Massimo & Pembe
A traditional wedding service with top hat and tails set in a beautiful church in Orpington Kent. A lovely bright blue day with puffy clouds and warm, started with bridal pre-wed shots at Pembe’s house.
Arriving at the church, St Lukes in Orpington, shots of guests arriving, best man and groom and all family shots, as the sun was in front of the entrance of church it gave a nice rim light to the back of guests and with fill flash lots of nice shots.
Groom and best man shots with rings outside the church, by this time the puffy white clouds had evaporated into blue skies and blazing overhead sunshine, managed to move people into the shaded archway in the church, fill flash to fill out the shadows.
The main problem was going to be the member’s arrival as there was no shadow cover and I knew the sun would be intense.
As Pembe arrived I managed to get bounce flash off the ceiling of the car and as luck would have it a magical cloud appeared out of nowhere giving me the chance to get her outside car and church entrance shots but just in case I had settings ready for high-speed sync on the flash.
The actual service was restricted to me getting shots from the sidelines, 70mm of the 24-70 just about made it and I was worried there would be images quality deprivation at that zoom length, tried to keep ISO below 1000 and shutter to 1/60-1/80 sec and F4, the meter was showing 1 stop overexposure, this could be easily corrected in lightroom and just in case had my 70-200 and another d700 ready if I need to fill the frame.
All in all excellent shots with only a little noise reduction are needed in lightroom 5. Service has done, processional, lots of natural window light so just a little fill at minimal power.
There was no outside space to take the formal group shots so we went to priory gardens just off Orpington town centre. The plan was to do several posed shots that Pembe had selected out of a magazine, time was now against us with only 45 minutes till the wedding breakfast, we managed to get several Nikon cls off-camera shots with the best man holding a Nikon sb910 45 degrees to the couple and TTL metering with negative and positive flash compensation depending on where the sun was at the time but no time to set up a dedicated two flash system but hey that’s weddings, never enough time.
From a couple’s point of view of a perfect wedding that day was it, lovely and sunny no wind, warm and no cock-ups, from my point of view as the photographer no real problems, yes the powerful midday sun can cause problems but experience and knowledge can overcome that ( sunny 16 rule and hss ), just wish we had more time for the directed shots…..till next time.
