The Best of Wedding Photography.pdf - Free

take up more room on media storage cards and they take
longer to write to the cards. As a result, many wedding
photographers find it more practical to shoot JPEGs and
perfect the color balance when creating the exposure,
much like shooting conventional transparency film with its
unforgiving latitude. This topic is covered in greater detail
below.
A system that many pros follow is to take a custom
white balance of a scene where they are unsure of the lighting
mix. By selecting a white area in the scene and neutralizing
it with a custom white-balance setting, you can
be assured of an accurate color rendition.
Others swear by a device known as the Wallace Expo-
Disc (www.expodisc.com), which attaches to the the lens
like a filter. You take a white-balance reading with the disc
in place and the lens pointed at your scene. It is highly accurate
in most situations and can also be used for exposure
readings.
SHARPENING AND CONTRAST
Image sharpening should be set to off or minimal. Sharpening
is usually the last step before output and should be
done in Photoshop where there is optimum control. Contrast
should also be adjusted to the lowest setting. According
to California wedding photographer Becker, “It’s
always easy to add contrast later, but more difficult to take
away.”
White balance is crucial
to good exposure technique,
particularly when
shooting JPEG files. A
situation like this, with
mixed lighting in varying
degrees, calls for a
custom white balance to
be sure your colors are accurate.
Photograph by
Tibor Imely.
FILE FORMAT
RAW retain the highest amount of image data from the
original capture. While not as forgiving as color negative
film, RAW files can be “fixed” to a much greater degree
than JPEGs. If you shoot in RAW mode, you should back
up the RAW files as RAW files; these are the original images
and contain the most data. Shooting in the RAW
mode has several drawbacks, however. First, it requires the
use of RAW file-processing software to translate the file information
and convert it to a useable format. Also, if you
are like most wedding photographers and need fast burst
rates, RAW files will definitely slow you down. In addition,
they will fill up your storage cards or microdrives much
more quickly than JPEGs because of their larger file size.
Your other file option is shooting in the JPEG Fine
mode (sometimes called JPEG Highest Quality mode).
Shooting in JPEG mode creates smaller files, so you can
save more images per media card or microdrive. It also
does not take as long to write the JPEG files to memory
and allows you to work much more quickly. The biggest
drawback to JPEG files is that they are a “lossy” format,
meaning that since the JPEG format compresses file information,
these files are subject to degradation by repeated
saving. Most photographers who shoot in JPEG mode either
save the file as a copy each time they work on it, or
save it to the TIFF format, which is “lossless,” meaning it
can be saved again and again without degradation.