i was fortunate enough to have been volunteered, and was subsequently accepted, to shoot a wedding the first weekend of december. it was a family wedding, but i was there as a photographer. i’ve thought about getting into wedding photography. some of the horror stories i’ve read have made me quite leery of it. this however was a low-key affair and i was just there to capture some candid photos of the day. exactly my type of gig.
i have a single camera body with two standard focal length prime lens. i looked at renting another body with a longer prime lens, but it wasn’t to be as it would have had to been shipped overnight which would have made the whole rental price border on the $200 mark. i decided to just go with my single body, the fujifilm x-t3 and use the 23mm f2 lens (34.5mm full frame equiv). i also have the 35mm f2 lens (52.5mm full frame equiv), and i brought it along, but i resolved to try to shoot the entire day with the one lens.
i think it went pretty well. i can certainly see where I could have used a 50mm lens (75mm full frame equiv), but overall, the 23mm lens felt comfortable and capable. churches are typically dark and this one was no exception. my shutter speed stayed at 1/100s, my aperture at f2.2, and i adjusted my iso to get a good exposure. it got pushed as high as 2000, but the shots all turned out great. there were the few out of focus where the camera just couldn’t lock it down before the press of the shutter, but those were a very small percentage. i took 1000 shots and think there were only 9 that were just a blur. i presume that some or most of those were because i switched the camera from ‘performance’ mode to ‘normal’ mode. it slows down the camera processor, which controls focus, to save battery. that switch was set as a press of the iso dial. so, when i was dialing through the iso to adjust my exposure, i accidentally pressed it. it has happened to me before, but this made me change the iso dial to be simply iso and nothing else. plus, i just don’t use normal mode, so it’s really not even useful for me.
i wished i would have gotten a few more detail shots than i did. there wasn’t really a groom or bride “getting ready” time, so i couldn’t have gotten any of those, but thinking back, there were a few times where i could have gotten some detail stuff and just didn’t. good experience there that i could use in the future.
here are a few select pictures from the day.
