Knocknacarra Church

I spent last Saturday photographing Cáit and Martin’s wedding in Galway and we had a great day with light that was a photographer’s dream – not just soft light for the outdoor shots (even if the fog didn’t lift), but plenty of diffused window light in the house in the morning, and a wonderfully bright, airy and spacious church in Knocknacarra.  Officially known as the church of Saint John the Apostle, it’s a modern hexagonal design with lots of daylight streaming in through windows around the perimeter.  I’ll post again about the wedding, but today’s post is about how I photographed rather than what I photographed.

I can’t remember the last time I was at 1/250s and ISO 800 inside a church, but that’s the exposure that I used for this image.  Admittedly, that was at an aperture of f/2.8. At this juncture those photographers out there who’ve read this far and care about such things might be thinking that f/8 or f/11 would have been better for this particular subject even if it meant raising ISO or dropping shutter speed, especially with margin to play with in both cases, and they’d be right, but at a wedding my aperture almost constantly hovers near wide-open.

What all that light in the church meant was that I could happily shoot at 200mm on the Nikon D300 and not compromise on image quality or worry about camera shake.  Having a 70-200mm VR lens to play with helped of course, but as it turned out even my non-VR 50-150mm Sigma would have been perfectly capable.

Additionally, I was able to take full advantage of the capabilities of my recently purchased D700 and 24-70mm lens to work at optimal ISOs, apertures and shutter speeds for the vast majority of photos I took during the ceremony.

Speaking of that camera and lens, they were astoundingly good on Saturday.  Where the 70-200mm struggled to find focus in low light at the reception later (a reason to try out the VRII version next time perhaps?) the 24-70 showed no such issues whatsoever and got it right first time, every time.

As a result 76% of the shots I took on Saturday – and I took lots – were with the D700 and 24-70mm combo.  It wasn’t the first wedding that I shot using a D700, but it was the first where it had the Nikon 24-70mm mounted on the front – previously I found the Sigma equivalent suffering the same sort of focus-hunt issue in low light as the 70-200mm suffered on Saturday.  So having a reliable lens that could focus in all sorts of light on Saturday was quite the comfort blanket.

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, for someone like me who’s perhaps overly fond of his fisheye lens, I didn’t use any other lens on Saturday – neither my 50mm f/1.8 nor my fisheye lens.  It made things a lot easier logistically – the day was spent with the camera bags in the car and a camera over each shoulder, one for the wide shot, the other for the tighter shots.  Taking camera bags and lens changing out of the equation allowed me to concentrate on getting good shots that documented the day from start to finish.