Tips for a Small Outdoor Wedding Shoot

THansenite

My girlfriend's brother is getting married on Wednesday. (Their dad is battling cancer and they want him to be at the wedding.) It is going to be a very small wedding at the garden in the hospice and since I will be there anyway, they asked me to take a few pictures. I want to do a good job for them so am looking for a few tips to help me out.

As I said before, it will be outside in a garden with around 20 people total and I am going to be using my Nikon D60. The weather report now is saying it is going to be sunny, but I anticipate it will be in the later afternoon.

Any basic wedding shooting tips would be helpful.

tenoverthenose

This is my approach for shooting outdoor weddings.

1. Raw will give you much more flexibility.
2. Make sure you do not blowout necessary details (it will be hard to recover blown at faces). This is especially true of the red channel.
3. If there is a mix of shadow / sun on their face, shoot wide so its not as noticeable.
4. Use a long lens to shoot pictures so as to not include the ground and sky in photo, use full if there are trees or buildings around you. A wide open lens will help.
5. During portraits, shoot into the sun, so your subjects faces are completely in shade and rim lit. Watch out for flare and including overexposed elements (sky). Be careful metering, you will probably need to overexpose the image.
6. Take all of the above with a grain of salt and do what needs to be done to get the shot.

THansenite

Thanks a lot for those tips. That is exactly what I was looking for. I had been planning on shooting with my 18-55 lens, but I can see the benefit of shooting with my 55-200 instead. This will definitely help me out.

WingsOfLovePhoto

1. Shoot Raw
2. use the 55-200 (standing farther and getting a nice blur)
3. try these settings.... iso 400, f4 and adjust shutter speed to an adequte histogram, just avoiding "blinkies" try starting point of 1/250 in light shade. For larger groups you may have to ajust the fstop accordingly
4. Find open shade.... watch for dappled light, avoid sunlight as much as possible. (can be done but easy to screw up)
5. Keep people from being too close to any bushes etc for background...distance at least 4 feet if not more. watch out for distracting background elements.
6. Look around here and find some poses you like then maybe take a picture of them with your phone so you can remind yourself what you like and recreate them.
5. Charge lots of batteries and make sure you have enough memory.

just a few ideas, I am sure others will disagree with this but it tends to work for me! good luck and have fun!

ChatKat

Shutter speed
Watch your shutter speed...if you are shooting with a focal length of 200 make sure your shutter speed is greater than 200. If you are at focal length of 50 your SS should be at 50 min.

Use fill flash if you need to.

Things move fast! Be prepared. Have lots of memory for your camera. Put a new card in just before the ceremony. New battery too.

zoomer

Shoot in jpeg at your highest quality.
Set your camera to P mode, (automatic).
Set your on camera flash to ttl bl (Matrix metering) at a setting of -1.
Then don't worry about the camera just go shoot.
Use your 18-55.