Bob McEvoy Photography

Wedding Blog

Miller/Gray Wedding

The Crawfordsburn Inn is a beautiful, period location, with many opportunities for environmental portraiture. The wedding was planned to be a small, friendly gathering with just 24 guests, with the emphasis on its informality. Hence there were no bridesmaids, no best man, no cars and no speeches. The standard wedding shots simply had to be discarded. How do you fill an album under those circumstances? There are two options, to go with the flow and rise to the challenge, or to panic!

I like a challenge, so I decided to try to emphasis the informality, by taking more time with the bride and groom before the wedding, and attempting to capture atmosphere. I planned a couple of special shots, one of which had to be abandoned on the day, because of architectural unsuitability. Here’s my shooting plan for the day:-

1) Take time! I arrived a full two and a half hours before the wedding, to allow stacks of time for posed portraits, metered and captured manually.
2) Focus on the Bride. Cathy was a beautiful bride, with a lovely facial shape. I wanted to use the light to emphasise her face as much as possible. I think this succeeded - especially in the bedroom portraits, where she is looking out the windows. Keith, the groom was full of good humour and happy to go along with most of the suggestions – although one or two posing suggestions made by his friends were definitely vetoed!
3) Natural light! I wanted to do as much as possible in natural light. I was determined to avoid flash as a key light as much as possible. But a tripod wouldn’t fit into the Crawfordsburn Inn’s bedrooms. At least not where I wanted it to be. I did the window shots very slowly. I set the camera ISO to 400, white balance on automatic. Cathy looked out the window, and I metered the light manually then set the camera manually. Cathy's friend Eithne held the white reflector, bouncing back some of the light from the window onto the dark side of the bride’s face, and under her chin.
4) Fill Flash. Most of the shots in this wedding were taken with the camera set on manual. I metered the posed shots with the light-meter, but the casual shots and the outside shots were taken using the camera’s matrix metering system. This allowed me to reduce the flash setting by 1 EV, thus reducing its power by half, adequately lighting the subjects without the harsh lighting effects of key flash. Even in the ‘fast-moving’ parts of the wedding, like during the ceremony, where manual metering would not have been practical, and the camera was set on Programme, I upped the ISO to 640, thus allowing the SB800 flash to automatically reduce its output so much that I achieved images with very little shadow problems. Obviously a high ISO like this will be grainy (with digital noise) but I think that photos like these will only ever be used in a montage page, and the extra noise won’t be too noticeable. (Anyway, we have ways of removing noise these days!)
5) Poses. Because I wanted ‘natural informality’ to be the tone of the album, I didn’t go for over-posed photos, so even the family groups were fun-filled, happy, casual groups.

The results were pleasing!

So, thank you to both Bride and Groom for allowing me to be part of your day, and every best wish for the future.

Bob