Exposing for wedding dress

[hsma]

After doing a search I couldn't seem to get an exact answer. When you expose for the white dress, it's best to +FEC a stop or so and let the flash do the rest?

[davidgr]

With your 40D, put the histogram display on the brightness setting and watch for blown highlights. I'd try to use as much natural light and bump up the ISO. An ambient light meter would be great here.

[tdodd]

I'm a newbie to a lot of this and have been researching in preparation for my first gig as assistant/second shooter this afternoon. From my reading I've concluded that it's not really as simple as that. Your approach, including whether or not to use the flash at all, all depends on the available light - not just quantity but quality/direction as well, and whether you are indoors or out and have anything to bounce from.

What I have noticed is that a lot of the world's top pros try to avoid flash altogether and shoot making use of available light only. I get the feeling that shooting in manual exposure mode, without flash, keeps things a lot simpler in general. A flash will get fooled by a white dress or a black tux, just like the regular meter, so you will be having to ride that FEC as much as you would EC if you were shooting in Av mode. There's a wealth of information on the net but if you want to check out some guidance on metering and flash from one of the well known flash gurus who shoots weddings then check out this website....

http://planetneil.com/tangents/

and follow the links on the right hand side. I think this page will be especially pertinent....

http://planetneil.com/tangents/flash-photography-techniques/8-flash-exposure-comp/

Unless I get better advice from the pro this afternoon, for most conditions I shall be shooting manual, spot metering off a bright part of the dress and exposing at +2 from that reading. Alternatively, I'll meter off my palm and set exposure to + 1 1/3, or off grass at perhaps -2/3 depending on its exact tonality, or a clear blue sky at +0. I'll avoid flash altogether, unless there is a very good reason to use it. For the evening stuff indoors I'll be setting an exposure to suit the overall ambient conditions and then foofing my flash, probably around the +0 FEC level to begin with and then tweaking from there.

What I have learned, in some exposure experiments this morning, is the amount of exposure headroom I have above the 0 mark on the camera's internal meter.

- With my 30D I have 3 stops of headroom above 0 without clipping;
- With my 40D and HTP disabled I have 3 1/3 stops of headroom above 0 without clipping;
- With my 40D and HTP enabled I have 4 1/3 stops of headroom above 0 without clipping. It's worth noting that while DPP recognises HTP enabled captures and gives that extra headroom, both in the rendered image and the histogram, Lightroom 2 renders HTP and non-HTP raw files identically, with matching histograms etc.. That may mean that the HTP safety net cannot be relied upon in software other than Canon's own. That said, Lightroom's highlight recovery is very effective for such images and, as that feature is absent in DPP, it probably all balances out in the end.

What all this means is that, whichever body I use, and in whichever mode I use the 40D, if I meter at +2 off the brightest part of the dress I will still have at least 1 stop in reserve to hold highlight detail, and possibly more. Of course, if the dress is in shade and the background is sunlit, I may end up blowing part of the background (a bit), but from the examples I've seen, there often seems to be little interest in the background exposure accuracy, so long as the subject is looking great. This could be a problem for sunlit bright fluffy clouds in the background, for example, so some thought about composition to avoid extremes of lighting may be in order.

One more thought - outdoors, if you do want to use flash, it may well put constraints on your creative choice of aperture, unless you can use high speed sync. I'm expecting to be shooting pretty wide open, at f/2.8 for a lot of my shots, just to isolate my subject and conceal the clutter in the background. On a bright sunny day, at 100 ISO that would require a shutter speed of 1/3200, which is massively above the standard sync speed of 1/250 for my camera bodies. To shoot at the sync speed I'd need my aperture to be closed down to around f/10 on a bright sunny day. I don't want to shoot at f/10 or anything like that.

[GilesGuthrie]

High Speed Sync outdoors can be incredible. I have a perfectly exposed shot with fill flash and a shutter speed of 1/8000. 5d & 580EX II.

[tim]

Practice with various EC and FEC combinations. Turn on highlight tone priority when you're outside. Watch your histogram.