This is perhaps the most useful aspect of blogging about photography for an aspiring amateur like myself: documenting success and failures in technique. When a certain type of shooting opportunity is approaching, it’s great to be able to look back in a technical diary of sorts and see what worked and what didn’t in the past. Of course, if you keep a well organized database of image, you can always just look back and see what the results were, but you don’t always save the bad images from a given event, and you can’t always remember what you did- beyond the EXIF data.

Here is probably the first time I photographed people in a church, or at least first time in this church for sure, with flash. I had no assistant and was not about to bring lightstands or tripods into the church, so it was on camera. I did okay, but for future reference here were some mistakes and observations:

Continued…

I had my SB-600 flash set -1 EV, with the built-in diffuser engaged. I had my Nikkor 35-70/2.8 zoom on (wishing once again that it was the 24-70/2.8…wahhhh!). My thoughts on lens choice were that my 16-35/4 would be too wide and distorted through most of it’s lower end of the range, and would not get me long enough for some headshots. Plus I wanted a wider aperture to throw the background out of focus on some shots. My 50mm or 85mm fixed 1.8s would be great for bokeh, but too restricting in terms of focal length and I was not into switching lenses or employing ”sneaker zoom”. These events are too fast paced for that. So I believe my lens choice was about right given my selection.

For the group shots, my perspective was too low. I was kneeling down to stay out of the way of the photographers behind me. Considerate, yes, but the back rows of kids are barely seen. And the flash lit up only the first row or two, exacerbating the problem. Lighting-wise, I would have been better off to do one of two things: either put away the diffuser and angle the flash at full power up to the ceiling at about 45 degree angle (with a bounce card if I had one for that flash), or just jack up the ISO and shoot available light, no flash.

I have to really pay attention to the background. I keep forgetting to do this where it really should be engrained into my brain by now. Although I didn’t have a lot of freedom, mainly because I’m always trying to be considerate to the other parents/shooters, I would have been better to be a little more centered in front of the subjects and to pay attention where the crucifix was in relation to the subjects. This is for the individual shots of the children posing for photos with the two Fathers. I stayed off to the side so that each child’s parent could get that prime real estate when their turn came. The angle I was at meant I wasn’t getting direct looks into the lens, which may not be all that bad, but it also meant that in some shots the crucifix on the back wall looked like it was growing out of Father Ed’s head.

Lastly, I should have set the camera’s exposure comp at somewhere from +1/3 to +1 to counter it’s reaction to the excessive amount of white clothing. I guess this might be a common thing with wedding photographers. I think +1/2 or +2/3 would have been perfect. The sensor sees all that white and tones down the exposure to compensate. I had to boost pretty much all the images I shot that session by .5 to .66 in post processing.

Live and learn….