Susanne & Martin

I was invited as one of two photographers to Susanne and Martin’s wedding. I accepted since this would give me nice training and hopefully some added images to my portfolio. My task was to follow the bride’s preparations, then join the groom for the meeting. After that it was time for the ceremony and finally the reception. So my whole day was booked basically. I’m sharing some of the images in this blog post.

Unfortunately I was not involved in the planning so I couldn’t scout the different locations in beforehand. I only knew about the church so that one I had covered. Without knowing the different locations I couldn’t make use of the off-camera flash units as much as I would have wanted. The good thing is that they did not have any expectations on the results.

Brides’s preparation

I arrived in time before the bride and bridesmaids, only the makeup artist and the hairdresser were there. What I wanted to shoot here was the wedding dress and of course the preparation of the bride’s hair and makeup. I forgot to get detail shots of the shoes. But overall I’m quite happy with the results. I mostly had good light but in some of the shots I had to bounce some light on the ceiling.

The meeting

My car brought the bride to the meeting and the ceremony so I didn’t only act as a photographer during this day. Here it was of course important to catch the emotions and expressions when the groom saw the bride for the first time. After that the bridal couple had agreed with the other photographer to take photos at different locations. Here I just had to go with the flow and try to make the best of the situation. No off camera flash was used although it would probably have made fantastic images. This is something I would have had to plan in beforehand.

Ceremony

I agreed with the other photographer that I should stay on the right side of the church and move around to the back just before the recessional. I tried to catch the wedding couple walking down the aisle, not too happy about those images though. The moments I tried to catch were the vows, ring exchange and recesssional. Outside the church I tried to take some nice images of the bridal bouquet and of course the rings.

Reception

On the reception I was the only photographer. With a micro 4/3 camera I knew I would struggle with the low light during the late hours. I wanted to catch the most important events during the night without knowing in which order they would come. What I absolutely wanted to catch were the speeches of the bride and groom, the cutting of the cake and possibly the first dance.

Post processing

Since I always shoot RAW there’s always lots of work to do after the shoot. I use Capture One as my RAW developer and Affinity Photo as my image editor. The normal procedure I use is first to reject the images I immediately notice are not up to par. Then I start developing the RAW files by correcting the horizon, whitebalance and exposure. Then I select images again by removing doublets and selecting the best of the alternatives.

Most of the processing was done in Capture One (as always). When it comes to removing distracting objects I do that in Affinity Photo. For example, the bride had marks on her back from sitting in the car on the way to the meeting with the groom. I removed those by using the clone and heal tools together with frequency separation. Also there was a car driving by distracting a couple of the images. Here I had good use of that I took multiple shots of the same scene since I could blend in parts from the other images to remove the car in a very natural looking way.

When doing the post processing of image sets like these it’s important to try to normalize the whitebalance and exposure in the different locations.

Lessons learned

  1. During a wedding day it’s not ideal to stay in manual mode since stuff happens so quickly. I should have used aperture priority and auto ISO.
  2. Planning is important
  3. My camera body is a bit too small for fast paced shooting sessions like this – too fiddly to change settings.
  4. Planning is important
  5. I probably need a belt system to be able to carry some lenses and flashes with me.
  6. Planning is important

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