Wedding Photography for Guests IV

In this, the fourth and final part of my guide to Wedding Photography for Guests, which started at the ceremony and worked through the drinks reception, dinner and the first dance, I want to wrap up with some tips on presenting your images to the bride and groom and their friends and family once the wedding is over. First though, let’s step outside.

Part 4 – Wrapping Up

It is true that most of the standard photo opportunities at a wedding (certainly as far as any set of official photographs goes) come to an end once the first few dances are complete.  But before you put away the camera and join the dancing, or if you’re looking for a break from it later on, there are still one or two shots you can look for.

Step outside once it gets dark

The bride and groom will have many photographs (from you and from others) taken outside during the day – not so many taken at night, so set yourself the challenge of getting one.  In particular one that shows the venue and the party going on within can be nice to get.

While the shot at the top of this post of Rathsallagh House by night during Niamh & Dave’s wedding was taken with an SLR camera sporting a fisheye lens and mounted on a tripod, getting a night time exterior shot need not require the most sophisticated camera.  Turn off the flash on your point and shoot, sit it on a level surface, and use the self-timer to avoid camera shake when triggering the exposure and you could get a slow-exposure night time image that does a good job of conveying the party atmosphere of the wedding inside.  The image below (although it was taken with an SLR), could easily have been taken with a point-and-shoot compact.

Convey movement on the dance floor

It’s very difficult to get flattering pictures of people dancing, so one good technique is to focus on the movement rather than the individuals by getting a slow exposure of the dance floor in which the people will blur into barely recognizable shapes, but the sense of people enjoying themselves will still be clear.

If you’ve just stepped back inside from getting a night time exterior photo, this couldn’t be easier as the camera settings can remain exactly the same.  The key to this one is keeping the flash turned off and the camera steady.  Indoors a chair or table will make for an improvised tripod. A photo like this is also bound to have lots of colour from the disco lights.

Quality, not quantity

If you want to deal with the photographs you get while a guest at the wedding in a professional manner, you need to realise the importance of (even just a little) post-processing and (quite a lot of) editing.

The former need not be the full Photoshop layers and masks and dodging and burning – for most of the images I find a batch process to boost contrast, recover highlights and apply a vignette to help the composition actually does most of the post-processing work in very little time.  Even if you don’t own any post-processing software, something free like Picasa, or Gimp if you’re a little more adventurous, will be more than adequate.  If you’re going to make a habit of taking lots of photos, I’d look into Photoshop Elements, and if you have a RAW-capable SLR something like Lightroom or my friend Aperture is a must.

Equally, if not more, important is the need to edit your shots.  This is different from post-processing and is a way of reducing the number of photos you need to post-process, and often after post-processing reducing further the number of photos you will share with the bride, groom and other guests.  I use a simple rating system to edit, by first of all selecting all the photos I want to consider looking at again, then batch processing those as described, then selecting which of those I’ll share.  Aperture allows me to keyword, flag, colour-code, and rate, but if you can achieve similar results by creating a couple of folders – “source”, “processed” and “slideshow” for instance.  The source folder contains all the pictures you shot.  The processed folder contains all the ones you first select to look at again, and it is these images that you batch process.  The slideshow folder is a subset of the processed images to share.  Speaking of slideshows…

Let the slideshow do the work instead of the viewer

The slideshow software I use allows me to add music, which can be nice (the first dance is often a good song to take note of for this purpose), and it gives a clean interface with which to easily create slideshows of anything from a minute to 8 or 9 minutes without requiring lots of processing power. For the record it’s called Soundslides, though there are other programs available that might be equally good.  Why a slideshow is a good idea is it allows the viewer to sit back and enjoy rather than having to click through images one by one.  Also, if you do add music, it can be an added dimension to the experience.  An alternative to music is to record audio during the day – the vows, the speeches, the band – and use that as the soundtrack.  I haven’t yet done that for a wedding, but I will.  For the record I’ve found that 3.5 seconds per image is just about right for most slideshows.  And if you are choosing music, make sure it’s somewhat appropriate to the occasion!

Facebook is your friend

This tip may not apply to everyone, or to every wedding, but where the bride or groom are on Facebook it is probably one of the most efficient ways in spreading your newly produced slideshow that tells the story of the day, and to do so quickly.  I find that brides and grooms absolutely love it when good quality images (be they professional shots or high quality well thought out guest photos that you now can take!) go online in the hours and days after the wedding.  Getting something to them quickly can be a real bonus and enhance their experience of viewing the images.  Email works too of course, but with 400 million people on Facebook (and growing), a link to your slideshow posted on their wall (assuming you have a way of putting it online, which is a discussion itself for another day’s post) will get the photos to them pretty quickly, with the added benefit that all their Facebook friends will pick it up also.  If the images surpass the usual sorts of images people expect to see on Facebook you’re onto a winner already.  Note though that I recommend sharing the link, and not the images themselves.  Unless that is you’re happy to decipher Facebook’s copyright and privacy policies and satisfy yourself that uploading photos there isn’t a bad thing to do.

In conclusion…

Hopefully you’ve found the guide useful, or will do for the next wedding you’re attending.  And if you put some of the tips in the last four posts into action, I hope that the effort is appreciated and that you find people raving about your images. What better reward could you hope for.  And if I’ve missed some glaringly obvious tips that you’ve used or plan on using, let me know in the comments.  Thanks for reading the series, and once again do please share it with anyone who might find it interesting.   Back to non-wedding-but-still-photography-related topics here tomorrow.  Till then…