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Still catching up. Alex Fabrikant, my old friend from high school, invited me to his wedding to Nicole. They had an interesting scheme where they divided photography duties among several friends; I landed the reception.
So I promised in the Yaz and David wedding post that I would add some more lessons picked up from this event.
1. Wait for it... wait for it... Focus is good. In dim light, even the fastest lens/body combo is going to take time to lock. This is difficult when one is diving in and out of chair-bearing sweaty men trying to get better angles on the shot. My fancy new (refurbished) 40D should be faster on the focus lock, and in some limited situations live view on the LCD might be helpful.
2. Shoot first, be creative second. There were large chunks of time where, in an effort to show the movement of the party, I tried dragging the shutter with second-curtain flash. This is fine, in principle, but the more reliable shot is to just do the flash. Dragging the shutter produced some good photos, but many, many blurred images which were not really presentable.
3. Batteries. Charged. All of them. I didn't exactly run out of batteries, because I carry multiple spares and chargers, but the flash cycling time is poor on low battery, particularly with my hacked up Sunpak flashes I got on ebay. Those chair-bearing sweaty dudes are only going to hold up the couple for so long.
4. Check off the gear before you leave. Had to drive all the way back to the reception site because I left the flash triggers behind in a convenient little plastic bag without my name on it.
5. If everybody points their camera in one direction, point yours in another. This sounds like I'm just being contrary for the fun of it, but there are a couple reasons behind this. First, the couple had split photo duties, so they're going to get something decent from somebody who was crowded in one direction. I hope. Second, sometimes the shot is that more interesting is the paparazzi shot, which worked well in many instances. Third, the herd mentality is strong in humans and strong in me, but the herd acts on some strange form of consensus, which in my life has not had a good track record for finding the best shots. For instance, at one point the couple stood on a triangular balcony which had two access doors. A large crowd of shooters stood at one door, firing shots into the couple's back. Nobody is at the other angle, which is a sidelong view of the couple staring over some water, most likely because getting to the other angle involved waving at the DJ and navigating around his gear. I'm not sure if he was pissed off or not, but whatever. Nevertheless,
6. You still have to get the cake shot. Although to be sure, I really like that paparazzi shot.
7. Flash, and more flash. At the beginning, I thought, mistakenly, that there might be enough light coming through the windows to just get available light photos. This got me by, but many shots were lost because of backlighting issues and low light issues. Later, the staff turned on floodlights for me, which was great, except that they still weren't enough light, and were oddly colored to boot. Which brings me to the next point,
8. Don't mix lighting types. This has been an issue before, but it cropped up in limited settings where I could just go into photoshop and fix the issues. In an event setting, where the number of images is much higher, it's a huge problem. For those who have not yet been battered by mixed lighting issues, the story is that every type of light (sunlight, indirect sunlight, flash, fluorescent, CFL, halogen, incandescent....) has a color temperature. If you compensate the white point for one type of lighting, but have another type of lighting in the shot, it will make the other look funny-colored. Sometimes this is good for, say, fancy lab photos (like the ones you see in catalogs where the lighting is weirdly blue or weirdly red) but for most applications went out of style several decades ago. On a related note, some types of lighting do not cover the full spectrum, so certain colors will never ever look right under, say, streetlamps, or, say, a DJ's funny-lights.
OK, i'm done ranting now.
