Wedding Photography Tips – From Capturing to Editing

I love photographing weddings, they are extremely fun and allow you to get really creative. Every wedding that you photograph is different and presents a different challenge. Sometimes you are faced with a strange location with not a lot of great backgrounds and other times you are in the most beautiful place. Regardless of where you are you still need to capture images.

This weeks photo of the week brings you an image captured at a recent wedding. I want to start off by saying how amazing it was to work with this wedding party, they did not stop smiling and laughing all day. When you are working with people who are having fun, smiling and just being themselves it makes for a much easier day. To set up this photo I will give you some background on the location.
We were on the banks of the Delaware river in North East Philadelphia at an old estate. The grounds were gorgeous but we faced an overcast day and were loosing light. You may have heard me say this before but I love shooting on overcast days. It is like shooting with a huge soft-box in the sky. A soft-box diffuses the light aka the sun is blocked by clouds which in turn makes for really sweet light.

We needed to capture a full wedding party shot before we lost to much light. There was this amazing path with trees that had their leaves changing. When it came to setting my camera and deciding on a lens I knew I wanted to use the Nikon 70-200 2.8 VRII because it would be sharp corner to corner at 2.8 as well as separate the party from the background. The Nikon D3S was set to 4000 ISO 1/400th of a second at 2.8 manual exposure. Yes, 4000 ISO, I am never worried shooting the D3S that high because it handles it extremely well. Remember, if your exposures are very close and you do not have to make major corrections you have less chance of noise being introduced into your images. I directed to party to walk down the path spread out so I can see everyone and stop at a certain point. I got down on a low angle to add more dimension to the image. As they walked back I used continuos focus to track them while capturing the moment. The best image from the set is this weeks photo of the week.