Felicia & Kedrick’s Wedding
It’s been awhile since I shot this wedding but I’m finally getting around to write about it. I had a great time and got lots of good shots. Felicia & Kedrick got married on August 15th, 2009. I was able to shoot both the wedding preparations, the ceremony itself, some formal portraits after the ceremony, and the reception. The complete collection of photos can be found by clicking here.
I’m going to try and limit the photos I post here because I ended up with a lot of favorites. The bride and groom were awesome and resulted in lots of great photos. The kids were soo adorable too. The wedding was held in the Castle of Muskogee, a location about 40 minutes South of Tulsa, OK. It was the first wedding I’ve ever shot photos at, so I was very nervous about the event.
I ended up with a lot of notes and memories about what I did right and what I didn’t get so right. Preparing for the wedding involved reading lots of books and guides. I’ve really only been to a few weddings in the past so I only generally understood the things that went on, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes! Once the ceremony starts the action doesn’t stop until long after the sun sets.
I was able to make a nifty Wedding Photo DVD thing using my computer. I haven’t run this by the bride and groom but I hope they like it. It’s got a slide show where they can view the different photos from different parts of the day. When they pop the DVD into their computer it also has the high resolution files that they can use too. I love that my computer allowed me to put this together in under 30 minutes (after hours of processing the photos prior to that of course). The only distracting part is the little tiny Apple Computer logo in the right-hand corner, but I bet as time goes along I’ll figure out a way to get rid of that.
Okay technical notes time. These are more for myself (and maybe other photographers), and pretty boring so don’t pay too much attention to them unless you want insight into how my mind was working at the event.
- Ended up taking 1400 photos. Probably that is too many. The problem was that lots of times a good shot would get messed up by someone blinking, the light not being flattering, or distracting events going on in the background. The number of usable photos was a lot smaller than that but I took a bunch at the wedding because I’d never get a chance to go back and do it again.
- Tried to make the bride the subject and focus of attention in each photo. Didn’t always succeed but the tricks about shooting from the right-hand side of the room did help during the ceremony.
- The 5D Mark II’s battery is a champ. I shot all day long and it only drained half way. I had the battery grip with the AA battery holder ready to go but never needed it.
- I now understand why Canon’s pro line has the “regular on” and “half on” mode. Halfway through the ceremony I accidentally hit the wheel on the back of the camera (which is disabled in half on mode), this changed my exposure settings to -1 2/3 EV. Had I only had the camera half on this would have never happened.
- The -1 2/3 EV thing was very bad. My photos came out very dark. Had I been checking my camera I would have noticed. I didn’t. Part of it I chalk up to lack of experience and being nervous, but the camera gives you 3 different places to notice a small error like that and I let it slide for -hours-.
- I think the bigger issue is that when I shoot photos I don’t really focus on looking at the viewscreen and making sure that they come out ok. In the past I’ve missed lots of good photos because I was checking the screen out and not looking around me. I need to remember that it is a good idea to check the viewscreen at least once and awhile. I rely on my equipment far too much to do the right thing, and in this case it was, but I had told it to do something wrong.
- Shooting in RAW helped me recover from this problem. I lost a lot of detail in some of the shadows of the tuxedo’s but overall if I had been shooting in JPEG things would have been much much worse.
- Those kids were criminally cute. Seriously.
- I’d like to go back and try some other processing techniques on some of the photos. Black and white would be good. I’d like to try and warm up some of the reception photos too. A slight white balance adjustment to make them a little less blue (cold).
- Formal portraits were my weakest part of the photography. I didn’t really know what I was doing, even though I read a lot about it before the wedding. Practice practice practice I guess.
- What would have helped is if I had brought my flash outside with me. I didn’t because it was packed inside in the kitchen area. It was great to have my photography gear inside, protected, and safe. However it was far back inside the building, and I needed to have placed my bags somewhere near the entrance to the building. After the ceremony we went outside very quickly and I didn’t have time to go back and get my other gear. (Part of it is because I just plain forgot to go get it, but I’m guessing if it was closer to the exit I would have bad a better chance of grabbing it).
- I don’t like carrying L glass around, especially while wearing a black suit. The white just stands out way too much, attracting attention when I’d rather be stealthy. I’m going to sell my 100-400 and get a Sigma or Tamron 70-200. With a 2x tele-converter I can have practically the same focal length range, and without it I have a f/2.8 that is a discrete black color. Win win win.
- I tried to walk real quiet during the ceremony but I felt like I was attracting too much attention moving around. Made me very nervous.
- I love my laptop but working with 30 gigabytes of RAW files is pushing the limits. I’m switching from Aperture to Lightroom and hopefully that will help. I may shoot in sRAW in the future depending on the situation, and I may need to upgrade laptops or increase my memory for the future.
- I really like the smugmug gallery, the slideshow features are nice. I haven’t really heard one way or the other if anyone else likes it or not though. It lacks a nice statistics package like flickr has, but it allows me to sell prints. Haven’t sold any prints though, but it’s nice to have that functionality.
- Tips in the future for formal portraits: control the eyes (tricks to get everyone’s eyes open and pointing in one direction? I don’t know any), don’t put people in mixed shaded locations (tree shadow looks really weird going across half the wedding party), watch out for wasps and hornets and bees. The bride getting stung would have been very bad. Also kids will only last so long before they get exhausted.
- I’m sure I’ll keep adding more to this list later.
Thanks for looking at the photos!