Monday, August 6, 2012

...twas the night before,

...well it was certainly not the night before Christmas...twas the night before the "big" wedding ! ...you see, I don't do weddings, I had only shot a small affair about four years ago, an associate of my wife's ...it was a smaller event, backyard ceremony and such, journalistic style... but this, this was going to be the wedding of the decade and somehow, I managed to end up being the photographer of choice !!! ...I tried to discourage this, but to no avail...

...I thought, what if I actually planned for this event, how 'bad" could it be ? ...well, either pretty bad or pretty good, depending on how you viewed the glass half empty/full scenario...

...I had been advised to not try any state of the art lighting techniques, that it may cause pre-mature aging and a lowering of testosterone and so forth...I should have listened...

I knew I wanted to use diffused light every chance I had...so simply bolting a strobe to the top of my camera would not allow me to create the tense technical scenarios and profanity outbursts that only photographers can appreciate...hmmm, so I decided to shoot with the Gary Fong Lightsphere Diffuser...I mean we have all seen Gary slap one of these "salad spinners" atop his strobe, point the damn thing anywhere and effectively light up the state of Rhode Island with the first shot...I mean if Gary could do this for YouTube, then certainly I could duplicate some of this success ? right ????

..so a week prior to the wedding, I began testing...

I have three camera setups, with matching vendor strobes, so the odds of finding a favorable and competent  combo should be child's play...you sort of know where this is going, right ???

Choice #1, the Sony SLT A65 with Sony HVL-F56am "honker" strobe...matched with either the Sony 16-50mm f2.8 or the Leica 16-80mm f3.5 would be a to die for combination for a "newbie" wedding guy... problem was, I kept getting strobe blow-outs with a variety of combinations of this body (2) lens and strobes (2)...hmmm, but still had a few days to go, surely I could work this out, surely...

Choice #2, the Panasonic G3 with the Olympus FL-50r "honker" strobe...but alas NO fast standard zoom as they had just intro'd the 12-35mm f2.8 and it was not available, and to further compound the problem the lens was priced over $1k...yowza !!! ...so the wedding would have to be shot with an assortment of fast primes, and I knew changing lens during the event would further induce pre-mature aging and a possible drool... testing indicated that his combo worked well for the strobe work with the Gary Fong spinner...

Choice #3, the Pentax K-01 with the Pentax AF360 "semi-honker" strobe...I had the fast zooms and primes but alas, during testing I discovered that the af360 would rotate vertically but NOT horizontally... that would knock out my ability to shoot vertical strobe shots with the GF diffuser...drat ! ...scratch the Pentax combo

well for whatever reason, "twas the night before" and I still had not worked out the Sony combo to any high degree of success...I told my wife that I was going to shoot the wedding with the Pano G3...at least it was producing excellent results with the the GF spinner and I had stopped shaking when I used the Pano combo...she indicated I was daft !

...bottom line, the wedding shoot was great with the Pano G3 combo and GF spinner...I was pleased as was the client, and had only shortened my lifespan by a few years, I did not have to start the Viagra treatments...the primes worked great and caused far less trepidation than I had anticipated... whew, a job well done...

I returned  to testing the Sony combo AFTER the wedding, this had to be Pilot-Error... and  I discovered a variety of automation features I had selected and left "on" were creating the flash inconsistencies...HSS/ auto ISO/variable apertures/ADI flash control, etc, etc were contributing to the blow-out situations...or so I think...but bottom line, the Sony is now a viable contender for my upcoming wedding photography, I switched to the new Nissin di866 strobes...like the Bride and Groom, we will all live happily ever-after !!!





...anyone else getting married ????


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