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Old September 11th 06, 07:38 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
embee
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Posts: 61
Default My First Wedding

Hello,

I've just posted some pictures I took at a recent wedding and I'd be
very grateful to group members if they'd have a look and tell me what
they think. First, some background:

I was not the official photographer at the wedding - I was there as a
guest and, as the groom had hired a professional wedding photographer,
I was very careful not to get in his way. Some of the pictures -
particularly of the bride and groom - were therefore grabbed, rather
than posed for my camera.

I used this as an excercise to see how well (or badly!) my camera and
post-processing skills coped with what many photographers consider a
challenging assignment. I have never photographed at a wedding before
and I have no desire to do so professionally - too much stress!!

Areas I was particularly looking to get right were exposure, contrast
and colour (you'll notice people in the pictures have a wide variety
of skin tones and this, combined with all the usual problems
associated with a wedding, presented me with quite a big learning
curve both during the picture taking process and afterwards on the
computer.)

I also wanted to concentrate on getting my sharpening skills right. In
the past I have over-sharpened pictures I have edited for the web and
I knew that to do so in a wedding shoot would be a disaster.

Overall, I am quite happy with the results, although I accept they are
by no means perfect. On my CRT monitor they appear to have
satisfactory contrast and colour and do not appear over-sharpened to
my eyes. I am also quite happy with the test prints I have done.
However, I've looked at the pictures on my work computer with an LCD
monitor and I notice the contrast seems a little flat - I guess this
is an issue with LCD screens as the prints appear OK.

Areas I am not so happy with are my framing (a crucial part of wedding
photography IMHO) and some nasty hotspots on the skin in some pictures
(I forgot to take anything to difuse my flash and so tried to rely on
natural light most of the time with no fill - stupid mistake). I also
notice a lack of real neutrality in the highlights in some pictures -
although in print it's not noticeable.

For the record, I used a Canon 1DMKIIN with a 24-105L IS lens.

I'd welcome comments about what I got wrong and what I got right, as
well as any advice on how I can improve. Thanks for looking:
http://www.pbase.com/midie/wedding