I am about to do my first outdoor wedding shoot and am concerned about getting the proper exposure without having the bride's gown blown out in the pictures. I will be using a Nikon D300 and am familiar with chimping (checking the histogram) to monitor proper exposure, but this type of shoot is unexplored territory for me. Is the sensor dynamic range be wide enough to accurately capture both skin tones and the white dress? I plan to shoot in raw and use an SB-800 for fill flash.

While on the subject, a photographer friend suggested that a neutral density filter would help control the white of the dress. I am unsure how this would work as it would effect the whole image and then the camera would compensate and the image brightness would be back where it started (unless I compensate). Am I missing something with this technique?

Thanks in advance for your help.

I use a D700 and the latitude and matrix metering is good enough that I have yet to have any significant case of blowing the dress (shooting raw), occasionally in bright sunlight some tiny areas of the dress may blow but at the end of the day the dress is white anyway so I don't consider this a big deal, as photographers we agonise over tiny changes in skin tones, and small areas with missed detail when capturing the right moment is far more important to the client.

If you see blinking highlights on the LCD on the dress, you can quickly dial in come exposure compensation and reshoot which would be more obvious than checking the histogram where you won't know where the blowout is occurring or if you should be concerned. If you are really nervous about it and have time you can spot meter the brightest point on the dress and then overexpose by +1.3 or +1.7. An ND filter will not help since it will just darken everything and teh contrast will remain the same. The only time it may help is when 1/250 shutter speed (max flash sync) is too slow but even then nikons high speed sync mode does pretty well at close distances.

A bigger worry than blowing the dress is dealing with hard mid day sun if it's a blue sky day! If you have not shot outdoors with flash before do some reading on TTL and TTL-BL modes on your SB800 and try them out beforehand. This site is good http://www.planetneil.com/tangents/flash-p...phy-techniques/ as it deals with weddings and the SB800.

Shoot RAW, expose to hold the dress and fill the rest in with flash.

Oh and don't shoot weddings professionally if you don't know how to expose....

I shoot quite a lot of weddings and have three ways of dealing with dresses on bright days. The first is to do high speed bracketing on the dress, combine and then blend a single exposure with the bracketed exposures. Photomatix is really excellent for this but only use Exposure Blending, not HDR. Second is to meter off the dress and then fill with flash, as mentioned above.

Third is to mask the dress and bring back detail but that only works if the dress isn't completely blown out with highlights.

I personally wouldn't bother with a ND filter. Depending on the size and type of wedding, you'll find messing around with filters/tripods etc just isn't possible.

Thanks everyone for your comments and the website reference. First time doing this brings a few butterflies, but I am more confident now that I have heard from seasoned pros.

Miles

No, your friend is ignorant. You are right that a ND filter will simply darken the entire scene equally. What you need to do is use spot metering and manual mode and adjust exposure so that the white of the dress is close to, but not quite, blowing out. Do a Google search on RawAnalyze and do some test shooting beforehand with some white fabric to determine the exact relation between clipping in the RAW file data, the camera histogram clipping point, and the camera spot meter reading. When actually shooting, try to keep the brightest whites of the dress about 1/3 stop below RAW clipping, and your shots will turn out fine.

Thanks for that clarification on the ND filter, Jonathan. I will try your suggestion.

Miles

You have an advantage shooting in fall light. First of all it is not nearly as harsh as is summer sun; the sun is lower in the sky and the light is more flattering. So you don't have to worry as much as if you were shooting an outside wedding in June. You might want to do some experimenting, get some white material and practice exposure. If you have an assistant, a reflector can be useful as the results are more visible and more controllable than flash.

Is the SB 800 powerful enough for big groups in bright sunshine? f8 would give you 5m, would it not?

When using the flash as fill, you should have it below the camera, to prevent double shadows under hats. (You can just hold the camera upside down!)

In overcast weather you can use the flash as main light, but you need wireless remote or master/slave flashes?

The ideal solution is to get the bride to wear light grey, and the men to wear dark grey - but it will never happen!

You could combine flash and bracketing, first shot with flash for the dark suits, subsequent (before flash recharges) for dress.

Putting the group next to some light coloured paving, or reflector might help.

Speedlights work OK as fill flash in full sun for individuals or couples, but for groups, especially large groups, you typically need more than one strobe. There's also the issue of limited range using the speedlights' built-in wireless triggering; the brighter the ambient light, the shorter the maximum triggering range.

...so 4 big Metzs (2*72s + 2*76s) is useful kit?

The theory is that I also use this kit for the usual seated diners shots, with main, fill (wired to camera, below lens) and two for background... the only problem is with the low fill, but you can get round this by using the table cloth as a reflector.

Just what I expected from the forum... lot's of good advise.

The wedding has been shot. The weather changed from what had been forecast and it was overcast the entire day. Pictures came out great!

Thanks again everyone for your help.

Miles

Here is what works fantastically for outdoor bright wedding shoots:

Use an ND filter to slow down the shutter. This is NOT ignorance. Or shoot at the lowest ISO. Either way this will allow you to do the following to excellent results:

1. Camera in Manual mode. Set to RAW mode!
2. Set shutter speed to 1/200s or fastest sync mode, but not faster then 1/500s. Set aperture for required DOF.
3. Don't use hi-sync for reason of #2 above.
4. Set camera to under expose the background by 1 to 1.5 stops. You might have to stop down for this but often F8 or F5.6 works.
5. Set flash to E-TTL and set EC to 0 or not more then 1/3+.
6. For up to three subjects one flash will suffice. A 2nd slave should be used for more subjects (groups).
7. Pick and choose the appropriate focus point manually, lock focus, do not recompose, take the shot.

RESULTS: Background will be under exposed so that the subject/s pop out and are razor sharp. Skin tones will be excellent. White dress will not be blown. Sky will be deep blue because the background is intentionally under expose. White dress will not be blown, and in fact show fibers! The camera body exposes for the background, and the flash will fill in the skin and dress fibers.

I've used this technique a million times to excellent result.

Under-exposed backgrounds in flash sync shots is one of my pet hates.

My theory is to use a view camera to blur the background behind the heads... inclined Scheimplug plane of sharpest focus, with all the heads, and the background above the heads (trees, stonework, etc.) sharp = in the plane of sharpest focus.

If you want to use a filter to get the sky blue, use a rotary polariser!

...but when did a wedding photographer last use a view camera?

1907?

Well how else does one get a nice blue sky when the sky is blown to the human eye? And how does one get a nice deep blue sky without over exposing the people? If anyone knows a better way, I'd like to know. But I doubt there is a better way then to let the camera under expose the background and the flash paint in the subject/s.

In this attached example, I set the camera to manual mode, flash to E-TTL, 0 EC on flash, aperture F8, shutter speed was 1/160s (was 1/200s but I was using a circular polarizer so I changed to 1/160s), the camera was set to -1.5 EC so that the sky is bluer then the otherwise washed out sky to the human eye, and the water is a nice deep blue too. The flash made sure the human skin is exposed normally.

Click to view attachment

Polarising filter - ask a good landscape photographer.

Last time I went to a wedding and was impressed with work of a pro wedding photographer... they were using glass plates!

I did use a polarizer so that I could lose 1 to 1.5 stops, so that the shutter would sync to 1/200s or slower (at ISO 50), so the background would be under exposed ;-)

Glass plates would not work for most weddings, sadly.

I once was impressed with wedding work shot with a Holga.

I stand by my original comment, for the following reasons:

1. What you're recommending has nothing to do with setting exposure properly to avoid overexposing whites. If you don't know how to expose whites properly, using flash fill and an ND filter is just adding extra complexity to the process, and isn't going to do squat to help. Learning how to read and interpret a histogram properly will.

2. If you want to use flash to overpower the sun so that the background is underexposed, you are going to need more flash power than you can get from a battery-operated shoe-mount flash, unless you are shooting individuals or couples at fairly close range. The wedding image you posted is an excellent demonstration of that point. The sunlight coming in from the left side is too bright and (especially on the gentleman on the left kneeling in the front row and the lady immediately behind him) is blowing out facial and clothing highlights. It's also making a rather distracting highlight on the groom's forehead. If you were actually using enough flash power to compete with ambient light (instead of merely providing a bit of fill), you could have decreased exposure even more, prevented those clothing highlights from blowing out, de-emphasized the highlight on the groom's forehead, and still gotten decent exposure on the group overall.

In this first image, I used three speedlights to light the subject. Even though I was shooting fairly close, because I was firing the flashes into umbrellas the power level from the flashes was barely adequate--they were firing at close to maximum power.

Click to view attachment

For this shot, I used two Alien Bee 800s on stands about 15 feet off the ground, two Alien Bee 400s about 5 feet above the ground, plus a 550EX on-camera for a bit of fill. I had enough flash power to do the job, but was running everything pretty close to full power.

Click to view attachment

Using flash to darken backgrounds and reduce shadows caused by direct sunlight can yield excellent results, but you need a lot of flash power to do it right (especially when shooting groups of people), and you still have to know how to expose properly--not just for ambient, but for the flash as well.