Digital or film
Digital
The digital medium is very suited to most types of wedding photography. Modern digital cameras are a flexible and useful choice for the modern wedding photographer, compared to the traditional film cameras. Features such as being able to change ISO and white balance on the fly (the equivalent of changing a whole roll of film in a film camera) are more than useful when working in an environment like a church that has very variable and mixed lighting. As a professional wedding photographer I find the benefits are twofold – speed of use, and “knowing by seeing” the desired photograph has been taken. Also the ability to convert a shot to black and white, after the photograph has been taken is much better than when we exclusively used film
Digital has introduced to wedding photography some interesting changes. Twenty years ago a wedding photographer spent an hour with you, shot a few rolls of film resulting in perhaps 20 – 30 photographs in an album. Often a professional wedding photographer now works all day long, producing many 100’s of images - where the photographs are used in albums, DVD’s, slide shows, and storybook albums.
Photographers used to take orders from brides for reprints – this took lots of organisation from the brides end, and lots of collecting of monies from relatives. Nowadays, the digital revolution enables wedding photographer to use online albums for guests to purchase their own prints from, and for brides to show their wedding photos at the click of a mouse
Film
Shooting a wedding on film does have several distinct advantages for a wedding photographer. A bride wearing a white wedding dress, next to a groom in a black suit poses a challenge to digital that film deals with more easily. The dynamic range of film is higher than that of the digital medium. Put simply, film captures a wider tonal range than digital does. Film however is so much slower to process and lacks the immediacy of digital. A bridal photograph shot on film, has so much more information in it compared to a digital image, when an portrait needs enlarging to a large size, film has an absolute edge over digital
For this reason I often shoot a roll of film at a wedding alongside digital. This gives me some flexibility and expands the creative opportunities, and ultimately raises the quality of my work
So what do I use when photographing a wedding?
I shoot 90% of my work as a wedding photographer using a digital camera. I have found the flexibility, immediacy and instant preview afforded by a digital camera suits wedding photography. In the main, wedding albums have photographs of a size that a digital camera takes in its stride. I use film for the occasional tricky lighting situation, as a back up to digital, or for the situations where I know the image is going to be enlarged. Using a quality professional scanning service, the file size for a scanned film photograph can be 10 times more than that of a digital camera, which is why I use film for any portraits where the intention is to produce a large image
Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King
Useful Information page
click on “home” to return to the main site
Copyright (c) 2006 Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King, All rights reserved.
Material published by Beautiful Wedding Photography by Richard King on these web pages is subject to copyright.
Material from these web pages may not be reproduced without permission
