Help: Which Photo Modes for Wedding Photography?

H

Homunculus

Carbonite Member
Hey everyone I got asked by a friend to shoot some stills for their low budget wedding and since I got the GH1 primarily for video, I haven't really mucked around with photography too much and don't know much about all the various modes and what is best for various conditions/circumstances.

So in an outdoor wedding ceremony can you guys give me some advice as to what settings and modes to use?

For instance should I switch all my film related -2 -2 -2 contrast, saturation, etc off back to 0 or + for the stills to give them more color and life.

And most importantly, what modes should I be using? The "Portraits" mode or one of the priority like shutter priority mode? I honestly have no idea how to shoot stills with GH1 just because there seems to be such a vast array of modes whereas for film you just use the manual film mode. Is there any manual stills mode where I can just control everything like I do for film as I would prefer that.

Thanks!
 
shoot stills like how you shoot video. good thing with stills is you aren't limited by shutter speed. shooting in Aperture priorty is a safe bet if you are shooting with pana lenses. What I do is set the exposure and the look manually via video mode everytime i change position then switch it back to full manual photo and snap away and adjust accordingly. takes the guessing game out of it. It's the one thing that I love about this camera.

it would be a good idea to throw sharpness back to normal, the rest can be adjusted in post but remember to shoot in raw. all the photos i have taken i have always had to rework in post to give it some magic. The most important part is getting those money shots that really capture the moment.
 
thanks. good idea I'll switch back to raw because I have it set on jpeg right now. Is there a very huge difference between jpeg and raw in terms of quality?

And you said you switch to 'full manual photo', which mode is that exactly on the dial? So far all the modes I've tried allow you to adjust only one thing or the other.

I'm reading the book again now (read it all the way through when I first got the gh1 but forgot most of the stuff) to learn about the modes but help here is appreciated as well
 
I'd shoot Standard 0/0/0/0 JPEGs for quick use along with RAW (assuming your card is fast, you do not want to miss a moment of a wedding because the card is too slow, practice shooting burst RAW and see how much you can do.) The manual shooting mode is the M mode on the dial, pushing the dial down changes what setting you're on. I would recommend shooting aperture priority mode and using auto focus. Shooting manual photos for an event is not a great idea. Shoot "A" mode, find an aperture that's working well for the location and shoot at that, and then adjust exposure compensation for different photos.
 
Homunculus said:
thanks. good idea I'll switch back to raw because I have it set on jpeg right now. Is there a very huge difference between jpeg and raw in terms of quality?
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The Wife and I use to shoot weddings digitially using JPEG always. This was from about 1999 to the recent past. We've pretty much discontinued wedding shooting, but probably from about 2003 on, we shot almost exclusively digitally... we'd bring the Hasslblad along... but almost never brought it out...

In the past, due to the expense of the Compact Flash devices, shooting a wedding 'raw' just was cost prohibitive, as well as ending up being like 'rolls of film' where one could only get about 30-40 shots on a CF device.

During the same time period 'everyone' was touting 'raw' mode... either they didn't shoot many weddings with counts for images in the 'over 2000'... or they just had a big budget for CF devices...

Anyway... with reasonable exposure, there's no real need for 'raw'. The biggest issue is dealing with high contrast situations, and the 'raw' image does allow for a bit of compensation, that gets lost in the JPEG compression process.

In that regard the Fuji S2/3/5 sensors that we used, seemed to be pretty good at holding detail in the white wedding dress in sunny days. As it is the Wife prefers a 'flat' light for portrait and required 'group' shots, so we would find a location at the event that had that characteristic, and the use of JPEG did not impact the quality of the images.

We used the 'histogram' display feature extensively to check whether we were blowing out the images as we shot. For 'happy' shots, that is shots just of the event showing people doing event things, a minor over or under exposure was not a detriment to the overall quality.

In terms of that 'quality' perception... get the ceremony shots as 'good as possible', especially The Kiss. Required Bridal Party and Family shots, get the group to a location where the light is 'good for your camera'. For party shots... get what you can to give a feeling of the event, but don't be overly concerned with absolute 'quality'... well, there is a minimum, but these types of shots are pretty much 'photojournalims' shots...

If you use flash, get a frame to move the flash off camera, and perhaps a bit of diffusion on the flash to soften edges. Indoors, you can bounce flash off ceilings(point the flash straight up if the ceiling is 'generally' white...) and walls to give softbox like effects.

Kids... get a few shots of kids playing around always good for those nostalgic moments...

And... capture both sides of the couple's family with a certain sense for 'equality' of representation...
 
If you're their friend, get a photography student or someone looking for portfolio work...anyone with more then zero photography experience. It would be a great wedding gift for them, and probably save your friendship. ;)
 
swyzlstyx said:
If you're their friend, get a photography student or someone looking for portfolio work...anyone with more then zero photography experience. It would be a great wedding gift for them, and probably save your friendship. ;)
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ha...i like your thinking. I have a friend that has asked me to shot a video for his wedding, i'm making sure he knows what he should expect from me, ie a bunch of beautiful candid snippet of the day and night, none of this filming every second of it, speeches ect.

I was asked to shoot a funeral of all things for a friend as my first attempt at photography. Man was that awkward, did a good job of it though. a good tip i learnt from it is try to familiarise yourself with procedures/schedule to get best position with minimal disruption in flow as in, try and avoid asking people to do it again for your sake cause you missed the moment...lol just shoot as much as you can and pick and choose after.

I recommend you start taking spontaneous photos around the house of your partner and kids/pets, ambush them so to speak to get use to running and gunning, reading lighting and just plain familiarising yourself with the art of taking pics.

good luck with it.
 
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swyzlstyx said:
If you're their friend, get a photography student or someone looking for portfolio work...anyone with more then zero photography experience. It would be a great wedding gift for them, and probably save your friendship. ;)
Click to expand...

you underestimate me sensei. In fact the wedding went great and everyone was blown away by my "professional photos". everyone is saying I should now start my own wedding business. thanks to everyone here for their help and big thanks to the Mighty Gh1
 
yeah thanks everyone for input I used all your advice and it did go great. Maybe I'll post some of the pics in a bit. It's true it's good to scope out all the best spots to stand first and perhaps even talk to the minister/celebrant/whomever prior to the start of ceremonies where he's comfortable with you standing. For example the celebrant or whatever he was in this particular wedding got to talking to me and explained to me I can stand anyhwere I want or move around, behind him, to the side etc so it made me feel more comfortable in whizzing around snapping pics everywhere.
It did turn into a bit of a nightmare because the wedding got delayed and night came, low light started creeping in and I'm up there with my kit lens which is slow as heck so in the middle of ceremony I'm there fumbling around switching to manual primes which I then am forced to shoot at f/1.4 or as open an aperture as possible which obviously with manual focusing makes it damn near impossible to focus properly so a lot of the shots came out very soft but at least I got a good amount of nice ones as well only because I was nonstop snapping and took over 600 shots (which I know is not a lot by some of your standards, but it was also a very small/short lowbudget wedding)
 
This reminds me of when I first got the GH1. Right off the bat I got hired to to video for 'fashion week NYC" last year in Bryant park. I had NO experience with the camera but the way I am, I just jump in and swim with the sharks. 90% of the footage I shot was utter crap.... the shift from a video camera to the GH1 controls completely threw me... YET, 10% of it came out beautiful... and that's the only 10% they saw or needed.

I almost pooped my pants.
 
In this forum I would like to share my experiences, when I was in Sydney I got married, we hired a photographer for the wedding. They assured about the quality of the album saying that it would be excellent. They did not charge us exorbitantly the fee was nominal, but when I received the album it was outstanding, it was absolutely flawless
 
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