Adventures While Shooting a Wedding

And Subsequent Construction of the Obligatory Treasured Wedding Album.

By Christopher Lindley
March 2005

"No pressure, buddy . . . but you'd better not screw this up."
I've been using an IBM microdrive for image storage - Compact Flash format - in my D60 ever since I've had the camera . . . over two years now. This is a defacto spinning hard-disc drive, 1,000 MB capacity, that's about the same size as a quarter. Scary! And it has never failed me.

A hardware meltdown during a never-to-be-repeated event such as a wedding would likely be life-threatening, and frankly, I don't need the stress. So I don't 'do' weddings. I like my free weekends; I am not starving, and want to be very careful that this lovely hobby doesn't turn into just another job.

In this case, though, I couldn't really say no, as the bride was my sister, Renee. I spent a moment wondering when I'd last been throttled by sis, and then I realized that the real threat was her fiancee. Chuck is a cop, and would undoubtedly have a gun handy. Panic began to set in.

Just as I was wondering where I might like to be buried, I caught a glimpse of the upside: This was the perfect excuse to buy that 24-70mm f/2.8L lens I'd been wanting. And so that clinched it:  I cleared off Big Blue's microdrive, and hoped that it had a couple of good spins left on it. Who said photography wasn't a risky endeavour?
Move your cursor over the image to view!
Must have javascript enabled
Here's a confession:  I continue to be rather taken by "fashion photography". I think it's almost easy:  If you can't get a good shot of pretty people looking their best, well . . . let's just say it isn't their fault. And later, when you're creating the print, no one will get too upset about image manipulation (unlike, say, a lot of landscape photography purists). Indeed, people expect them to be manipulated. So - shhhh! - weddings are "easy", for the same reason.

Before the actual wedding, there are seriously interesting goings-on in the bride's and groom's rooms. People fret, cry, become retrospective, or are deliriously happy (sometimes all at once).  The photographer seems to have some license, and will ideally alternate between being a fly-on-the-wall and a dictator. These before-the-ceremony situations seem to be one of the best opportunities a wedding photographer will have for some creativity and candid shots.
A single six megapixel image, cropped, resampled, and split in half to print on two facing 11" square album pages. A good-looking 22" spread.
Because the room lighting was both incandescent and daylight, I shot everything in RAW mode so I could later adjust the white balance at will. This was invaluable. I had no flash (I need to get one), and so had to opt for maximum aperture at low (1/30 sec) shutter speeds. Bumping up the ISO sensitivity was sometimes required, but that naturally increases the attendant grain. Shooting at f/2.8 was OK, though, as the backgrounds took on that nice blur. I brought a tripod, but never used it. The new, fast lens was great, doing it's thing.

I found that the ceremony itself didn't provide much opportunity to be very creative. Weddings are scripted events, and it seemed that the best I could do was simply provide documentary evidence, if only in the form of a snapshot.

Immediately after the wedding, though, we took a short drive to the Garden-of-the-Gods Park in Colorado Springs. Here was a chance to become creative again. The light outside was great for shooting, so I went out of RAW mode (to the best JPG mode) and set the white-balance for "cloudy". Not everything I tried with the subjects worked here; it's not good, for example, to take pictures of your subject while they're being blinded by your reflector. And the 100-400mm telephoto was a bit much for anything other than tight face shots. I was learning to like that the flexibility the other lens gave me. . . and ultimately returned to it.
Artz Album Construction
The other side-benefit to shooting this wedding was that I could try to construct an album. A few companies have begun supplying pages that are printable on both sides by your inkjet printer.  I chose Artz's "Digital Coffee Table Book", a 13x11" book that comes with about 40 11x12" pages of Moab Paper company's Etrada Fine Art paper. Holes are punched in a 1" margin on the side, giving the photographer an 11x11" printable area.
I distract Chuck by continuing to take pictures. So far, so good.
My photographer friends know that my latest obsession (OK, one of my latest obsessions) is printing. Specifically, getting the best print possible. And so far I'm having fun printing this album: You download your printer-profiles from Moab Paper. You get to print on paper that cost you about $3/sheet, once you figure out how to stay out of that margin area. You get to figure out how to put in the page for a right-facing page, and then figure out what is going to follow it on the other side, all the while feeding the page to your printer in the correct orientation . You get to figure out how to spread your image across two pages. Did I say "fun"?  No, it is, really!  I haven't messed up anything, yet.
Like I suggested above, when you are creating this kind of work, people don't mind too much if you get "artistic". So translucent backgrounds, montages, text, and anything else you can think to do in Photoshop can enhance the otherwise generic wedding shots you took. The album is coming out great - although it may take me a few months to produce.

When it's done, it should be stunning and one-of-a-kind. And when it's in Chuck's hands, I should finally be off-the-hook.