Surely a wedding is about the beautiful bridal gown, wedding ring, wedding decoration, food and all the beautiful elements. But the wedding photography is all about capturing those candid moments that are exclusive to a wedding. If you are an aspiring wedding photographer, you better master the technique of capturing these candid shots, with proper lighting, perfect techniques and all your hard work, and you will get name, fame and money. Here are a few useful tips.
1. Prepping
The biggest challenge in capturing candid moments is that they happen quickly and almost always never last too long. This is the real fun of capturing them. Posed shots can be captured even by an amateur. But for capturing candid shots, you have to be on your toes always, waiting for them. So, prepping is important. Some go-to lenses for this purpose are Canon 70-200 f/2.8 II, Canon 24-70 f/2.8 II, Canon 50mm f/1.2L (or you can choose Sigma 50mm f/1.4 Art) and if you get adequate space, Canon 85mm f/1.2L II. Just keep a flash on top of your camera handy, just in case there is bad lighting and can’t make any adjustments.
2. Lock In
Another essential thing is focus while taking candid moments. If you remain busy in adjusting your camera settings, you may miss a perfect shot that won’t happen again. Therefore it’s important that when you are set up in a scene, you should Lock In your Color and Exposure settings in Manual Mode, so that you can focus on the moment while shooting. Still, if you have to adjust the exposure during the moment, you should first try to adjust via ISO because you need to dial in your Shutter Speed depending on whether you want to capture motion or freeze the scene. Similarly, you can dial in your Aperture depending on how much DoF you want in the scene. You can get great inspiration from the work of Annabel Law productions Singapore photographer. Take a look.
3. Anticipation
A wedding is filled with anticipations. While it is made of lovely emotions and journalistic moments, often these moments take place in not-so-perfect conditions. The lighting may be poor, backgrounds may be messy, people’s faces may be in a wrong direction and so on. So, throughout the wedding day, you will have to set up your scenes so as to make them ideal for photography. Then you just have to place your subjects in the correct position of the scene and prompt the action (like a bridal prepping scene), rest of the times you will be just working with what you might have (like a ceremony) and you have to expect picturesque angles and anticipate emotional moments.
Consider following these tips to capture more and more flawless candid shots and you will get great appreciation from your clients.