About the Shoot:
This is my first attempt at shooting a wedding. As a favor to my wife and daughter who are friends of the bride, I agreed to photograph this wedding, with the understanding that I’m not a PRO and cannot produce professional-looking results. I also insisted that I must have someone designated to assemble and pose all of the various groups and shots. I finally agreed to process the images and deliver them on a disk so the couple can have them printed.

Setting:
This was shot at a small country church between LaGrange and Pine Mountain, Georgia. The exterior of the church offered no natural settings conducive to photography on a sunny day at 1:00PM. The church was overall very dark, making flash photography a must in all but a very few shots. Props for the occasion included a couple of candelabras, a unity candle setup, and some nice stained glass.

Technical Notes: Shot with the Canon Rebel 300D. Flash was provided by the Canon 550EX sporting a Stofen Omnibounce diffuser. Most flash shots were taken in camera manual using various apertures for creative effect. I mostly used 1/50 second for the shutter speed and ISO 200 to include as much ambient light as possible. Flash was set to E-TTL mode, auto zoom, and FEC of+2/3, which has given me good flash exposures in the past.

Lenses included the EF28-135IS and the EF 17-40 f4L. All were shot in RAW mode and converted in PSCS.

Evaluation and Thoughts for Improvement:
I was overall pleased with the shoot and the results. I’ve seen amateur wedding shots and I know how bad they can be!

I was very surprised to see how many of my shots were underexposed. I was afraid of blowing the highlights in the white wedding dress, so was relieved to see that my camera histogram was staying away from that extreme right edge. When I started working these images in PSCS, it soon became obvious that I was chronically underexposing throughout the shoot. About 80% of the shots were underexposed about 1/3 to 2/3 stop. About 5% were underexposed even more ~ some as much as 1.6 stops. Out of 400 shots, only one was overexposed. When doing the post-processing on these, I got to witness first-hand what a great price one has to pay when making large exposure corrections, even making these adjustments in the RAW converter. The greater the amount of the correction of the exposure, the greater was the amount of noise that appeared in my images, particularly in the shadows. This phenomenon is well documented. The noise was so bad in a few of these heavily corrected images I had to use NeatImage.

I also had problems deciding which color temperature/white balance to use in the Adobe RAW converter. Some images appear too cool (blue tint) and others appear too warm (orange tint). Certainly the skin tones are not the same throughout the shoot. I particularly struggled with the groom’s skin color ~ that never seemed to be the same color as others in the shot. Perhaps this is the result of not doing a manual white balance in the field. Perhaps there is a PhotoShop trick to standardize the white balance throughout a series of images? If so, let me know.

Comments, suggestions, and critiques welcome. ~ jim