Equipment necessary for wedding photography

While I wait for Lightroom to delete rejected images, which is extremely slow for some reason, I thought I would write about something I struggled with starting my business. It can be very confusing to figure out with all the lenses and cameras Nikon offers, what is really needed for wedding photography.  So I thought I would make a list of what in my opinion is necessary to help out anyone thinking of getting into the business.  This is based on my experience with Nikon, but it's basically the same for Canon.  I will list what is necessary first, then recommended second.

Camera Bodies:
First of all you need two camera bodies.  If budget is tight one body can be really any Nikon even a D40, you just need a camera with a wide angle lens so you can easily switch cameras during a ceremony.

• Nikon D300 $1500
• Recommended: Nikon D700/D3 $2400-$6000

Lenses:

Forget any lenses that come with cameras.  Wedding photography absolutely requires lenses with a fixed f2.8 or below for short depth of field.

• Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 ED $2000
• Nikon 50mm f1.8 or f1.4 (Recommended) $90-$400
• Recommended: Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 ED $2000
• Any other primes you like are a good investment but not necessary

Flashes:

More than one flash is recommended, but I typically just use a single on camera flash and direct the flash in different directions.  More than one flash is really necessary outdoors at night.

• Nikon SB600 $200
• Highly Recommended: Nikon SB900 $400

Other Accessories and Software:

• Lowepro Bag: $100
• Lightstand and Umbrella: $100
• 8GB Sandisk CF Cards: 3 x $50
• Drobo for data Backup: $400
• Lightroom: $300
• Photoshop CS4: $600
• Presslite Vertex: $50

Article in Coastal Carolina Home and Lifestyle Magazine

Article in Home and Lifestyle Magazine
Originally uploaded by Ryan Smith Photography

I haven't had much to blog about recently, it's the slow time of the year. I did think it was cool to have another wedding featured in a magazine. This time the Coastal Carolina Home and Lifestyle, a local magazine from the Sun News. They featured an article about a wedding where the couple had a lot of problems with Premier Resorts International and lost a lot of money. The wedding turned out really nice, I can't say the pictures they picked for the article were my favorite, but I can't really fix that.

Changes to Website

Sorry, I just realized my client gallery was having some issues where the clients name wouldn't show up. I'm surprised no one mentioned it to me, I guess most people have already picked out their orders. It should be working again now. I also made some changes to the website, the background in now fixed and the head and body of the site are transparent and scroll over the background. I think it's a nice effect, it actually took a lot of work. I've got a small wedding tomorrow, a client wanted to get married right at the turn of the new year. It's a nice idea, hopefully the weather will hold out and not rain.

Brenizer Technique

Portrait Panorama 2
Originally uploaded by Ryan Smith Photography

I haven't posted to the blog in a while, if I have a brief thought I usually put in on Twitter. This picture isn’t perfect; it’s my first try on my wife of a new technique from Ryan Brenizer, an amazing wedding photographer. Depending on how much you know about photography, you might know that short depth of field, in other words a really out of focus soft background, is created by a really wide aperture as well as focal length. So to really get a background really out of focus and really highlight a subject, you need to really zoom in on the subject. Basically, you either have a wide angle shot where the background is in focus, or a zoomed in shot for example of a face where the background is really blurry. I hope I explained that in a way that makes sense.

With the Brenizer technique you can get both wide angle and zoomed in depth of field. You do this by quickly taking 10 or 20 shots with a longer zoom such as 85+mm close in on the subject. For example shooting the head, moving down the body, then all around the subject to take in the background on manual focus so the focus point always stays on the subjects face. Photoshop has an amazing tool called photostich that can take a lot of random pictures of a location and stitch them all together into a single image. Doing this you look like you used a wide angle lens, but you have the depth of field of a zoom. It’s pretty amazing. However it takes some practice to get it right, if I have an upcoming wedding with you, you will probably be experimented on a bit, hopefully we can get something unique and amazing you haven’t seen before.

Missing Pictures

For some reason I changed some permissions on Flickr and it's messed up every picture in my blog.  If you click on the image it will still take you to the Flickr page with the image. But I just really don't feel like fixing the link to every image on the blog. Who knows how many places I have broken image links now.

Wedplan

Wedplan
Originally uploaded by Ryan Smith Photography

I had one of my pictures featured on the homepage of wedplan.net. It's really cool to see my work start to show up in various places. Also I had a client mention they wish my site had music, I don't know if everyone feels that way but I decided to add some. I'm only using royalty free music so I'm not breaking copyright. I wonder about a lot of sites that feature recent pop songs, if they are actually doing it legally. If you don't like the music let me know, also I tried to make the pause button really obvious.

My photography featured in Grand Strand Bride Magazine

My photography featured in Grand Strand Bride Magazine, originally uploaded by Ryan Smith Photography.

A client recently send me a copy of the magazine. I hadn't actually seen the article because I can never seem to get into a bridal shop to pick one up. It's cool because it's the first wedding featured in the magazine. Of course it's not really just my photography but the really beautiful Indian wedding that made the article. It was really nice doing something special like this.

Conway River Walk Portraits

Conway River Walk Portraits, originally uploaded by Ryan Smith Photography.

I did a Photoshoot for the first time down at the Conway River Walk area. I know this is a popular photography spot, but since most of my clients are looking for beach portraits I don't get an opportunity to do portraits away from the beach very often. It was exciting to be in a different location. I really liked the old train tracks that you see here, I think this would be a great spot for Bridal portraits as well. I'll have to start giving it as a recommendation to clients.

Grand Dunes

grand_dunes, originally uploaded by Ryan Smith Photography.

I was excited to see they added a bunch of my pictures to the gallery for the Grande Dunes Member Club website. It's just exciting to see when my pictures are actually used at big wedding locations like this. This traditional Indian wedding has been really good for me, the bride actually had the pictures in the latest Grand Strand Bride magazine as well. I still have yet to pick up the magazine myself but I've had a number of potential clients mention seeing the pictures.

Perfect Out of Camera

, originally uploaded by Ryan Smith Photography.


Crop From Original

It's not often I get a shot that is basically perfect out of the camera. There is nothing particularly great about this picture, except that I think it's a good example of combining things in camera to get a perfect exposure. Normally I'm always tweaking exposure, fill light, etc in Lightroom after taking a shot, especially one that is backlit by the sun. I keep getting better at doing it right the first time. I like this shot because the sun is acting as a hair light, giving that nice glow. I used +.5 exposure compensation on my D300 because it will underexpose a bit in this situation. I used some fill flash from my D900 set I believe to around -2.5 exposure compensation to fill in the face and give a catch light in the eyes which you should be able to see in the close up. Also the focus is spot on, many times I tend to shoot wide open f2.8, but here I'm shooting f4.8, I think it's a nice balance between background blur and nice sharp focus. Anyway, I just blogged this because I like the fact I'm having to do less and less in software the better I get. By the way, these kids were a little trouble, but they were still nice kids. I've had some real monsters a couple times lately.