Questions from my students and blog readers asking: what to do, and what to buy, populate my InBox. With all that great material, I’ve decided to feature some of those questions in my posts. Please feel free to add your two cents worth in the comments as well, as there is a huge range of experience out there to share.
Your Question
I’m doing a wedding for a friend and she wants me to take photos. I was wondering if there was a setting I can have for the camera to be ready for any shot at anytime. Just for the indoor shots. Submitted by: Joanna C.
Answer
First a few questions for you:
- Are you using flash?
- Or, available light?
- What lens focal length do you think you’ll be using?
If it was me and I wasn’t using a flash, I’d set my camera on Shutter priority, and set the shutter speed on the slowest possible (i.e. 1/focal length). So for 70mm lens 1/60 second is your slowest. If you have image stabilization on the lens you could even go slower. Keep an eye out for unwanted blur though! Maybe a bit faster when the couple is walking down the isle, but I’m one that doesn’t mind a bit of movement showing, so it depends on your style.
I’d then figure out my best ISO, so maybe 400 or 800 depending on the amount of light in the room. Hopefully it has lots of soft evenly filtered light streaming in! You want to be able to get your aperture to f5.6 to get reasonable depth of field. Keep in mind that the higher the ISO the more noise, and noise shows up the most in the shadows. With a wedding, too much noise can also make skin look a bit mottled, so be careful.
In this situation though, it would be best to have a fast lens.
Do some tests. Try to get to the venue early (few days before at the same time of day) and take some shots, view your results and base your final answer on that too, keeping in mind that the light may change if the weather changes.
If you have a question, send me an email using the contact form and I’ll do my best to give you some valuable information on the topic.
Great suggestions, Marlene. I am way off topic, but still having problems with last week’s assignment! How can I make the graph stretch to both ends of the chart? I get a high point about 2/3 way to the right and can’t get the right lighting? I’m sure this makes perfect sense! I have been noticing how people cannot properly describe things, and here I am!
So, your histogram doesn’t stretch all the way across to the right? Sounds like your photo is a bit underexposed. So in other words, needs more light.
I will write you a longer PM to explain fully how to do this. (The space and formatting capabilities of this comment box are not sufficient for me to answer this fully.) I’ll also use your question for a future blog post. Can you send me a sample image?
Stay tuned and thanks for asking!
Thanks, I’ll look through and send an image. Also, I am using one light, along with white boards and natural light so never sure which setting for white balance.
Hi Marlene,
Again… Great Blog! I think I’ve got half my family hooked on your newsletter. Question: How do you do a great High Key photo? Do you need a special set up?
Thanks for your help.
SA
Thanks for spreading the newsletters. I really appreciate it!
Great question! I’ll answer it in a full blog post in the next couple of days. High key lighting for portraits or product shots?
No problem and thanks!
Which one is easier: product or portrait? I would probably lean towards product as they tend not to talk back and are a bit more patient…;)
SA
Products and people both have their challenges! I can spend hours setting up a jewelery product shot, especially shiny silver, but once I get it, then the rest are pretty similar. When I shoot jewelery, I usually under light or back light the pieces so they are on white background. Anything that gets missed, I take out in Photoshop.
With people I have a couple of studio lighting set ups that I’ve worked out and tested over the years, so I just stick to the plan and concentrate on making my people feel at ease so I can get the best from them. (I’m not sure if my set ups are considered high-key or not.) People are very self critical when it comes to portraits, so you need to make them look and feel fantastic.
Bottom line though, you need some studio strobes and light modifiers to get into high-key lighting.
This little video is a good example. It’s not mine, but it might help you to understand the concepts. Basically you put one big light in front of the subject, and a light or two on the background to turn it evenly white.
Great. If you do a full blog post could you talk about how you do your Snow Pea shot in your Portfolio… that’s a cool picture.
SA
Well that photo was actually done in my back yard in open shade using no lights!
I put the peas on a white foam core and shot them from above. After that, I close-cut and masked the peas in Photoshop and then dropped in a pure white background. Voila! Much faster than setting up the studio lights.
Most of my shots from the vegetable series are done this way. I’m all about keeping things simple, plus it takes over an hour to set up the studio. I thought I’d try this and I have been shooting my veggies this way ever since. The added benefit is that the vegetables don’t wilt under the head of the lights and neither do I, and I get to work outside, even better.
It goes to show that nice even lighting works really well in some cases.