Cake-cutting paparazzi

Some of my favourite moments to capture at a wedding are those where the guests turn paparazzi and the bride and groom are at the centre of a mass of flashing cameras.  There are two moments in particular where this happens – the first dance, and the cutting of the cake.  I like the images that can result from taking a wide-angle shot of these moments,  rather than just focusing on the bride and groom themselves.  Today’s image is an example of that, and is also appropriate to post today, Friday the 13th, because it was taken on Friday the 13th, in June last year.

At Deirdre and Enda’s wedding, I went a step further than just a wide angle shot and added a real paparazzi feel to the image by standing behind many of the other guests and raising the camera.  This was shooting a picture as you see photographers on the TV do when a celebrity comes through an airport or somewhere like that in the midst of a media scrum – hold the camera high, point it towards the subject, click click click click, and hope that the auto-focus has locked on.

A couple of things can be done to increase your chances of a well-focused shot.  Firstly, place the auto-focus selector in the centre of the frame – it’s easier to try to point the middle of the lens towards the subjects than the bottom, top, left or right third.  If you want a composition where the subject is not in the centre, you can always crop.  Secondly, if you have it available on your camera (and all non-SLR digital cameras do, as do many of the newer breed of SLRs), use Live View mode, where you can see the shot on the LCD screen before it is taken.  On my D300 I find that mode a bit cludgy because you have to almost double-press the shutter – once to focus and drop the mirror, and then press it further to open the shutter.  But, in a scenario like this it can be very useful for more accurate framing.

Also, depending on the light, you can stop down your aperture to something around, say f/8, and give yourself additional depth of field so that if the focus is a tad off your subject they may still be acceptably sharp.

As an aside, much of this advice also applies to candid street photography where you might want to take discreet shots without looking through your viewfinder.

For this shot, I actually made life easier and briefly stood on a nearby chair so that I could raise the camera but also continue to look through the view finder.  That not only took some of the element of luck out of the shot, but meant I could hold the camera a little steadier in the low light of the reception room.

In post-processing I did two variants of the shot – one where I applied the usual post-processing tweaks to contrast, levels etc, and this other image where I added a fake tilt-shift look to selectively keep Deirdre and Enda in focus and blur much of the scene around them, and also boosting the saturation a little which seems to suit this type of treatment well.  The intention is to end up with a shot which has a miniaturised feel to it, although it’s not as effective as it sometimes can be in this case – to really work you need an even more elevated viewpoint.  The treatment does draw the eye right into the bride and groom though, while still conveying the moment taking place around them.