Wedding dresses

[savagesax]

Well I'm tired of wedding dresses looking blown out, yet the faces of the brides are just fine. In fact, often the blown out white

dresses can turn to a bluish tint. All of the bead work is washed away. The dresses kind of look like a white sheet, showing

no detail. Unless you want to correct this using programs such as photoshop you and the bride have to pretty much

understand that this is digital.

 

Don't get me wrong here. Sure, often you can get the face of the bride and the dress to show up perfectly. However, even if

your exposure is dead on chances are the brides dress will be over exposed. Even if you use a handheld light meter. I have

the Minolta Flash Meter 4F and I often use it pretty much at every wedding. So lets pause for a second here. Lets say you are photographing the bride and she has a wonderful sun tan! Your camera reading is 250th of a second at F8. Her face looks perfect. Well we also know that when you are photographing white things, not just dresses, you have to compensate about 2 stops to see the details in the dresses or the white objects. This translates to 250th of a second to about or around F16. Then you will see every detail. But then the brides face is 2 F stops under exposed!

 

Film is much more forgiving. With film you can see every single detail of/on a wedding dress. Even with darker skinned

brides you will see the details. Pretty cool.

 

Well I have some minor health issues. 2 elbow surgeries last year, I've had back surgery and both feet have been operated

on. Often after weddings I hurt for a few days.

 

Marc Williams actually gave me this idea. So thank you in advance Marc. I went out and bought a Leica film camera, range

finder style, not the SLR style. It kind of looks like a toy camera. However when you put a roll of film through the camera you

will surely get that WOW look on your face!

 

Although I'm cutting way down on weddings for next year I will be doing a lot of the formal shots with a roll of 36 exposure

film.

 

Yes it means that much to me. The brides spend so much money for their gowns I strongly feel that shooting just one roll of

film will make that bride very happy.

 

As said above, I've had surgeries. The M series Leica cameras can fit in your pocket. Yes they weigh about the same as

some of the SLR cameras, these tanks are small. The lenses on the Leica's are probably equal to the quality of any SLR and

in some cases as good as some of the medium format cameras.

 

Needless to say I'd love to hear some viewpoints. Maybe Marc will pop in. After all he is one of the top rated photographers.

There's others as well - great photographers on this site. I'm just giving kudos to Marc, because he has Leica gear and I

know that he still uses film. I'd like to hear from the long timers too, such as WW that started in the wedding bizz using film. I

thought about buying a Hasselblad film camera, but then the weight of these camera's turned me off.

 

So should photographers really care enough to buy a film camera for the formals? Frankly, I never got a complaint from a bride, but this is a subject thats bothered me for many years.

[User_6502147]

<p>Bob, unless you can wash that dress in tea...like they do in films...you'll always get that fine blown out look. But, one can put a reflector or diffused light on the face. Not sure I'd want to try to fix it in pp. </p>

<p>Can you show us the difference between film and digital ? It still comes down to DR.</p>

<p>Les</p>

[michaelmowery]

<p>Using a scrim on the dress can work otherwise change your exposure on the second shot to expose for the dress better then layer them in photoshop. The blue cast sometimes can be caused by your flash tube not having UV coating and the dress has been treated with some chemical in the color process that shows up as a blue tint. This also happens with hair coloring.</p>

[tomweis]

<p>Bob, I'm sorry you're having problems with wedding dress exposures. However, I don't think digital cameras are the problem, at least not any sort of pro DSLR made after 2009. I use the Nikon D700 and am constantly surprised at its dynamic range. I presume newer cameras are better. I shoot with flash in both manual and TTL modes and rarely have a problem with exposure. What camera are you using? What flash system? RAW or JPEG?<br>

The wedding photo here was shot with manual flash off camera with an umbrella, and there's plenty of detail in the dress.<img src="http://www.tomweisweddings.com/Z/Stephanie_George_1054_700.jpg" alt="" /></p>

[twmeyer]

<p>"However, I don't think digital cameras are the problem, at least not any sort of pro DSLR made after 2009."... amen to that. <br />I wouldn't shoot weddings on 35mm film if you paid me. Extra.<br /><br />If you want to try with digital again (which I highly suggest), try the new Fuji X series (and shoot RAW only fer gawd sakes), probably the XPro-1 for the most versatility in optics, or wait for it's next iteration, expected in early to mid-2015... t</p>

[shawn_mertz]

<p>the best solution for an ultra white dress in the sun that i have tried is. (oh i hate saying this) Nikon has What they call Active D lighting you need to ( i really hate this part) take camera off manual exposure to use i think Nikon recommends A or P but S also works</p>

[savagesax]

Thanks folks! Nice exposure Tom.

[martin_luther2]

<p>These two pictures are very beautiful.</p>