exposure

[elwoodk]

Under available light, what is your best method for good exposure of a bride in white. How/where do you meter?

 

[Big Mike]

Best method might be to use an incident light meter

There are plenty of options. You could meter off of the dress and then open up two stops or so. You could meter off her face/skin and adjust accordingly for her skin tone. +1 stop for typical caucasian skin. You could meter off of your palm, then open one stop.

Actually, with digital...what tend to do is to shoot, then chimp (check the histogram on the LCD)...then adjust if needed. It's best to 'Expose to the right'....meaning that you want your histogram as far to the right as possible, without clipping the highlight detail.

 

[elwoodk]

That's pretty much what I do, but the problem with exposing for the skin involves blowing out the dress. If I expose with the dress in mind, the rest of the composision is generally too dark.

 

[Big Mike]

Wedding dresses, for being on of the most photographed things...are fairly hard to shoot, aren't they?

Not to mention that if you have a groom in a black tux standing beside her...you will be hard pressed to get any detail in the tux while exposing for the dress.

Some people will expose for the faces and let the rest fall where it may. That is usually a pretty good way to go. I try to keep the dress from blowing out but still retain some detail.

If you were really concerned about it....you could take it into photoshop and mask off different parts of the image and edit them separately.

 

[elwoodk]

Yeah... just looking for other options. good luck....

 

[Digital Matt]

Unfortunately, a lot of photographic situations call for a compromise of some sort.

Shoot in raw. If the shot is really a keeper, you can easily extract detail in either a dress, or a tux. It's not something you'll want to do for 500 pictures, but for a really great one, having a raw image gives you that ability.

 

[Big Mike]

Good point Matt. I did just that a few days ago. I had a couple shots of a bride sitting in the grass, out in the open sun. If I exposed for her skin and the grass, the dress was a complete wash out.

I took the RAW files and processed it twice, then combined the shots in Photoshop for a much better result.