Mom's Wedding
2012.12.29
Day One Hundred and Four. Mom asked me to shoot behind the scenes at the wedding and at the reception. I hadn't shot a wedding since September of 2010, and the reception hall had about as much light as an intimate candlelight dinner ... this was going to be interesting. I started with the 105mm for both the fast 2.8 aperture and because it's an amazing portrait lens. A lot of those pictures came out really well. The biggest challenge was zooming with my feet and catching the moment is such a confined space. The real challenge came in the reception hall. I stuck with the 105 to start, again for the fast aperture, but quickly found that focusing was a serious problem in the low light. Erratically moving (dancing?) subjects in low light are not easy to focus on. I had to throw away a lot of focal misses that otherwise would have been great pictures (and i don't mean slight soft focus, I mean focused on the wall which was 20+ feet behind the subject). Feeling constrained by the 105, I switched out for the faster 50mm f/1.4, hoping that the faster aperture and wider focal length would help. I was half right. The wider focal length did indeed help a lot, but shooting wide open at 1.4, while allowing sufficient light in, meant that even the slightest focal miss made the image complete rubbish. I ended up stopping it down to around f/4 to keep more of the subject in focus. Since going from 105mm to 50mm made my life easier and since I was stopping down to f/4 anyways, I switched out to my trusty 28-300mm and kept it racked out at 28mm for the remainder of the dance party. To anyone who views these images and comes to the crazy conclusion that you'd like me to shoot your wedding, all I can say is, I hope you're independently wealthy ;)
