Looking at photos is great, but I really think they come alive when you understand the story that is contained within them. Episode 2 of 'the story behind the picture' features a photo from Emma & James' wedding, which I shot a couple of weeks ago.
In contrast with the past couple of weeks, today (30th July) was a baking hot day - probably what E&J had had their fingers crossed for for over a year. I had already photographed all the key moments of the day and they had just cut the cake. The final official duty I had was to capture some images of their first dance as husband and wife. Now, normally I'm a big advocate of using ambient light whenever possible, as I feel that you can really sense the atmosphere in the photograph, whereas using flash can kind of kill the whole mood. This was not one of those times.
For around half and hour prior to the first dance I was trying to envision what I wanted from the dancing shot. Photographically there are a lot of things to bear in mind: firstly, it's almost pitch black so you have to decide how wide you want to open the aperture (which gives a very limited depth of field, meaning you run a risk of not getting the couple in focus); secondly you can lengthen the time the shutter remains open (anything less than about 1/60 of a second leads you open to motion blur); and thirdly you can increase the sensitivity of the sensor (increasing ISO sensitivity gives brighter pictures in low light but also means more noise). Hmmm ... what to do? I decided that the two flashes in my camera bag had been too lazy all day and needed to come out for some exercise. I wanted the couple backlit, but not rendered as silhouettes, which meant that I had to rig up one flash on a stand high up behind the couple and another one opposite to light the viewable side of the couple. The only other thing to bear in mind was how light or dark I wanted the background, which wouldn't be affected by the flash. I didn't want a black hole behind them but I wanted to keep it on the dark side (like Darth Vader). Using my 50mm f1.4 lens I shot in manual mode at 1/125 second, ISO 800, f8.
So, they are the technical details of the shot. The cake had just been cut, but the master of ceremonies tried to immediately go into the first dance (I'd mentioned to him that I'd need a couple of minutes to re-set the flashes after the cake-cutting photos, but I think he forgot) so, very untypically for me I jumped in and asked to delay the dance for a couple of minutes - I never do this kind of thing normally, but I knew that all I'd need were a few seconds and Emma & James would get a far better photograph. Here it is, just how I wanted (after a few tweaks in post processing) - the story completed by Emma's dad watching in the background. So, here it is. Comments welcome.
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