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Home >> Learning >> e-Book on Wedding Photography Table of Contents Wedding Photography e-Book - Equipment Considerations Film and Lighting Film
As an aspiring professional you must of course use professional quality film. Yes, dispense with all those Costco rolls of film for the family snapshots and head over to a professional lab and purchase rolls of Kodak Portra or Fuji’s N series of films. Kodak Portra is available in two varieties, the NC for Natural Color and VC for Vivid Color. ISO speeds available are 160, 400 and 800 (only as NC). There is also a Portra B&W film that is ISO 400 and is chromogenic, meaning that it can be processed and printed the same as a color film, but if printed on color paper, a sepia-like tone can result. True B&W results can be obtained by printing on B&W paper for added cost. Update – Portra B&W has been replaced by Kodak Professional BW400CN, a new chromogenic film to replace Portra and the old TMAX 400CN. Fuji’s films also range from ISO 160 to ISO 800 and also offer natural or vivid color emulsions. The various films offered are NPS 160, NPH 400 and NPZ 800 for natural color and NPC 160 for vivid color moments. While Fuji does not have a pro-grade chromogenic film, it does offer Neopan B&W films with ISO 100, 400 and 800 ratings.
Most weddings follow tradition to some degree and that means white wedding dresses and black tuxedos, yin and yang, zebra, whatever. It just means that you’re going to give your camera’s meter some fits as it is going to see some pretty high contrast elements and then having to compute that mess and potentially creating new messes as the algorithms do their thing for an exposure bias. Using consumer grade film that punch up the colors, saturation and contrast for holiday pictures may result in disaster, or at the very least, blah photos for weddings. Professional grade films have been designed to lower contrast so that there will be a hope of seeing the details in the bride’s dress as well as the groom’s tux. The pro films also do better for skin tones so that your subjects do not look like they just come back from the tropical honeymoon before their wedding day. If all you’ve ever shot with have been consumer negative films and then you move over to the low contrast pro films, you may wonder what all the fuss is about because the photos will look somewhat dull, but the devil is in the details, so look closer at the dress and tux for them and then notice the smooth skin tones.
Ilford XP2 is a chromogenic film that is as simple to use as Kodak Portra, but you definitely want to test this film to see how the prints are at its rated ISO 400. Most users down rate the film at ISO 250 for better looking prints. Kodak TMAX 100 and 400 are true B&W films and TMAX 100 is considered the finest grain film generally available to the public. If you’re looking for poster-sized prints, TMAX 100 is the film to use. I’ve had one shot enlarged to 20x30 inches from a 35mm TMAX neg (tripod mounted camera) and it looked pretty damn good if I say so myself J Ilford Delta 3200 or Kodak TMAX 3200 are high speed films that allow you to shun the use of flash and still be able to obtain a fast enough shutter speed for handholding the camera. Very grainy, but in an artistic manner, but don’t over do the use of this film though because people can only put up with so much grain. Ilford SFX 200 is a near infrared film that will provide very infrared-like results without the hassles of true infrared films. Knowing that it is an ISO 200 also makes it easy for exposure since you’re not guessing as you sometimes do with Kodak’s HIE film. Kodak HIE requires cold storage because heat is near infrared and can affect the film. HIE also requires absolute darkness to load in the camera and absolute darkness to unload. A huge pain in the butt for results that can be quite interesting but also very potentially grainy. SFX 200 offers most of the benefits with far less grain, minimal hassles for loading and unloading, and the use of a red filter also creates striking images, especially with foliage in the background. Definitely worth a try to add something unique to your wedding day coverage, but be sure to use it only in good daylight conditions for maximum effect.
Other possibilities are using slide film, but as wedding photography is all about producing prints, slide films do not make sense unless you’re doing some cross processing to produce prints with wild and vivid colors out of the ordinary.
The use of pro film is expensive, so don’t cheap out and go to Costco for the processing and printing. Go to a pro lab that caters to professional photographers for best results. Many offer traditional analog printing along with digital printing processes such as the Fuji Frontier system. The digital process can offer sharper looking prints than the analog system, but the analog system can offer unique templates such as messy borders. For those shooting digitally, you can print at home with your own printer or after editing the prints, go to a pro lab and run the files through a Fuji Frontier for proofs. But that’s just so film-like that what’s point of shooting digital? I say get more creative with the digital process instead of reverting to 4x6 proofs, unless the client “really” wants 4x6 proofs. Studio Flash
Direct flash is a necessary evil in event photography. We are so often disadvantaged in having to photograph in dark caves, otherwise known as reception halls and restaurants. To get the guests into the mood for celebration, the lighting is usually quite low key, which for us, the photographers, means extremely slow shutter speeds if we did not use flash. Unfortunately, use of flash usually means directly mounted to the camera’s hot shoe and that results in flat and cold lighting that may also cause red eye problems when the subjects are at a distance to the camera’s location. There are various methods to ameliorate the quality of direct flash, from flash brackets to bounce lighting techniques and even small soft boxes for the on-camera flash. You do what you can to try and obtain some good looking photos, but when doing large groups or intimate portraits, direct flash is not the way to go.
Studio strobes come in two varieties with many power ratings between the two. The first type is the power pack strobe setup. As the name implies, a power pack that looks and sometimes weighs like a car battery is plugged into a wall outlet to obtain the juice that is then modified and distributed to the individual flash heads. The power rating is based upon the power pack as the flash heads can usually handle a wide variety of watts per second loads. Power packs make sense for studio use but less so for field use where portability is a key consideration. The alternative is the self-contained flash head, or mono light,that has the power pack built into the flash unit. The individual heads are obviously larger than heads meant for power packs, but the size and weight varies with the power rating.
As nice as it would be to go whole hog and purchase 1500 w/s heads, that is an awful lot of power on tap and you have to consider how many times you would really need it. For intimate couples only photos, you’d never need more than 200 w/s and for group photos, 400 to 600 w/s is all that you’d really need. I’ve seen the output from using just a single overhead 600 w/s strobe firing into a 60-inch umbrella and it provided enough light to take a group photo of over 20 people at f11 with ISO 400 film. A basic kit of two self-contained strobes, two umbrellas, a softbox, flat disc reflector and enough light stands, can be fitted into a custom case that makes it easy to take out into the field. While I can suggest and make the case for having a basic studio strobe kit, such kits can be pricey investments and as a beginning wedding photographer or a part timer, the cost may not be justified, especially since I did indicate at the beginning that being able to use studio strobes might not be present very often. The alternative is to continue using on-camera flash, but if the ceiling is low enough, bounce the light and use slower shutter speeds to try and create a more pleasing, lower contrast photo than using direct flash on the subjects. I’ll have more to say about flash lighting in a future module. |
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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You
have your cameras, you have your lenses, and you have all the accessories
you will need to support these primary pieces of equipment. Now you
need to ensure that you have an adequate supply of film on hand. Digital
of course means enough flash cards with a digital wallet or notebook
to dump the files to.
In
the past I have favoured Fuji films, but the more I used Portra films,
the more I like it. Both companies’ films can produce stunning photos
in daylight conditions, but offer some different characteristics for
low light shooting. Fuji NPZ 800 tends to be very strong with reds while
the Kodak Portra 800 comes off as more neutral. The only concern is
with Kodak films used in overcast conditions or shade where I have seen
skin tones become muddy compared to Fuji. Very judicious fill flash
should help to alleviate this though.
Black
and white coverage at a wedding is standard these days and the aforementioned
Kodak Portra (or new Pro BW400CN) makes it easy to shoot because of
its color compatible processing and printing. While Portra B&W is/was
a very good film, there are other B&W films of interest for different
uses.
There
are certainly more B&W films available, but I like to keep things
simple and generally go with rolls of Portra B&W/Pro BW400CN for
my main coverage with some SFX 200 in a third camera for the more wild
shots.
If
you can afford to add studio strobes, this is a very worthwhile option
to add to your kit. Unless you really make an effort to include such
photos in your package, you may not find that many opportunities to
take studio flash quality photos, but when you can, it can really make
your shots stand out, or just make life easier when you need more light
than is available in a small, camera-mounted flash unit.
Studio
strobe units used to flash directly onto the subjects presents the same
quality as on-camera flash, just with much more power. All that power
though means that you can modify the light and lower the contrast by
using soft boxes or umbrellas. A couple of umbrellas is the fastest
and most cost effective way to modify a studio flash unit and beautiful,
even light will be your reward for the time, effort and cost of studio-type
lighting in the field.
Power
rating in watts/second can be as low as 150/160 w/s up to over 1500
w/s. As you go larger in power output, the more power it requires and
more heat is generated, which is why most of the larger flash units
come with fans built in to cool the unit. Many of these strobes also
offer modeling lights, which I don’t find that useful when used with
umbrellas, but that is a reflection of my limited experience with just
low powered units.