How Many Leicas to Shoot a Wedding

[fotografz]

Actually, I will be adding a 3rd M to my kit next wedding ... sort of.

 

For some color available light shots I'll be trying the Epson RD-1 and M lenses.

 

Not quite done testing it yet, but here's a shot of St. Patrick's at ISO 1600 with +2 stops

compensation dialed in. Anyone that's been in there knows it's a cave. Result? Almost no

grain in an uncropped 8X10 at what is the equivalent of ISO 6400.<div></div>

[red_buckner]

Marc, I got lost in your tenses. Is this St. Patrick's shot from the digital camera? If so, which M lens?

[dstolman]

Hi guys. Wow that's a lot of answers.

 

For the first wedding I got all the key ceremony shots and most of the candids I wanted.

For the second (of which there were 2 other main still photographers and 2 videographers,

all besides me), I had been told to get mainly the candid things happening and concentrate

on mainly the reception, i.e. not that I was trying to miss shots at the ceremony, but was

told that the other two were the main for that, get what I could but not in their way. So I

missed some shots because of the sheer number of people trying to photograph, the fact

that the crowd made a semi circle around the couple the photographers were all told to

stand behind and shoot around the minister and also due to running out of film in one

place at the wrong time (missed a noncrucial ceremony moment that was later repeated

again). The ceremony featured a Renaissance theme and vows and a pace I wasn't used to,

also.

 

As far as rewinding on picture 30 if the lull happens, that is a great idea, I was shooting

duplicate expressions to get through the roll, rewinding early should be what I did and

what I will do in the future.

 

I can and have shot DSLRs at weddings, done whole weddings all Canon 10D, right now

I'm just trying to do all film if I can. The clients I've been working have been shown my film

work and know the extent to which I've used it for weddings specifically before they have

brought me aboard.

 

Available light photography is just so beautiful in my eyes and I really would like to

eventually shoot just all that, all film proficently and hopefully a few weddings in just all

black and white.

 

Thanks to all who have answered so far.

 

D

[Jochen_S]

I never did weddings. From my amateur pj days I know 3 bodys, all b&w are no mistake. A 4th body is to much for me, but nice to have in reach as a backup / special task camera. Runing out of both films in a color + b&w situation sounds normal to me, although I didn't practice such a thing.

[al_kaplan1]

One thing that can't be stressed enough, Danielle, is to learn your lenses, what their coverage is! When you pick up a camera you should be able to raise it to your eye after moving yourself to shooting position, and have just about exact framing. I think a lot of younger/newer photographers raised on zoom lenses are just too accostomed to fine tuning with the zoom.

 

You don't need film, or even a camera to practice this. Pick up a variable finder like the Leitz Imarect or the older Vidom, or one of the Russian made Zeiss copy turret finders, and carry it around with you. When you see something "that looks like a picture" decide which "lens" you want to use and get in position first, then look through the finder. Concentrate on just a couple of lenses, perhaps 35 and 90.

 

Until the late 1960's when independent Japanese manufacturers started producing relatively inexpensive ultra-wides for SLR's very few photographers could afford anything wider than 35, and that was likely f/3.5 or f/2.8. When you look back at prices for new stuff then it all seems dirt cheap. Actually it was more expensive in real inflation corrected dollars. A new Volkswagen Beetle was under $1,800, people were bitching that coffee had gone from 10 to 15 cents a cup, and states with a minimum wage had mostly increased it to $1.25 an hour.

 

The saving grace at the time for those of us who lusted after Leicas was the fact that "The SLR Revolution" was in full swing and people were fleeing rangefinder cameras, together with the still relatively new M bayonet mount. Thus even pros and moneyed amateurs were unloading their screw mount Leicas for peanuts into a saturated market. Tens of thousands of Korea and Viet Nam vets were dumping Canon and Nikon rangefinder cameras and lenses on to the used market to buy Pentaxes and Nikon F's.

 

But the reality was that almost nobody except top pros actually had a 21mm lens, and when the local dealer special ordered one for somebody its arival was an event the local photo community knew about, and everybody wanted to see it. Still, two camera bodies with 35 and 90mm f/2.8 lenses would be considered enough "extremes", together with a fast 50, for the average newspaper photographer. After all, before that he'd made do with just the 75mm lens on his Rolleiflex or the 135mm on his 4x5 Graphic.

[dan flanders]

I'm sure glad Al is around to give the low down to the younger generations. I'm a generation older than he but he has a lot more photo mileage and is gifted with a repartee that I just don't presume to. Hell, back in those days there were four kinds of lenses: telephotos, long focus, standard, & wide angle. If you used a 4x5 you could put a 127 on it like Weegee and call it a wide angle though it really fell off at the corners. Severe cropping was the word of the day. When Fritz Henle made the Rollei famous everybody oohed and aahed about the "wide angle" even though he cropped too.

If you wanted a lens shade you made it out of a piece of mailing tube because they only made them in a single configuration and acceptance angle. We never heard of "boke'" and when the "fisheye" hit the market we wondered if anyone would ever accept its distortion. I went broke trying to make acceptable color prints from Ansco 'Printon' but finally Kodak came out with a drum processor that would make decent color after a lot of time and effort. If you tried fine grain developing you usually wound up allergic to paraphenalene diamine and had fantactic sores on your hands for months at a time. But Al will tell you they were 'good old days' and sometimes we had a buck or two left over every several weeks to really celebrate with buying a T-bone. Well, I better shut up and start serving my sentence for the crime of living too long!

[al_kaplan1]

Dang it Harry, your brain is a couple of millimeters closer to senility than mine is when it comes to wandering off topic. (Shooting a wedding, remember? How many Leicas?) Back to Leica relevance. The word "Leica" will appear in the last paragraph!:

 

Press cameras came in many sizes. The British seemed to favor "quarter plate" which was 3.25 x 4.25, the Americans went for 4x5 and on The Continent 9x12cm was the standard, about 3.5 x 4.5 in inches. The makers somehow decided that double film holders (one sheet on each side) for 9x12 and 4x5 would have the same exterior dimensions but quarter plate was a bit smaller as were the cameras. The sheet film was cut just a tad undersized to begin with, and you lost another couple of millimeters of image area from sliding it under the edges of the holder. The accepted standard lenses were 127mm for quarter plate, 135mm for 9x12, and usually 150mm for 4x5. Press photographers, then like now, preferred a slightly wide "normal". Hence the use of the easy to obtain 135 and 127mm lenses on 4x5, aproximating the coverage of a 35mm lens on a 35mm camera.

 

Still, these were mostly high quality 4 element Ektars, Tessars, Raptars, and Xenars of moderate (f/4.5) speed. If your rangefinder was properly adjusted you could shoot from 5 feet away and crop a nice sharp head shot out of the negative, more than good enough for a one column "mug shot" in the newspaper. You couldn't do that with a Leica and a 35mm Elmar using the films available in 1950! OK now Harry, time to go back to our rockers and admire all those good looking sexy young fifty-something women out walking their dogs;-)

[mskovacs]

Al and Harry: I'll throw a party if I ever get my 1950's era <a href="http://www.cameraquest.com/zeissbio.htm">21/4.5 Biogon</a> :)

[rob_skeoch2]

Just a small tip... I put the B&W film in the black body and the colour in the chrome. I don't

shoot weddings but did shoot colour and B&W together for a while. Shooting Fujichrome in

the chrome body seems to make sense. Two bodies are plenty, any more and you'll

strangle yourself.