the band or entertainment – they are all part of the event and help relive the feelings of the evening. If you’re too focused on the couple you will miss many great shots.

Most likely, your last scheduled event to shoot will be the first dance. As the photographer, you should avoid getting in their faces during what is probably an intimate time , so be mindful of your distance and choose a lens accordingly. With constant moving of your target you are well advised to flip your camera into continuous focus mode and try to ensure you mostly position yourself side-on, not only does this capture both faces but permits easier focusing. Complimenting this, it is also a great time to play with perspective. As with pop-videos, varied camera angles deliver a sense of excitement and solace. Holding the camera above your head or getting down low will provide a dramatically different feel to the dance sequence.

Wedding photography is a job and a celebration, hopefully you’ve captured the best of the proceedings and actually enjoyed yourself too.

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As a wedding photographer it can be strange to face the realisation that you will probably spend more time in front of a computer processing your images – than you do behind the camera taking pictures. This is true for the vast majority in this profession and only those who are super busy generally leave the processing to someone else back in the studio. It of course makes sense to process your own images and maintain artistic license right through the delivery process.

To remain productive with our photographywe need good machines and software. Thankfully, computers and software have come a long way in recent years and the digital workflow can work wonders. However, with camera resolution increasing, and professional photographers shooting pictures in RAW mode (raw data) the files sizes, quantity and processing required from a typical wedding can be a taxing process for most computers.

The two most important factors in selecting your computer of choice is CPU and RAM – the graphics card surprisingly contributes very little in terms of speed. You will need at least 4GB of ram although 8GB+ has real benefits if working on lots of files and multitasking with various software tools. More than 8GB is probably overkill at this time even with 21MP files from the likes of the popular Canon EOS 5DMK2. For CPU choice, do go with a quad-core configuration – these are noticeably much faster with image editing work and the software you will be using makes full use of multi core threading. Quad-core is becoming a standard for MACs and PCs so it makes sense on a cost-performance level anyway. To put into perspective – on a 3Ghz quad-core PC editing images from a 5DMK2, it still takes around 3secs to flick between one picture and the next for processing – multiply that by say 700 images from a typical wedding and you can see why a modern computer is important for photography work.

It goes without saying that you need a good storage solution too, but luckily big fast hard drives are relatively cheap. Invest in an additional external hard drive for achieve purposes or invest in a recordable Blu-ray drive if you want to store original RAW files on achieve media.

Most wedding photographers capture and edit in the RAW camera file format and convert to JPEG at the final print/client stage. Always keep the RAW images in back-up until your client has proffed your work should changes be requested.

Making the right choice in software is also critical. You really do not want to be learning new tools continuously. Thankfully, an industry standard piece of software has emerged in recent years for both MAC and PC: Adobe Lightroom has it’s flaws, but remains a fantastic weapon for the wedding photographer dealing with large numbers of images. Check it out with the free trial available. If you’re looking to engage in more detailed and flexible image alterations, Photoshop is probably your only other choice to make, and both programs integrate very well.

If you are really concerned about image quality you might also like to invest in some image noise reduction software to clean up low-light photography grain. Quite a few choices are available for image noise reduction but the two best solutions today are Imagenomic’s Noiseware 2 and Neat Image. The downside to using such software is that this will increase the effort required to complete your project.

So you’ve got everything together – how much time is it going to take to process a typical wedding shoot? A rule of thumb that is sensible states for every hour of photography – you will spend around 3+ more hours in post production. Clients rarely equate photographer fees with the work also required after the big day, but clearly it is something you need to think about wisely if making money from your work.

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You’ll find many photographers who pigeon-hole their style of photography: Contemporary, traditional, reportage, fine art and so forth are all popular phrases for photographers. From the client’s perspective they usually do not really understand the differences –they simply see modern or old fashioned looking wedding pictures.

Particularly in wedding photography the important thing is to capture emotion, and one thing which clients really appreciate in wedding images is the natural look – they get that.

Wedding photographers are often in conflict with tradition in trying not to focus on ‘standard’ photographs. Such images are cliché and for a client comparing photographers – it can be very difficult to differentiate. Such tick-tock imagery is bound to lose its impact with clients, but clients still want these pictures regardless of the style they have booked for; the cliché lives on.

How to address this problem is one that more successful photographers have acknowledged. Shooting with a wide lens aperture for example gives a more modern ‘movie’ ‘3D’look to images, pulling the viewer to a particular component on the scene. Capturing candid expressions in this fashion can take cliché shots and present them in an incredibly natural fashion that is always a hit with the client.

Other photographers focus on timeless images. Being able to anticipate the action and be prepared to capture it is a valuable skill. Photographs that captures the mood of the moment as it unfolds appear timeless in that their emotional impact is just as vivid today as it will be 50 years on, and there is nothing in the picture that will seem overtly dated. Simplicity is a key tool for the professional photographer and the best images usually happen by themselves. Authenticity brings out the story in wedding photography. If the image is overcooked in post-production that purity is forgotten.

Use of colour or not is also a cliché. Spot colour (where a single element of a black and white image is given colour) is generally frowned upon by most modern wedding photographers, but clients still really like it (they probably will not in 10 years). Similarly pure black and white photography is traditionally regarded as artistic and well suited for portraits – colour is often a distraction in a busy photo, so a conversion brings back simplicity to the composition. Often in wedding photography, the use of colour is rarely artistic at source – but applied in post for clichéd effect.

Unfortunately there is a trend among most clients to expect as many pictures as possible from their wedding, but they also want to book their photographer for as few hours as possible. The result is that the photographer does not have time to capture much more than the cliché pictures. Simply herding guests together for a long list of ‘requested’ shots from the couple is not efficient use of time, and impatient guests make for pictures that are not natural in form. Similarly, a private portrait session with the bride and groom is also critical, but there is often little time to find scenic backdrops and explore poses and props that would really create memorable pictures that are not cliché.

Ultimately, wedding photography has moved on thanks to technology, but remains cliché due to expectations and tradition. Unless you are prepared to pay a premium and devote extra time on the day for the wedding photographer, that’s what the market decides.

This article is copyright of www.Visualsnap.co.uk – Kent wedding photographer. Established and Professional Kent photographer and supporting wedding videography services for London, Surrey, Kent and the south east of England.

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