2004-2006 Chinese Wedding Showcase

[janshim]

Hello,


A week ago I put together a gallery of Chinese/Church wedding images that I've shot between 2004-2006 and I've chosen the ones that are creative, dramatic and journalistic and present you the following gallery

http://www.shimworld.com/gallery/wedding/ (http://www.shimworld.com/gallery/wedding/)

The images are not in any particular order and they were shot on both 20D and 1DMkII. I have since sold the MkII in favour of keeping 20D. Recent wedding assignments were shot mostly on EF10-22mm for my wide shots and other lenses I used in a wedding are EF17-40, EF24-70 and EF70-200 2.8 IS.

For details of what a Chinese wedding photographer has to go through in a day, I have also recently documented this http://shimworld.wordpress.com/ don't miss it - 21 hour marathon!


--
Jan Shim
http://www.shimworld.com (http://www.shimworld.com/)
Blog: http://shimworld.wordpress.com (http://shimworld.wordpress.com/)

[Grace]

you have some beautiful pictures. A million, but pretty for the first bit I saw ! Welcome to the forum! I know everyone would appreciate seeing a few posted here :)

[Woogie]

Welcome to POTN. I thoroughly enjoyed looking through those photos; I didn't get a chance to look at all of your photos, but I saw some very impressive ones in your set.

On a side note, I really like going to asian weddings. I've attended many vietnamese weddings and I've never been to one where I didn't have fun.

[Yella Fella]

wow Jan i like the pics, did you do a lot of PP on them? What cameras did you use, the colours are well vibrant and saturated

but i know about your marathon... my last chinese wedding, i was at the bride's place at 6am right past midnight!

[janshim]

Welcome to POTN. I thoroughly enjoyed looking through those photos; I didn't get a chance to look at all of your photos, but I saw some very impressive ones in your set.

On a side note, I really like going to asian weddings. I've attended many vietnamese weddings and I've never been to one where I didn't have fun.

Thank you for visiting. Yeah, Asian weddings are colourful and vibrant occasions with so much varied culture even within the same race. It gets interesting when you have a Chinese Christian couple begin their wedding day at Church followed by traditional Chinese tea ceremony at home.

[janshim]

wow Jan i like the pics, did you do a lot of PP on them? What cameras did you use, the colours are well vibrant and saturated

but i know about your marathon... my last chinese wedding, i was at the bride's place at 6m right past midnight!

The images were captured on EOS 20D and 1DMkII with majority of them on the 20D. Prior to getting the EF10-22 ultra-wide lens, I had relied on my MkII's 1.3X crop factor for my wide shots on EF17-40 lens (22.1mm vs 16mm on the 20D). I have since sold the 1DmkII and shoot exclusively on the 20D, it's such a great camera.

I like my images contrasty and saturated. I have my 20D's Sat set to max but my images go beyond what the camera can offer so I increase saturation during PP, and oh, I shoot 100% JPEG much to the disbelief of many!

[CTR]

WOW! I'm very impressed at the quality of your work, especially the extra vibrancy/punch that you have in your images.

I was wondeirng if you could give me a few pointers on your post processing technique or the settings that you have set on your 20D? Most of my images comes out flat and underexposed with my 580EX. I noticed that you've used a Lightsphere. Do you find that the Canon flash system underexposes by 1/3-2/3 of a stop? I needed to shoot RAW to bring the exposure to the proper levels. If I had shot JPEG, I probably couldn't keep half of my shots.

Thanks!

Jason

[janshim]

WOW! I'm very impressed at the quality of your work, especially the extra vibrancy/punch that you have in your images.

I was wondeirng if you could give me a few pointers on your post processing technique or the settings that you have set on your 20D? Most of my images comes out flat and underexposed with my 580EX. I noticed that you've used a Lightsphere. Do you find that the Canon flash system underexposes by 1/3-2/3 of a stop? I needed to shoot RAW to bring the exposure to the proper levels. If I had shot JPEG, I probably couldn't keep half of my shots.

Thanks!

Jason

Thanks Jason.

I've always shot JPEG even in very difficult lighting situation though at times I would switch to RAW+JPEG but rarely have I ever needed the RAW files. The settings I use in my 20D are Sharpness +1, Saturation +2 everything else is at factory default. The saturation levels in-camera isn't enough to satisfy me so during post processing I apply quite a bit more including a high contrast plug-in that I prefer to keep quiet about.

I don't know what lenses you shoot with but I've found with my 2.8 lenses (and also 10-22mm) 0 FEC is OK when bouncing without a Flash diffuser. These days I bounce a direct Flash whenever possible but when I have to use the Lightsphere-II I typically add between +1/2 to +2/3 FEC.

For my corporate portraits, I mount the 580EX (with Lightsphere II PJ) on a lightstand and trigger it remotely with the Canon ST-E2 to get directional lighting. This setup works brilliantly when you consider the convenience of moving around from venue to venue compared to lugging a studio softbox.

Here are examples of my corporate portraits of CEOs and Ministers from various economic and academic leaders in my country that have been published in a Singapore/Brunei publication, Asia Inc magazine

http://www.shimworld.com/gallery/portraits/corporate/

http://www.shimworld.com/images/AsiaIncMagazinesweb.jpg

[mizuno]

including a high contrast plug-in that I prefer to keep quiet about.

C'mon dude, spill the beans!

If David Jay can come on here and answer any question honestly and cadidly about his life, business and workflow, surely we can all help each other out, too?

Share and it'll come back to you, guarantee it.

[janshim]

C'mon dude, spill the beans!

If David Jay can come on here and answer any question honestly and cadidly about his life, business and workflow, surely we can all help each other out, too?

Share and it'll come back to you, guarantee it.

Hi there. I figured since I am going to plug the Photoshop plugins I use (no pun intended) I might as well make it worthwhile and mention that I do not use Photoshop in my work (at least not yet). I have long been a Paint Shop Pro 9.x user and since it runs most Photoshop plugins I had no reason to switch*. Besides it runs fast on my 2GB RAM P4 3.0GHz Dual Core PC (http://www.shimworld.com/images/studio.jpg).

Plugins that I use religiously are:
For color temperation correction: AGD Color (http://www.agdcolor.com/)
Noise reduction: Imagenomic Noiseware (http://www.imagenomic.com/)
Correcting slightly OOF images: FocusMagic (http://www.focusmagic.com)

The extra punch in saturation and contrast are controlled by scripts written by several seasoned PSP users. I think once I make a complete switch to Photoshop I'll have access to more tools.

* recently, I had a chance to see what Photoshop CS2 was capable of and it became pretty clear that my PSP 9.x had hit the limit. I evaluated Corel's attempt to make PSP X and XI mainstream but have only been disappointed by its resource hogging characteristics. I could not figure out why ver 9 takes one second to load a Canon 8.2 megapixel JPEG image while PSP X and XII take up to 5 seconds.