Shot my second wedding

I was a little nervous going in, but armed with the D7000, here are a couple of the pics. Any suggestions for cropping the first?
[Note: exif says lens is 18-105, but I shot with the 18-140. Pretty happy with the sharpness of this kit lens]

4walls wrote in post #17715030

Hosted photo: posted by 4walls in
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forum: Critique Corner

Hosted photo: posted by 4walls in
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forum: Critique Corner

Overall a nice set. I see some vignetting which I am not fond of. In the first shot I would crop out the car in the bottom right corner. The pedestrian in a bright red jacket is distracting, so perhaps you could bring down the red jacket a bit. In #3 the green grasses are too much for my taste, #5 the underside if the umbrella on the left is flat but salvageable. Generally a good job!

Do yourself a favor: if you plan to keep shooting weddings, buy at least one faster lens. f3.5 just doesn't cut it for this type of work, especially with these very busy backgrounds and foregrounds. Image 3 is a great example: at f1.8 or bigger, the couple would be in focus but the grass and party would blend out and you wouldn't care so much that there's a blade of grass going right through the bridesmaid's face. At f5, it should be culled out in my opinion.

Aside from that, I agree with the above comment about the vignette. I add vignette all the time to portrait work but these are all obvious and overdone. It shouldn't be use on every single image.

I feel like all of them would pop more with some extra time editing. The colors are flat - it was obviously a rainy, overcast day - but you can bump clarity, vibrance, contrast, etc. to help out.

randizzle wrote in post #17716219
Do yourself a favor: if you plan to keep shooting weddings, buy at least one faster lens.

I agree with this. You didn't include any images shot indoors and I wonder if it's because your lens simply couldn't perform in that venue.
A wedding is one of the most important days in a woman's life, and I think you owe it to your client to have proper equipment before making a commitment to shoot one.

well this is the cc thread

I like number 4 and the last one the best. I agree, you need faster lens, but you were not asking for cc on images not posted here right? On those that were, number one is odd and possibly incriminating lol not sure what that was about but Im sure there is a story. it just is a bit reckless IMO. The second one I can see where you were going but for me it did not land. Too much detachment... Number 3 would have been much better had the weeds in front been more out of focus. They were in too sharp and took away from the background and your main subjects. I like the bridge shots... those were fun.

On #1, clone out the chap in red, crop out the bit of car on the RHS. A fun shot.