Its been a while...

...since my last blog post. During this time I havent spent much time with my photography either, and naturally no new investments in that direction. The lens in the previous post is still interesting, but I have realized I only need anything like that if I have a full frame camera. The 17-40mm works brilliantly as it is now and has been used a lot.

The main photographic event lately has been wedding photography for some friends who married high up in the Norwegian mountains, by a big dam, the Sysen-dam. The scenery is spectactular (hoping to link a few shots here) and the wedding was very unusual in this regard. My 20D and the two main lenses, the 17-40mm f4 and 70-200mm f2.8L IS performed brilliantly and I got some nice shots that hopefully will make the bride and groom happy.

However, I have also learned a few things about wedding photography (this is my second), and that is that its hard to take control and arrange a good shoot. We had a plan to rig a neutral background using a couple of bedsheets so that I could get some nice potraits. And it worked fine for that except that the sheets were too thin making the woodwork shine its yellowish hue through it. Still I managed to isolate them fine in Photoshop later to replace the background. However, the biggest problem proved to be that everyone else in the party wanted to take pictures as well. This often made the bride and groom look in different directions and there was all sorts of distractions. It didnt get much better as people wanted all kinds of constellations of the family in the shots too. Since the bedsheets didnt look very nice (very wrinkled) and they hardly was wide enough to fill the frame everyone in the party probably has som terrible looking pictures on their compact cameras now. This again requires me to fix a lot more pictures than I had imagined (I was aiming for shots only with the bride and groom). So I guess the real issue now is just to limit the amount of pictures to work with.

Digitally there is some new ground to cover since I have problems making a believable backdrop when their feet are visible. It almost looks as if they are floating, and it requires some work "grounding" them in the shots. I have had some success by keeping the wriggly bedsheets where they are standing and I think I will go with that in the end, but fading upwards into a better looking background. A real challenge to get that professional edge.

During the shoot I used one single Canon 550EX flash which pointing up to the white ceiling which reflected a nice and diffuse light that worked fine for me to shoot at ISO 100 and 200. There is a hint of yellowish hue due to the wooden panels on the walls around but nothing bad. Will add a shot here later if I am allowed by the happy couple! :)