Wedding Photography Bloopers

Show me some examples of "bloopers" from your wedding photography

efforts.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours ;)

Oh, if anyone wants to put a black "mask" over the people's face to hide their identity and to protect the innocent, this is acceptable. You may also blur the facial features in photoshop if you like: Your choice.

This is one of my first weddings... things started moving along at a brisk pace, and I didn't take the time to set up my additional lighting. I metered this scene, but the contrast and exposure was terrible. The same thing, but worse, happened for many of the mens's formal pictures. (It was my worse wedding mistake by far.) The meter reading seems it was for the bright background, instead of the shaded foreground. Moral of the story: understand light (background/foreground) and understand your camera's functions fo exposure control. If you have lighting, set it up the night before, test it, and use it. I have since gained a lot of knowledge about lighting and exposure through the PN forums, and especially from Timber, Marc Williams, and others. <br><br>

There are quite a lot of images I took that I am still looking at, asking myself "I took that?" Understand light, metering, and how to control exposure for backlit subjects. <a target="self" href="http://www.stevetout.com/kistler/index2.htm">More here</a>

I think your people were standing on the wrong place of the open. All shadow or all sunny is ok, both combined are hard to dela with. For example in shadow plus fill flash can look great.

Steve, take a look at Fred Miranda's Shadow Recovery plug in for PhotoShop. It's a big help

when dealing with shots like your example (www.fredmiranda.com). If you have PhotoShop

CS (8), it already has a shadow and Highlight adjustment (Image > Adjustments >

Shadow-Highlight).

 

While it's always good to shoot everything correctly, mistakes happen to everyone

somewhere along the line, and tools like this are a big help.

 

I hope you don't mind, but I did a quick tweak with PS Shadow/Highlight. Not ideal, but

with the full file size instead of a dinky web upload, it could help out with occasionally

saving problem shots.<div></div>

Marc,

 

I do have Photoshop CS, and I have been using that filter a lot! In my opinion, that feature in itself is worth the upgrade to 8.0! I have not went back to this wedding set and adjusted those less than perfect images with Shadow/Highlight yet. The main point about my post is that I did not apply techniques to compensate for the backlighting and the need to bring more light into the foregound. This was one of those live and learn experiences that I hope never to repeat in the future.

 

Thanks for posting the adjusted image. I'm sure it would look better if I did the same to my original. In any case, Shadows/Highlights feature is great for recovering images that would have forever been lost due to this kind of exposure problem.

 

Am I the only one who makes bloopers at weddings? Why isn't anyone else sharing their experiences? ;-)

Why would anyone want to keep their bloopers? I cull images to get rid of "bad" images and throw them away. Some images I cull are still good, but not the best, so I seperate them and use them as samples in proof books or the like (before going digital). This may be why there are few responses. I think this was a neat idea though! I'll try to remember this when deleting stuff from now on. Thanks Timber!

Okay Steven, I'll rise to the bait...

 

Story: I'm shooting the procession (Nikon D1-X, with flash @ ISO 100, 28/1.4). The

bride's father had a stroke some weeks before the wedding, so he could not walk her

down the aisle. So her brother walked her so far where he handed the bride off to the dad

to walk a few steps to give her hand to the groom. I got the shots, shut down, cranked on

an 85/1.4 to rush to the rear of the church for available light ceremony shots. As I ran

along the side if the pews I noticed that the whole congregation was transfixed. Looking

over I saw that the bride would not let go of her dad's outstretched hand and both were

crying. I whipped the Nikon up for the shot and fired one off just before they parted. NO

FLASH #@*#* IT!... because I had shut it down. A shot of a lifetime lost... or so I thought...

 

Later when downloading, I came across the completely black frame, I hit PS auto levels just

to see what would happen, and wham! there was the image.

 

Lessons learned? 1) Don't shut down to soon (now I won't even pack my camera when

we're finished at the reception because there is ALWAYS one more great shot to be had as

you are walking out). 2) When using a lower ISO, digital is amazing @ recovering

underexposed shots.

My friend runs a successful wedding photography business and sometimes asks me to be 2nd photographer. We were preparing to shoot a ceremony in a church, and the priest loudly instructs us not to take pictures during the ceremony. Not even without a flash on a virtually silent camera. It was the groom's church, and not the bride's, and the bride's father takes us aside and tells us "NO MATTER WHAT, when i lift my daughter's veil to kiss her before giving her away, you WILL GET THAT SHOT. I don't care what the preist says. My friend and i come up with a quick game plan. He sits in the fron row on the left side, me on the right. we sat there quitely and politely. The father is about to lift the veil. we both smoothly stand up and we each go to take the shot. The Priest shoots us an extremely stern look. Both camera's fail. BOTH. we didn't get the shot. It was surreal. Both camrea's were fine earlier, and later but just would not function AT ALL as ther preist glared.