 This episode as a photographic eye is brought to you by pick drop. Be sure to get your free trial by clicking on the link in the description box below. How's it how's it guys? As a wedding photographer, you can bump into so many issues and I wanted to share with you the stories today of quite possibly the hardest wedding I have ever photographed because within that whole day encompassed all the issues all the problems all the solutions that I keep banging and beating my drum about but understanding how your camera works you know being able to make choices about exposure things on the fly being able to understand the technical processes of what it is you're doing and also how to go about actually creating a focused project under a lot of pressure and where goalposts keep moving all the time. So around about 2014 I'd been taking photographs or weddings rather here in the UK since 2008 and over that time my approach had evolved from the very sort of formal portrait photography that I did in weddings in South Africa through to a more kind of relaxed and one of a better word a documentary kind of style. So Sally and Pierre had reached out to me over email and said look you know we'd like you to photograph our wedding and normally this would involve me having a chat with them in person but Sally and Pierre lived in Bali and they were getting married down in Poole which is near Bournemouth and so we weren't able to meet up. Now I know Bournemouth a little bit because my gran used to live on the other side of Bournemouth in New Milton and saw okay well I must go and meet them because we have to have a chat in person anyway so that would be good I get a chance to know where I'm going drive off to their house their folks got this awesome house down a little private lane meet have a chat about the day the awesome yeah everything's great they're lovely at this point so next day got all my stuff ready it's all lined up I've I made a point of actually touching all the bits that I needed to make sure I had them with me all the batteries are charged cards are clean all sorted turn up at the house go in start taking photographs now at the point I had taken this this choice of photographing with the album in mind already the narrative a couple of photographers who had given me advice on this point said look you know think about chapters in the in the album like chapters in a book that you introduce the you know introduce the bride where are we give us a sense of time we've narrative throughout the day we're going through that our photographing around and I'm finding little bits in the bobs that's just you to help reinforce what's going on now a huge skill at this point is to not be in people's way to just stand back as I look you know don't worry about me don't pay any attention to me you just do your thing and often that works really well you know after a while people stop it they ignore you basically and you just go back to business but this wedding for some reason Sally I think basically because they had mostly planned all this from barley she had this dress that had like a corset tie thing on the back and I was photographing trying to get into this thing and neither her bridesmaid or her dad could figure out how to tie this thing up so I say look I because I'm a I'm an ex-goss and I've hung around people who wear corsets before I know how to tie them do would you like me to help you otherwise we're going to be late for the church so it's like yeah so we tied up so that was one time I kind of I kind of broke through so at this point you know so far so good it's fairly standard stuff I'm walking around taking photographs being unobtrusive and then I have to drive off to the church and this is where I'm starting to get into places that are giving me throwing me a little bit of curveballs what was kind of starting to throw me a little bit was that the church was quite small and this is where experience of understanding how to measure up sort of what lenses do and and how to kind of craft a bit of a story and and again be unobtrusive come more into play get into the church it's like okay well I haven't really got space to walk down the aisles everything's very cluttered and close in so I'm going to have to think about what it is that I'm going to do in regards to pictures I want to get full image I want to show us where we are get a get a sense of the church it was a very pretty church now because I don't have the the space to walk around during the ceremony I have to make a decision who am I going to focus on is going to be Sally or is it going to be Pierre because of the way that they stand facing each other I can only have one often the bride is more emotive during the sessions and also quite a lot of the times it's the bride's family who are paying for the album if you want to be that you know blunt about it ceremony goes through I get some awesome shots of once they go up into I don't know whatever you call it like a little chapel bit to go and do a blessing I was able to get some wider shots which gets the the choir in there now it's all fantastic and then you know they're out I'm following them down I've got more of a wide angle lens going on because I want to get a bit of what just got energy going on and I find that with a wide angle lens I could be a little bit closer and because of that field of view it gives me a bit more of a dynamic sort of approach so okay awesome they're out there got the wedding they they do this thing they have a little sort of get together because often this is the first time the bride seeing anybody says lots of things going on and I thought well this is turning out to be a really cool wedding you know what a lovely couple you know everybody looks good this is energetic and I didn't know that it was about to get like super super tricky that was going to really stretch my abilities as as a photographer the photographs that you're seeing on screen are the ones that Sally and Pierre chose for their album I wish I've had a service like pick job to make that whole process so much easier I could have just created a gallery with the images that I felt were you know right for the album and then they could check it out by clicking on the link they don't have to install any software they don't have to register anything and best of all they can flag the images that they say yes or no rather than having to write up endless lists another great feature that they could have employed was to use the scribble option so this is fantastic where you could just make some annotated notes on photographs like you know maybe remove this or change that you can see how much easier that whole process would have been even though they were back in Bali by the time actually did the layout for the album so check out pick job you know give them a try whether you use photographs for your personal life or in you know for the client pick drop is going to help streamline that bridge between you sharing some images and getting some feedback click on the link in the description box below for your free trial at this point the bride and groom they drive off and we're all going to a a stately home called St Giles Wimborn the turn up cool we're there what an awesome looking house a big sort of classic stately home wonderful drawing rooms and this is this is where you get into i'm my first major problem in stately homes there if you don't know that they are not set up as wedding venues so the lighting within them is not supposed to be all bright it's not like it's not a conference center it's windows and maybe some downlighters on the paintings that that's kind of your lighting choices which during the day it's fine actually looks pretty cool because you've got these lovely big windows and they do lead in a lot of light they make the room look great they throw some pools of shadows in there all looking fantastic so yeah that's that's cool i'm getting some action reaction shots i was a great tip that i had from from Stephen Taylor when he was teaching me about documentary wedding photography is that when you're looking through that album remember talked only about narrative thinking about the story action reaction there's somebody looking out the window at the people arriving i don't need to explain these this the progression of the story to you as you're looking at these images because it's there in the photographs doing some backgrounds getting people they're talking i think there's some pictures of the Duke in there and use some canapes lovely sort of framing the the they're running on hallways and stuff it is fantastic for weddings and you know we then off going outside to take some photographs of the bride group oh again you know it's it's fairly sort of standard stuff nothing too hardcore because that was part of my selling point it was that people they wanted a couple of nice natural photographs of them let's get some interesting photographs of the bride group with the house and if the eagle eyed amongst you may notice that the statue in this fountain looks very similar to the one in Piccadilly that's because the statue of eros it's actually it's not the same statue obviously doesn't take a holiday time but it was the same family the family who laid out Piccadilly they are that family who owned some Giles Wimbled so they have two of the statues they had one for themselves and one for the Piccadilly anyway an interesting sort of side side thing and these are kind of the cool things you get to to discover do some nice natural stuff again you know if you want some tips about this this is just about asking the you know the bride group just oppose do their thing you know so stand over there some nice lighting what have you just talk amongst yourself talk about when you first met you know just you don't worry about me and and you know tell a stupid joke or something and that gives you this wonderful natural expressions and my timer was running out my timer was running out because as you've noticed in the background and I mentioned about the windows I've mentioned about you know the sun and the sun is starting to set there's also a lack of light inside and as I've been walking around I've gone into where they're going to have their meal which is in the library and it's lovely and I'm kind of you know going but there's something lacking in the library and that's lights of any description apart from candles on the table and I did I did ask one of the the the people who is like setting up the fiercest they couldn't be otherwise she's nice they're just going to have candlelight it's going to be lit by candles it looks stunning I'm like oh this is this is handy right I don't know if you've ever tried to take photographs in an environment where there are just candles but yeah Stanley Kubrick did it and he had to fit a whole new lens through very light and and I was like okay this is going to mean that I'm going to have to photograph quite high eyes so I'm going to have to photograph pretty wide open and I'm going to have to decide how to make an exposure because it's going to have to be manual because I can't rely on my camera to make sense of the candles the darkness the people's light the face the things in the background none of that is going to be helpful so I kind of got right what am I going to do what's important here firstly shutter speed shutter speed is going to be primary thing I need to have at a minimum about a hundredth of a second 120th of a second somewhere in that range I can obviously handle slower than that but I'm dealing with people who aren't on board with this and they're not going to be sitting still and I can have slightly underexposed images with sharp-ish people relatively speaking or I can just have correctly exposed images and they're all blurry so I know which one I want I actually want people to be recognised right so that was so I forget what the actual exposure was and I have a feeling the ISI was probably up around about 12 and a half thousand so it was it was quite high and I did some experiments just before while the people still haven't pre-dined the drinks in there with some lighting just you know sort of seeing what I got and then I set my camera on to manual and I went bang I'm done now need to settle for shooting raw Brian Gloome come in now they warned me about a thing that the French do because Pierre as you may have surmised is French and the French they wave these these these napkins around as they as people come in and I was like this is awesome and I'd been told about how to do this and this is where again that kind of movement thing comes into play it helped make everything cool and pre-checked that everything was fine and so I could just focus on having some composition about following the progression of the Brian Gloome around of getting back into that narrative thing without having to worry about the technical aspect I know that I'd set my camera for what it was that I wanted and I could just put all that side I could park it and not have to worry focus on the thing that mattered so we did the speeches they had the meal it was actually fantastic I really I enjoyed it I did get sore knees because again it's a very small it's a very small room where it's very tight so I had to do a lot of sort of squatting down so I wasn't in people's way which is also why you end up with this kind of slightly lower down than than eye level view which I think makes the whole thing look pretty cool actually because it just it changes makes it gives a bit of a sense of importance again a bit of dynamic sort of feel to it so you know be doing all that sort of stuff and then later on they go and they have their first dance in again a huge room with a massively high roof and I just this is where I kind of let back into using flash and things that nature now the reason I didn't use flash and somebody no doubt will probably ask this in the comments during these speeches and the rest of the day is that that makes it feel for me unnatural it makes it feel for me obtrusive and it's not the way that I want to work especially given that the camera then has a big flash on it and people are going to stop paying attention to you Sallie and Pierre had seen my work they were familiar with other images that looked like I was now creating for them so they were on board with what they were going to get that final dance bit of flash bit of shutter drag intentional camera movement whatever you want to call it it was all quite nice said thank you ever so much to Sallie and Pierre a way of goodbye to St Jarlswood but that wedding could have gone so badly if I had not understood the basics of all the things that I had how the lenses work the way that they you know can can be employed to make you know decisions they're going to help you overcome a technical issues right that there are exposures and and dealing with very difficult lighting conditions and how to overcome that because I've been doing this for a while then I understand that you know sometimes you have to make compromises and I'm not being drawn into overthinking about things to focus on what's important that narrative that's gone throughout the whole day what you've been seeing here if you haven't signed up for these Saturday selections news lecture goes out every Saturday as you may have guessed and in there is a weekly dose of inspiration about your photography thanks ever so much for watching check out this video over here and I will see you again soon