Wedding Session Omnibus Post: More About The Experience Than The Gear.

Preface:

Past posts have concentrated quite a bit of attention on the gear used. Make no mistake. The gear does matter. But it is not everything. As my recent posts have made clear latest and greatest and mind blowing specs are nice to have, but not needed necessarily. As such I will share photos taken, but I will shy away from mentioning the gear used. Any number of cameras, lenses, brands, etc. could have been used.

I will make a few distinctions.

Digital:

Effectiveness/Output: Day and Night

This primarily deals with capturing moving people and unpredictable situations.
Sony is my chosen solution here, but many could do.

Experience/Look: Day and Night

Photos where the look of the image and experience of catching the image takes precedence. Accuracy is traded for look essentially.
Fujifilm is my chosen solution here, but many could do.

Film:

I like using film.
…also Fujifilm in this case.

Moving on.

In terms of wedding photography I am a newbie. Have done a few. I enjoy them. Which is a surprise to me since it took some arm twisting the first time around. I swore I would not do weddings, but a friend would not take no for an answer. And I had a great time.

Reflecting back on my first wedding shoot.

Completely changed my mind. Here are some of my favorite captures.

Recently I was asked to capture another wedding. While I was hired months in advance I did not see the venue until the morning of the wedding. Took a quick walk around and snapped some pics.

Reception area.

Where the wedding will be taking place.

Nice place.

Rain was predicted, but fortunately for all involved there was very little rain this day.

Effectiveness/Output: Day

This includes things like candid pics of the wedding parties getting prepared on through the actual ceremony. Folks are usually on a schedule and often moving fast so do overs are often not a thing. For this I personally use a modern body with good high ISO and AF performance. Others may prefer two bodies and two primes, like 35mm and 85mm for example. A case could be made for a nifty fifty if there is space to move about but that is often not the case.

This is where I will immediately renege on my opening promise of not talking about gear. But you can blame Tamron for this.

I used to use two bodies and two zooms, wide to short tele and a tele zoom f/2.8 lenses, to cover proceedings. But here I must admit a bias for a recent lens. Tamron changed things up for me with their 35-150mm f/2-2.8 . In fact I sold my Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 and Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 lenses to trade towards the 35-150mm f/2-2.8 and have not once regretted this decision. Sony has entered the chat with the excellent G Master 50-150mm f/2, but I am good. A fine lens but a few things keep me from switching.

The Tamron has proven to be everything I need.
I prefer having an extra 15mm at the wide end over f/2 at the long end.
Any gains are not worth the added cost.

That being said…

The pics.

Pleasing close up performance.

On to the ceremony.

Also good for portraits. Solid separation with f/2.8. So of course it works well when you do not need a thin depth of field.

Experience/Look: Day

Portrait time. Big honking aperture from a big honking lens is my preference, but a reasonable lens would do just fine also. It is more about how you stage the scene. My preference is an open area with a background that would look good with a little bokeh applied to it.