Tried & True Photographic Techniques

Tried & True Photographic Techniques

by William Lulow

There are some things in the business of commercial photography that don’t really change over time. You can use new equipment or change cameras or even decide to shoot everything with available light. But some things remain constant:

1. You need to know what you are shooting and the kinds of images desired by the client
2. You need to know how much light you will need to obtain usable images
3. You need to be aware of light placement and how to get the best images under your lighting conditions
4. You need to know what the client’s budget will allow and make that information known to everyone before you start the job
5. You need to know approximately how many images you will need to show the client in their final form. (This means after post-production editing)

As a rule, I don’t do normal weddings any more because I find that running around following the bride and groom through the various stages of a wedding from “formals” at the beginning to the many candids during the various rituals each religious denomination requires is just too tiring for me at this stage in my career.

There are many different ways of covering a wedding, however. It is good to keep in mind when doing jobs like this, that you are trying to tell a story. So, it should have a beginning, middle and ending. The stages usually are as follows:

1. Opening shots showing locale + portraits of main participants
2. Cocktail hour candids
3. Entrance of principals
4. Ceremony
5. Actual dinner or reception
6. Reception candids
7. Table shots of attendees
8. Closing images

There are a few “celebrity” wedding photographers out there who can charge enormous fees for their services and usually deserve them. You can cover a wedding with several assistants, each with a portable, hand-held light, all under tight direction and in touch with the photographer via walkie-talkies. The cost here is high, but can most often, provide some really memorable images. These photographers are charging as much as $50,000 for their services. Then again, many celebrities can afford this and don’t mind paying. Mainstream wedding pros usually charge around $5,000 to $8,000 for a full day of coverage, plus post production fees and albums. So, it can be lucrative if done correctly. Many of my former clients could not afford even this smaller amount, so I have had to adjust my fees and of course, the type of service I provided. Maybe a couple of weddings I have done over the years have allowed me to hire one or two assistants, but usually it was just myself and a couple of light stands. So I have had to adapt.

With all of the weddings I have done in my career, I have always tried to obtain interesting images of what has sometimes become a mundane subject matter. There will always be weddings as long as human beings survive on this planet, so beginning or continuing a wedding photography business is usually a good bet, if you learn how to do it right. The weddings I have covered in my life have been both good and bad. Sometimes I have been able to come up with some amazing shots and other times they are just ones that document the moments without being really great images. Here are a couple of the better ones:

Here, a great sunset background with the help of some post-production.

Here, a little set up shot during an actual sunset.

These three images have a few things in common. One, is that they stand alone as beautiful images. Two, is that they capture a moment. Three, is that they are, more or less, interesting images in and of themselves. They are not typical “wedding images,” but have either interesting lighting, pose or composition. As a photographer, this is what I have tried to do each and every time I set out to make images.

Recently, I did a wedding, a small one, for a former client. It was a job that I didn’t feel like refusing. He trusted me to produce a series of images that would be excellent and I don’t think I let him down. I proposed a fee for him that was consistent with what I thought he could pay for his wedding. It only had 50 guests, but was well planned and executed. For me, the coverage lasted half a day. There were things, as far as the lighting that I thought would have been better had the budget been bigger. One of those was to have the one or two assistants holding each of the extra lights I normally use. This would have added about $800 to the fee I charged. Would it have been worth it? Definitely! But photographers these days have to be able to work with their clients’ budgets. With that in mind, here are a couple of shots from this wedding:

This is a kind of interesting shot that focuses on the cake and not so much on the couple. Plus I was able to take advantage of one of my lights that was set up to the right here which was actually helping to light the rest of the room. It would have been better if I had had an assistant who could have directed the light a bit more to highlight the cake. Is this a bad shot? Not at all. It says what I was thinking about when I went to shoot the cake.

This shot is an “available light” one taken so that there would be no reflection in the glass from my on-camera flash. Even with all the light present in this atrium, I still had to bump up my ISO setting so that I could shoot at a decent aperture. But, there is also some overexposure of the outside since it was so much brighter. Again, as an advertising shot, this wouldn’t be acceptable, but as a wedding shot it is fine.

This, of course, is a shot made outside. I was hoping that the sun would provide some highlights from behind, but the bride did not want to shoot earlier which would have accomplished that. So, here, the sun was higher and consequently didn’t provided the highlights I was looking for. But, the shot works anyway. An extra light used outdoors and held by an assistant would have provided the shot I initially wanted.

So, there may always be something more you can do to improve the shots. Weddings are not commercial shoots. You don’t always have the budget to provide everything you need for a spectacular shot, but you need to work with what you do have. A wedding shot is not an advertisement, but as a photographer, you should try to make each image look like it was made for one.