Ruth Berry Photography

With so many of my friends getting their own digital cameras and wanting to photograph their own friend’s weddings, I thought I’d do a post about my thoughts on it.

There’s more to photographing a wedding than owning a nice camera!  

I get several calls a month asking me how to light a wedding, which lens to use, and in general, how to photograph a wedding.  If you are serious about photographing your friend’s wedding, you owe it to your friend to prepare well in advance of the big day.  

Here are some things to consider:

• Do you fully understand how to use your camera in a setting other than “program” mode?
  • You have your new camera.  Now what?  One of the first things most people tend to get excited about is getting a really nice sunset picture.  Maybe they’ll hang out on the beach and keep clicking the shutter until something pretty happens in their camera.  Then they get really excited about it, right?  At a wedding, there’s simply no time for that. The best way to overcome the random surprise of getting a great picture is to learn how to use your camera on MANUAL settings.  You can use aperature priority, shutter priority or program mode on your camera at the wedding, just know WHY you are doing it.  Sometimes, you have to ‘trick’ the metering of  your camera based on what you are photographing.  Read the manual, invite a friend over, and shoot, shoot, shoot!
• Do you have a second camera should something go wrong with your primary camera?  
  • I bring several extra camera bodies, lenses and flash units to every wedding.  Have you thought about what could happen if your camera locks up or otherwise ceases to function?  Talk about stress!  If you have a second camera system ready to go, you can just pick it up and keep photographing.  The last thing you should be thinking about at such an important event is if your gear will function properly.
• Do you have an assortment of lenses you can use during the wedding?
  • Most camera systems will come in the box with what is known in the industry as a “kit lens.”  It’s an all around good functional zoom lens.  It will usually be a zoom somewhere from 17mm to around 55mm.  For a wedding, you will need a wide angle lens, and a telephoto lens.  Sometimes, it’s impossible to get close enough to the action to get good pictures, and you have to use the telephoto lens from quite a distance.  A telephoto lens would be anywhere from 105mm to 400mm.  If you do not have a camera with interchangeable lenses, please do your friend a favor and let her know you’ll be attending as a guest and not the photographer!

• Do you have an external flash for your camera?
  • When using only the pop up on camera flash, it will produce harsh, flat lighting.  It’s a good idea to try to bounce the light from the ceiling, behind, or with a light modifier.  If you only have the pop-up flash on the camera, it’s pretty difficult to have flattering light.   In some situations, you will be able to remove the flash from the camera body, and trigger it with a wireless remote.  That is very flattering light!
• Do you have any flash modifiers to soften the light?
  • If you are in a situation where you are not able to bounce the light, you can still have softer light than direct flash would produce.  There are several modifiers on the market that you can attach to your flash.    Gary Fong is pretty well known for inventing several of them.

• Do you have several Compact Flash cards to bring with you?
  • It may sound impressive that a 2Gig compact flash card can hold so many photographs, but if you are photographing a wedding, you will need several of them.  Never, ever,  EVER delete photographs from your card in the middle of a shoot if you run out of  space!  If something goes wrong, it is possible to recover the images deleted by mistake, but why put that stress and pressure on yourself?  Format your cards before you arrive at the wedding and be ready to go.  I keep my cards in a compact flash wallet.  They are numbered and facing up.  Once they are used, I place them face down in the same wallet.  I always know which card to use next, because there’s an empty space between the new one and the used one.  I encourage you to get a system so the cards don’t get mixed up.
• Do you have a sturdy tripod?
  • Often times during a ceremony, you will not be able to use flash.  If you have a tripod, you will be able to get beautiful ceremony pictures using the available light in the sanctuary.  It’s also a good idea to use the tripod for the group pictures whether you are in a church or on location outside somewhere.

These are just a few things to consider when venturing into the world of wedding photography.  And as always, I’m just a phone call away if you still have questions!

I’d like to add that these are MY thoughts.  Everyone will have their own thoughts and ideas on the same subjects I may write about.  What I’m sharing is based on the experiences I’ve had.  Hopefully, it will make your photography journey more enjoyable!  Remember, there are several ways to get to the same place.

Above all, be yourself, and go create something beautiful!

Here’s a short tutorial on using layer masking to correct an image.  

First, here’s our image.  cute baby!  The background looks a little dark to me.  I’m going to correct for the background, but leave baby girl alone.

The first thing I like to do when working on any image in Photoshop is to copy my background layer.  This is so that when I make corrections, I don’t damage the original image.  But mostly it’s so I can see how great it’s looking!  

For this image, we’ll be making our corrections only on the layer copy and masking for the original to show through.  

“command + J” on a mac or  ”control + J” on a PC.

You can rename the layer if you want, but I usually don’t.

Next, I’m going to adjust my levels to get my background lighter, but it will make baby girl look very pale.

Use the sliders under the histogram and move them until you like the way it looks.  I used all three.

Here’s what we have now:

Look at the difference:

The background looks better, but baby girl is washed out.

Now I’m going to mask the baby so that my corrections only show on the background.

Create a layer mask on the corrected layer.

Right now, the mask is all white.  We’re going to paint black where we want the original image to show.  

You could just erase the corrected layer, but once it’s gone…well, it’s just gone.  With a mask, you can go back and paint white in if you make a mistake.  

Click on the mask, and using the paintbrush tool, paint with black.  Don’t forget to go back and paint white if you overpainted!

Here’s the painted mask:

When making a correction like this, I usually save my file two ways.  First, save as a photoshop file in layers in case you need to correct anything further, and secondly, as a copy of the original in jpg format.

Here’s the work, side by side:

I hope this helped you!  Leave a comment and let me know if it did, and what you’d like to see next!