Technology is Wonderful BUT...
April 28, 2023 issue #45 – Getting it correct IN-CAMERA is still most important.
In Monday’s newsletter, I spoke about how I photographed my first wedding in over 30 years. I mentioned that the wedding officiant wouldn’t allow me to use a flash during the ceremony, so I used Auto-ISO. I also talked about how I didn’t have proper lighting. I had to make do with a single Nikon SB-910 on-camera flash. The main gist of that article was that I was still able to make fine pictures because of the advancements in post-processing software.
With that said, it still is most important to get as much right in camera as possible. Also, I made some stupid mistakes since I hadn’t done a wedding in over 30 years. In today’s newsletter, I want to show you a few of the pictures and how I was able to take care of them in post-production. I also want to mention some mistakes I made. Performing a critical self-assessment after a shoot is always good if you want to improve.
First of all, the priest told me that during the ceremony, he didn’t want me to use a flash – he also mentioned that he didn’t want me to walk behind him. To be able to use the shutter speed and aperture I desired without a flash, my only real option was to utilize Auto-ISO. I did this without worry because I knew I owned post-processing software that would knock out the noise without an issue.
*For all of the photos in the newsletter, if you want to zoom in to get a closer look, if you’re reading this on your phone, you should be able to tap, pinch, and zoom. If you’re reading it on your computer, clicking on a photo will open it up in a browser window, and from there, you can zoom in by clicking on the picture or tapping the Control key on Windows or the Command key on Mac along with the plus sign +. To fit it back to the screen, hit Control/Command along with the zero key 0.
The photo above was taken at 1/60th of a second, F5.6, and an ISO of 1600. If you zoom in on it, you’ll notice that there is a fair amount of noise.
I used Lightroom’s new built-in AI noise reduction and got the result above. A fine image without any noise.
Below, you’ll see the happy couple walking down the aisle out of the church. Because they were moving, I wanted to use a faster shutter speed, so I bumped it up to 1/125th of a second. A mistake I made was leaving the aperture at 5.6. I should have used an aperture of F4.0 to blur out the background a bit more, which would have isolated the couple more than what I ended up with. Also, if I used that larger aperture, the ISO would have been 2000 and not the 4000 I ended up with.
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