Photographing a Wedding – Getting the Dress Right
Traditionally, brides will wear a white dress for their wedding (or a similar variety of pale colour such as ivory or cream). Whilst the dress will look beautiful to all of the people present at the wedding, capturing it properly on camera can be very difficult. It’s made even more tricky by the darkness of the groom’s suit in contrast. Here are some tips to ensure that you don’t overexpose the dress and lose all of the detail.
Practise a lot before the wedding. If you’re not confident, it will show and you might end up producing mediocre images which don’t fully represent the beauty of the wedding. You don’t want to be experimenting at a paid event – your photographs should be the final product.
The key to checking your exposure is to use a digital camera as opposed to film, and analysing your photographs as you take them. You’ll instantly be able to see whether an image is overexposed and adjust your settings accordingly for the next image.
Make use of your camera’s histogram view and try to keep your photographs from having a large peak at the very end. There should be a peak towards the right-hand side though. You can also use the auto exposure bracketing facility to create a series of images which are differently exposed to find the right one for your purposes.