Wedding shoot 1

Over the last month I have been out on location shooting shooting various weddings. I have completed two weddings recently one on my own and the second one which I was the second photographer.

Detailed below are some accounts of the day's photography,planning,techniques and equipment used.

I was commissioned by a colleague of mine to be the second photographer at one of the weddings he was shooting recently.We met a few weeks previously to pre plan the shoot and discuss all of the  business side of things.I was paid an agreed fee for this work and wasn't paid by the hour


We me up a second time at the actual location of the wedding to get ourselves accustomed with the venue and to plan out shooting strategies and to check on lighting and exposures

I was given the brief  for the day by my colleague shown here below which listed all of the shooting requirements for the day 


These were the costs I incurred for the day's photography


Petrol costs                                        £10.00
Batteries for flash photography       £  5.00
Meals and drinks at the location     £14.00


I arrived at the wedding location a local golf club and hotel at 11am with all of my equipment ready for the day. I was using 2  cameras  on the day a Canon 5D3 and a Canon 7D I was given a client brief of what I was to photograph on the day by my colleague the main photographer

It is very important to have two cameras at the ready to record images on the day as you cannot allow for mistakes on an occasion like this. A backup camera is essential because if you loose all images on one camera at least you will have some images of the day on the other camera to use as a back up

I particularly used a Canon 5D for most of the closeup portrait shots as this is a full frame format camera which produces really fine detail on its images.This allows for large print enlargements or close crops of the photo to be made with out without hardly any noise evident. Using a full frame censor allowed more light into the camera which enabled me to shoot at lower light levels as opposed to using my other Canon 7D camera which is a CSC crop sensor

My brief was to photograph the groom and the best man as they arrived at the golf course as my colleage would be phtographing the bride getting ready at her own house. I phtographed the pair in a variety of different poses and locations

My brief also needed me to capture the happy couple coming back down the isle out of the reception once they were married and to capture the spirit and emotion of their happy faces


For both weddings I used the software "Photoshop and Bridge" to post process my images


I used Photoshop to manipulate,crop,resizemy images which are are enhanced using these techniques.
I used a vignette on some of the images which gives a slightly dated kind of feel to my images this technique works really well on monochrome images. Other techniques include adding more noise using the noise filters which are built into photoshop. I also use a soft sharpen type of technique using different layers in photoshop which creates a nice soft focus

I use bridge for a variety of reasons and this software has a multitude of different uses. This software's main purpose is a file management  viewer which allows you to catalogue sort batch and batch process images. It is a very useful piece of software. Bridge is actually built into Photoshop so you are getting two pieces of software for the price of one

Film Noir (Image manipulation)

I was commissioned by a friend to shoot some images of a 30th birthday party. I was given a brief to produce some old style images and the theme of the party was 20's 30's film noir night,which roughly translates to old black and white films and characters from this era.The party goers were all dressed as different characters from this era in time and I was asked to manipulate the images to possibly reflect and emulate this era in time

The images were all shot in a local hotel.The images were shot with a Canon 5D3 and a Canon 430 speedlight. The ceiling of the hotel was very low so I bounced the flash to give an even spread of light to eluminate my subjects

I mainly used photoshop for this procedure using various layers to change the images structures. I firstly desaturated the images to black and white then added a texture from my library of textured images to give the images an aged feel

I used a third party piece of software which has some in built filters to shift the focal point of the image of centre to another part of the image and also added a blurred vignette to the edges of the images

Shown here are the finished images which I think portray the 1920's-30's era that my client requested

Shown below are the original images shot on the night before manipulation

I have also included some screen grabs of the meta data taken from the images which shows aperture, shutter speeds and other data that my camera was using at the time when the images were shot

Shown here are some more screen grabs of the techniques that I used to desaturate and blend layers together in Photoshop to give my images a sort of old/worn appearance, I think the technique works quite well

Shown below here is a screen grab taken from Bridge of some of my textures that I use to add to my images. I have a library of textures which I collect and add to and it's amazing how many different textures there are out there if you just open your eyes and look for them

The texture I used in the images above here was taken from a very old tree which had some interesting patterns,shadows and grooves,which when desaturated produces the ideal layer to give my images an old /worn look

Shown below are some of the images I used for ideas and inspiration for this project.These were general images taken from the Internet which gave me posing ideas, information on hairstyles and ideas to create the ambiance of the images

The final images were sent to print at an online print processor named Loxley Colour one of the best online photo printers in the business. The prints were requested in various sizes and printed on an extreme matt paper which gave the images an authentic look and feel which the client was really please with. The images were then mounted in a photographic album of the clients choice and presented to my client as the finished article

Flash Techniques

Over the last 6 months I have been using even more flash in my photography. I bought a Canon 430EX 2 speed-light for some weddings I was photographing to assist me with enhancing my images and to use  mainly as fill in flash 


Jim my work colleague being a bit of an expert on the subject has been giving me lots of tuition on using speed-lights recently and at long last I think I have mastered these wonderful gadgets


At first I thought like everybody else,stick it on auto and fire away. Wrong, this is the worst thing you can do with such a great piece of equipment, you must learn how to use it and get to balance your flash with ambient light, the results can be amazing


It took me some time to understand the flash and learn how to use it but now I think i am reaping benefits of my studies


At first I didn't understand sync speeds but after some studying,reading and watching video's I have finally got my head around them now. I understand the science of the subject now and everything has fell into place


Here's a brief explanation of sync speeds and what they do:


Sync speed is the fastest shutter speed you can use with that flash with your camera 


When you take a picture, the shutter opens and closes to let light strike the image sensor. When it does so, the shutter is fully open for a very short time. If the shutter speed is too fast, the burst of light from the flash won't fully expose all parts of the image sensor and part of the scene won't be captured in the image. The fastest shutter speed that can be used is called the flash synchronization speed and is usually between 1/125-1/500 second. My Canon 7 D uses a sync of 1/250th sec. If you select a faster shutter speed directly or indirectly, most cameras will override you and lower it. The shutter works with two curtains, a front and rear (sometimes called first and second curtains). The shutter opens when the front curtain slides out of the way and ends when the rear curtain slides to close it. The flash fires either when the shutter first fully opens or just before it's about to close.

Shown here are some images that explain the process

(Top row) Front/first curtain sync (the usual mode) means the flash fires when the shutter's front curtain first fully opens to expose the image sensor.

• (Bottom row) Rear/second curtain sync means the flash fires just before the shutter's rear curtain starts to close to end the exposure.

A focal plane shutter opens a curtain to begin an exposure and closes a second curtain to end it. At fast shutter speeds (top) the second curtain starts to end the exposure before the first curtain has fully opened so the two curtains form a slit traveling across the image sensor. Flash would only expose the area uncovered by the slit between the two rapidly moving curtains. At the flash sync speed and slower (bottom) the second curtain doesn't start to close until the first one is fully open.