A good friend and awesome photographer David Terry asked about the lighting and settings in a picture of mine… so while I was in the midst of writing Blog Posts I thought I’d quickly turn it into a blog post… cuz why not?

So if you have a certain picture you’d like to hear the story on let me know and I might do it.

The Settings

For those that didn’t know some things you can learn about how I took the picture right on SmugMug – I leave the info enabled for you to be able to see my settings. (Scroll over the picture and click the blue “i” as in information.)

I’m gonna go check it it says I was at 8 seconds

OK so the idea was that there were people roaming around and it was a little dark so i wanted a long exposure. The tripod was in the car and lets face it I was a tad lazy at that moment… I mean I was all the way upstairs. But I was able to set my camera on the railing in such a way I felt it wasn’t gonna move much.

I did longer shots but most of them were much shorter. I kept making the aperture much smaller to get longer exposures (f/10) I also dropped the ISO for that purpose as well (ISO 250). I wasn’t gonna be able to light up the whole dang reception place with lights so the long exposure was the best.

They had turned off the main lights in the place and lit a lot of candles (you can see the main lights up at the top and how they’re off) However lights on the downstairs sides were on… they weren’t that bright and weren’t a threat of entering in directly through the lens and effecting the pictures

How it came about

Anyway so I did a few pics of just the groom because he’s into photography and always up for me expirementing. I was happy that there was some down time before the reception got into full swing… there isn’t always ops like that.

They knew what to do because we did something similar on the other side but with a much shorter exposure. But I was pushing this to 8 seconds dangit.

It worked out… because there were lots more people in this picture than what you see… in fact a child walks by the bride… right there between the table and her dress.. during those 8 seconds. So where is she… not there… because she traveled the course of the picture during the 8 seconds. They stayed still during all 8 seconds.

What you can’t see in the INFO is that I did use an LED light to light them up a bit… I probably shined that down on them for about 1-2 seconds.

You can see I put them in the shady area of the picture, with reason. The lines lead toward them. And since it’s shady that means not much light hits them meaning I can determine and control what light I was happy about hitting them.

Now for BW

Recap: Why did I decide to take the picture?

Simply because I was trying to take an awesome picture of the venue and I saw the groom walk by and called out to him and figured why not try to get them in there as well. Why Not indeed.

Here’s that

pic

Another picture I took while up above

But I had to shoot this one at f/1.6 because of style and to get enough light to shoot hand hold

There’s a couple others I think that I have selected but I haven’t got them edited yet in the current batch… so look through the gallery later next month.