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Home >> Photography >> Digital Nikon D100 - Page 3 - D100 for a Wedding?
It was a perfect opportunity to take some photos with the D100 in a reception setting, in which low light is the norm and action can be fast-paced. It was also perfect in that I was a guest with no obligations to take photos for the couple and that allowed me the opportunity to pick and choose the moments I wanted. Except for a few occasions in which I got up to stake out a good vantage point, I took most of the shots from the area of my table. I shot with the following settings,
ISO 800 was used because if I had shot film, I would be shooting with Fuji NPZ 800, and ISO 800 is a necessity if you want ambient light to burn through in the background. Matrix TTL should be avoided for anything requiring the flash to be the key light. Even with regular D-TTL, I felt most of my shots could have used at least a plus one-third stop boost in flash output. These settings would be a good test of just how clean ISO 800 is and how usable the images would be for printing. I only shot about 70 images and chimped a half-dozen in editing. Of the remaining, I chose nine images to work with for final editing and printing for trying out some ideas of how to do a digital wedding. I brought up the levels for all the shots to some degree, some more than others and this in turn would also bring up the background noise. I had concerns about how clean the print would be given what I saw on my monitor. I was also concerned about how the noise was going to be after sharpening. To this end, I went in search of an effective sharpening method that would allow me to sharpen what needed sharpening and avoid the background as much as possible. I found what I was seeking at my current favorite website (outside of my own :-) of Michael Reichmann’s Luminous Landscape, specifically, a guest article by John Brownlow about Smart Sharpening. Smart Sharpening is a process of outlining specific edges of the main subject while working to ignore the background. This technique is quite effective and although certain noisy areas may still come out a little worse for wear, it is nothing compared to the indiscriminate nature of regular Unsharp Masking in Photoshop. For those with more software resources, the use of Quantum Mechanic Pro could also be another useful run-through first before applying the Smart Sharpening.
The results on print turned out better than I would have thought possible given the amount of noise seen on the monitor at 100% magnification. The noise is there but it is not objectionable to my eyes and printing to 10x15 inches at 200 dpi, resulted in a nice looking print. Other prints I did on 11x17 inch paper were two 6.5x10 images on one sheet; four 5x7 images; and eight 3x5. These sheets were inserted into an 11x17 size Prat Pampa portfolio book for an elegant change to the traditional wedding album fare. This printing flexibility is a key benefit of digital, as you can literally arrange the images anyway you can imagine on the paper for a unique look all your own. I only did some plain Jane printing this time around but the world is open for borders, adding text and other features and graphics that would be difficult to do traditionally.
Some concerns about shooting a wedding digitally (biased for my circumstances):
Taking professional grade film into a good lab means having each photo optimized even for 4x6 prints. Film can be processed and printed in a matter of hours but most places are going to take a day or two before you can pick them up. Now consider that even if I only spend five-minutes per image, for 500 images, that is almost 42 hours of editing never mind the printing time which would take that to well over 50 hours total. I know that there are a great many photographers out there who have switched over to digital but most of these photographers seem to be high-rate charging pros ($3000 plus per booking) that can afford to either edit themselves or hire someone to do it for them. This is their job and means of supporting themselves and their families whereas I do this on the side and do not envision taking it up full time, hence the lack of justification on my part to expend so much time on a digital wedding. I was willing to at least give it go for one wedding and see how it worked out, but after much thought, I backed out and bought film instead. Digital is great for much of what I like to photograph, but I’m not prepared to forego the ease, speed, and convenience of film for a wedding (hard words for me to swallow given how much of a digiphile I have become). Although I would save money by editing and printing digitally, the amount is not enough to warrant a week’s worth of my own time for such a project. Update - Since writing these comments, I have had the opportunity to try Bibble for processing my D100 images and have explored Photoshop Actions for batch processing. Although not perfect, the batch processing offered by these two applications does make the editing process less onerous. The weakness to batch processing is the assumption that the parameters chosen for editing one image will be suitable for all the images in a given folder. This is obviously not going to work for some images that are not "average" and require more work to look their best. However, I am less concerned about shooting a wedding digitally now thanks to the software solutions available now, but I'm still not rushing out to do a full day's shoot just yet ;-) |
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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The
first weekend of August was a busy weekend for weddings. My wife and
I had been invited to two weddings on the same day. To make sure we
didn't offend anyone, she went to one and I to the other, ensuring
that the one I attended would be one where I actually knew the people.
As it turned out, the table I was seated at was with my good friend
Tony’s family for which I had taken photos at his wedding and his
brother Bill (as described in my 
I
did not shoot RAW because I only had one 512 MB card available at
the time (the other loaned out as a return favor to the co-worker
who loaned me his 
After
editing the images, I ran the images through Qimage Pro for printing
on 11x17 sheets of Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper. Note here that
Qimage Pro does not recognize TIFF images with alpha channels, which
is required when using Smart Sharpening. I had to save a copy of the
image at maximum JPEG resolution for Qimage to work with the images
in the templates I wanted. Thankfully, no degradation was apparent
in the conversion.
This
small-scale test worked out well and I was happy with the results
after editing. It also alleviated much of my fear of shooting a wedding
digitally as far as the technicalities are concerned. Am I roaring
to go to shoot a full 10-hour day wedding? Not on your life!
I
don’t know about you but I’m the type that is going to want to tweak
an image to have it look its best before printing it out and I have
a hard time trying to comprehend editing 500 plus images in one go.
The easy way out is to print the captures straight through and thus
really have them as nothing more than proofs before final edit, but
would you do that with film?