I have been fortunate enough to have a lot of my 2007 weddings be outdoors. In Michigan, summers can be pretty humid and unpleasant… but without fail each weekend I’ve had an outdoor wedding this summer has managed to be the most beautiful day you could ask for. Blue skies, cool breeze and a perfect 70-80 degree’s outside without the sticky humidity.
Shooting outdoors is not without its challenges. The hardest thing to work with outside is lighting. With the sun being so bright, you have to use a flash when taking formals and put the sun behind the subject as a back light. The tricky part is that you need to be somewhat close to your subject in order for the flash to fire bright enough to compete with the sun. This can make group shots a challenge since you have to stand farther back to get everyone in the shot. Of course this also means the flash is firing at full power each time…. so even with an external battery pack, I still have to pace my shooting more than I’d like to allow the flash to recharge (usually 3 or 4 seconds with a quantum battery pack).
You also are a bit blind when shooting outdoors as you can’t really get a good sense of how you are doing using the LCD screen on the camera. The sun is so bright that seeing if your flash fired bright enough or if your exposure if correnct is very difficult. It’s as close to shooting film as you can get I guess… Meaning you are shooting… and hoping it will turn out in the end… just like the old days! : )
On the flip-side, shooting outdoors means your shots will always have enough light, and you’ll be able to shoot at high shutter speeds to stop the action, and use low ISO settings which means sharper images. And since the background is so far away from the subject, you get fantastic depth of field. And the COLORS are always amazing.
Aimee and Todd completed their amazing outdoor wedding with a fantastic location in Muskegon, MI at this old theater. They really played up the theater theme and had everyone get tickets from the ticket counter in order t get into the theater for dinner. Even the toasts were done up with an old fashioned red curtain backdrop and a spotlight on the speaker. Super cool! Here are a few quick shots from the theater that I liked.
To see more of Aimee and Todd’s wedding, check out thier wedding on Pictage using this link: www.pictage.com/278205
