Thursday, December 13, 2012

How To Make Your Wedding Shots Stand Out

By Vanessa Smith


Weddings are all about telling tales, and wedding photography is one way to document these fleeting moments. In his quest to seize these moments, the wedding photographer faces one essential challenge: to make his photographic gear respond as quickly as his eyes.

This is where mastery of equipment comes in. In order for a photographer to create stunning and meaningful images, he needs to work hard to master his photographic equipment so that it works precisely the way he wants it to. For the budding wedding photographer, here are several crucial things about your camera you should master. With constant practise, you are on your way to taking your photography to the next level.

White Balance: your camera's white balance settings will customise how colours look in your photos. Your goal is to make the whites look white, and once you do this, all other colours follow suit. You can use the Auto White Balance setting for this, although if you want to better understand how varied lighting conditions affect images, use Kelvin instead. Low Kelvin values, such as 3,350, create cold and bluish photos. Higher values, such as 5,260, warm your photos. Play with the numbers until you produce the accurate product.

Sharpness: unless you wish to capture movement, you need to consistently aim for tack-sharp pictures. Use a tripod to stabilise your equipment, but if there's a moving person somewhere in the frame, he or she will appear blurred. To freeze action, boost your ISO or else lower the value on your aperture.

JPEG or RAW: images captured through the RAW format contain more data, making them more versatile when post-processed. Because you're most likely likely to print these wedding photos, use RAW rather than the compressed JPEG to guarantee maximum versatility.

Flash: most of the time, weddings are held in low-light spaces. When shooting up the ISO or widening your aperture doesn't do it, use an external flash unit instead to catch up on the lack of light. In addition, bounce flash is preferable over direct flash because the latter creates harsh shadows and unbalanced lighting. Get a good flash unit and a few trusted rechargeable batteries to make your shooting more efficient. You could also browse through work of seasoned wedding photographers as well as studios to further improve your very own craft.




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