Photographers!!! I Have A Couple Questions
 

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.

Sorry to say but I guess they better can hire a professional for this. Not to blame you but I guess if you fuck up these pics they will be very disapointed afterwards.

And yes, I think you are not ready for this.

I agree if they dont care then great but if this is special to them they should hire a pro who does weddings for a living.

They are keeping the wedding to cost minimum...A professional will cost upwards of 2-3 grand...It's just not in their budget. So if anyone does have some help to these questions please let me hear them. They do understand I'm not a "professional" photographer. They just want some decent quality pics for a decent price.

i agree, that's a special date

Get a 70 - 200 MM objective with image stabilizator from Canon but that objective is pretty expensive and they want to keep it cheap. I would use at least an oblectibe above the 120 MM for this.

For the flash I would use the Speedlight of Canon, that is a pretty decent Flash in combination of your camera. For the backlight you can use an other flash as slave but you need to use a lightmeter for this.

No Job For Amateurs
 

The lens that you need is the Canon EF24-70 F2.8 L USM. The bad news for your friends is that this lens costs $1100. You also need a Canon 550EX Speedlight and a Canon CP-E2 battery pack to power that flash. This combination of equipment will all attach to your Rebel and will make it possible for you to do an adequate job at your friends wedding. If you try to use the ambient light inside the church you will have to shoot from a tripod and that will prevent you from being able to maneuver to capture moments like the first kiss. Wedding photographers make a fortune because it's the most difficult and stressful type of shooting that there is.

Mike Jones

Wow, I was going to suggest that EXACT combo for the digital rebel for weddings.

OH shit!

Alien, Mike's one of the workshop photog's I told you about for the shoot-out in Phoenix.. it's not too late for you to sign up! :winkwink:

Anya

Great Minds...
 

Great minds think alike!

Mike Jones

You can get a tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 Xr Di for around 300 bucks. It's a pretty nice lens and it will handle the job just fine. Another lens I recommend is the canon 135mm f/2.8 softfocus. Sharp as hell and it won't cost you an eye.

You have time to learn and pratice. Go to boards like fredmiranda.com (it has a wedding section) and photo.net and read as much as possible.

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.

A couple is two!
http://www.availablelightphoto.com/p...RayCharles.jpg

buying you the equipment will cost them as much as hiring a professional photographer. The lens alone is gonna run you $1K and up...

When i was invited to a wedding, i took my 70-200L canon and Sigma EF-500 DG Super flash. Since the lens had no stabilizer, about 1/5 of the pictures appeared to be blurry, but anyway the "just married" were satisfied with the quality :)

Yes, they also hired a pro photographer to that but some of the pictures that i took were better than hers. :)

By the looks of your questions...if you want to KEEP them as friends...back out NOW and explain why. The combination of lens, and flash, etc that REDSKY suggests is exactly right...but it's not as if you can open up your new "presents" from the couple a few days before the wedding and expect miracles...even if it IS in a church...

Someone replied that weddings are the most stressful, and that's why pro shooters charge so much...that is 100% absolute FACT!

Fitz

you're gonna need about $2,000 worth of equipment to pull this off


you'll need the 70-200 2.8 IS...about a $1,500 lens

the canon 550EX (aprox. $350)

a monopod would be recommended too

Thanks to everyone that has responded...I am now officially nervous about this. I just want you guys to remember that they know "I'm Not A Pro" and won't expect pics that will blow their mind. I'm sure I will get a bunch of quality pics. Keep posting if you have more ideas to make this any easier on me.....Thanks All

nice shot red sky - beautiful foxy - wowzee

yeah monopod would be a plus for inside of the church, because even at 800iso f/2.8 you might be shooting at 1/30th. tough to handhold that longer than about 100mm...and tripod will slow you down too much.

good tip.