hughmiley

I am a wedding photographer.... Pray for a cloudy day. They rock! There are two kinds of cloudy days, boring plain white overcast, and stormy patchy interesting cloudy days. Both are are great to photograph.

If you get the first kind, boring and white overcast, just try to cut out the sky in as many shots as you can....wide open apertures to emphasize your subjects, and go for lots of Bw conversions. You will get heaps of well exposed evenly lit and contrasty exposures....Just cut the sky out, not just because its boring, but also because it tricks your exposure meter. If you cut it out your foregrounds/subjects will be exposed properly.

If you get the second kind, stormy patchy and interesting....fill your frame with the drama occurring in the sky, Make the power in the sky a symbol of the couples love! This is the best of all days...I love stormy days!

Also.....if it is bright and sunny, shoot in RAW low iso - 100-200 (tis very important for PP), overexpose a little, +.3 or +.7. Then in PP boost shadows and darken highlights, Also if you like just go into the blue channel and darken it to get the nice blue sky back. You can set this up as a default in CS3 RAW, or lightroom. If you do this then you don't really need to fill flash....Try this before the wedding to get confident.

The 50mm 1.8d is absolutely worth getting for the hundred bucks. It is very sharp at any aperture above 2, and of course still pretty good at 2 and 1.8. But more importantly the 50mm 1.8 has the extra control over DOF because of the larger aperture. There are photos that your 18-200 simply cannot take because it does not have the same DOF capabilties as the 50mm 1.8.

It will be the most productive hundred dollars you ever spend on camera gear!

Anthony..... I can it very clearly. The 17 - 55 certainly seems a lot sharper, particularly in the 100% crop.

I have never used the 17-55, but I have to say that purely based on the constant aperture, it has to be a far better lense. In any case, regardless of any IQ variation. Having a constant 2.8 is going to produce far better images in a multitude of situations, whether it is because of faster shutter speeds, or better control over depth of field. Add to that the improved build quality and overall you have a "great" lense, as opposed to a "good" lense like the 18-135.