Quote:
|
Originally Posted by PinkMonkey
In Novemeber I am heading to Mexico for a friends wedding. They have asked me to do the photography for them and as my payment they are buying a lense of my choice. I will be using my Canon Digital Rebel.
Question number 1: What size lense should I get for shooting in the church...I don't want to be much of a distraction to the wedding. (I already have a 18-55mm lense)
Question 2: How much flash am I going to need for back lighting? I have been told I am going to need a fairly large flash.
Question 3: How many "mm" lense can you get away with without needing a tripod?
Thanks for your help everyone.
|
well if they will buy you only one lens something in the 70-200 zoom would be good, APO, with a big fixed maximum lens opening (that does not change as you zoom).
people will look their best without on-camera flash so try to shoot as much as possible with avail light. inside the church at the ceremony usually they don't want flash anyway. your camera body is ok, but i would not try to shoot higher than 800 iso without flash.
power for your camera body and flash are big issue---you should have multiple batteries are something like a big digital cam battery to really work fast:
www.digitalcamerabattery.com
you need a flash with very fast recovery, things are moving fast and you will lose many good shots while people are dancing etc at the reception if your flash recovery is anything longer than a sec or 2.
consider taking your umbrellas, and pro strobes and setting up a quickie glamour corner to get key posed shots---or if you have the power and hardware setup a bank of 4 flash heads bounced out of umbrellas against one wall and shoot the whole auditorium or reception while you move around with a wireless infrared trigger on the camera (wein, etc.) might be wise to rent this equip if you don't own it, and play with it for a day before the real thing.
if you must use on camera flash use something like a stofen diffuser tilted at 45 degrees like press photographers use---this will stop redeye and allow you to work fast.
take LOTS of images---weddings are very hard work and you must take pix of everything. get tight shots, table decorations, embroiderery on bride's dress, the cake, little kids faces, different angles, different focal lengths with your zoom, be prepared to get high and low and be constantly on the move shooting everything including the classic wedding shots. get a "must have" pose list of shots the bride has to have for her album, listen to her, not so much the groom. write this list down, and don't miss a single one of her "must have" shots. make the bride's mother look good also. try to make all women look good. many people will be overweight, on these folks use your zoom and get head and shoulder shots. if a shot is bad don't let it see the light of day, be ruthless in your editing, better to take 2000 shots and only present the bride with 200 than give her all the shots.
when shooting wide angle group shots take a minimum of 5 exposures of each setup to get one keeper where all eyes are open---a female assistant is good who will help arrange people and get their clothes, bouquets, etc in order.
on key shots that are posed bracket your exposures. shoot in raw if you can and have plenty of CF avail or take a laptop to offload your images. have as much redundant equip as possible, if something will fail, it will fail at a wedding.
remember, you shoot like a crazy man. forget about technique and shoot it as a documentary.