This photo is currently on the homepage of my website. It’s an image I really like and is an example of a shot turning out completely differently to what I had expected when I took it, but in a good way.
It was taken at a wedding back in February 2007 when I was still shooting with my Nikon D50, the kit lens (18-55mm) and a low-tech 70-300mm lens. That day I ended up with two of my all time favourite photos which goes to show that a good photograph does not necessarily require good equipment.
This shot is captured during the bride and groom’s first dance. I had moved to one side of the dance floor and was crouched low trying to steady the camera for a wide angle shot of the dance floor. The look I was going for was a slow exposure with motion blur of the dancers, hoping that the white of the bride’s dress would allow her (and hence the groom) stand out a little from the other couples who had joined the dancefloor.
Incidentally, I really had no choice about going for this type of shot – I had no flash with me apart from that on the camera which was not going to output enough light; the lenses I had were relatively slow; and the D50 images get quite noisy above ISO400 so bumping that high enough to get fast shutter speed was not an option.
Of course, I had no tripod either, so to improve my chances of a reasonable shot, I fired off a burst of 5 using the D50′s burst mode.
Click – click – click – click – click.
A quick check of the back of the camera and shot 3 of the 5 jumped out at me. The happy couple were for that instant illuminated by the flash from someone elses camera off to their right, rendering them not only sharp against the blur of the other couples, but also well lit and nicely contrasted against the backgroud. It helps that at the same moment the couple stopped to pose for a photographer hidden in my shot behind the couple on the right.
Knowing what I now know about balancing flash and ambient light, the impact of aperture on flash exposure and shutter speed on the ambient exposure, and the importance of the flash to subject distance in getting that balance correct also, it really is a miracle that this shot turned out as well as it did.
I only had Paint Shop Pro to use for post processing back then also so did very little tweaking of the shot and have not really seen a need to return to it in Aperture since. Incidentally, at the next 3 or 4 weddings I tried to replicate the effect and failed miserably!
I didn’t realise at the time but – with someone else’s on-camera flash acting as my off-camera flash – I had just taken my first photo as a “strobist”.
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