Welcome to the blog for All Occasions Photography. In posts that follow I will explain my approach to Wedding and Location photography.
It seems to me that as digital SLR's are get better in low light, many photographers are moving away from their strobes and relying on higher ISO settings. There isn't any wrong with this in essence, but you are at the mercy of the location lighting. For example a photographer may end up in a dark church on a rainy day. This would really put a damper on available light shots.
Here are the drawbacks to using available light:
1. Unless you are outside your going to have to bump up you ISO setting (more noise less detail)
2. You will have to open up you lens aperture which decreases depth of field (amount of the image in focus)
3. Use a slow shutter speed, the slow the shutter speed the less likely you are to stop motion.
You say I want that photojournalistic look that you see all the photographers have posted on their web sites. If you pay close attention to the photos you'll start to notice a couple of things.
1. The shots are outside, great if your wedding is outside.
2. The shots are in black and white, why because it helps hide noise (similar to grain in film)
3. The people are not moving because if they did you would get motion blur.
4. The photographer has mastered blending flash and ambient light and it only looks like natural light.
Many photographers myself included, set their aperture to F8 and shutter to 1/60th of second and blasted away. Why, because we were using film and this setup produced the most consistent results. We didn't have the luxury of chimping shots on a cool 3" screen on the back of our cameras. F8 produced a good depth of field and was pretty close to the sweet spot of most lenses and was good to 10 to 15 ft. Back then you probably didn't shoot more then 5 rolls of 36 exposure film now I shoot around 500 images.
This past fall I changed my shooting style, after studying other photographers work, and practicing on everyone and everything before trying it at a wedding. It was a huge difference in that first wedding I shot with the new style. The images seemed to pop off the page. What is it that I'm doing different you ask? I moved the light off of the camera/flash bracket and started using things to modify the way the light looks. I use to shoot weddings alone, now I use an assistant when ever possible to help with the moving the lighting around. I read on blog where the photographer mounted his speed light to a monopod and had assistant position the light where it was needed. I've been doing ever since, I'll never go back to just a flash bracket.
I'll post some photos in the next couple of days showing the differences in the "Look" of the new shooting style.
Here is some geek stuff explaining ISO.
ISO Setting: In film cameras you set your camera to the film speed or ISO rating. Film has chemical layers and each layer is sensitive to different colors of light and how fast these layers react light exposure determines their ISO rating. A higher ISO rating means the film will react quicker when exposed to light. The trade off here was that these faster films produced bigger blobs of color known as grain. Grain reduces the sharpness and clarity of the image and as you increase the print size the more noticeable the grain becomes.
Digital Cameras with the exception of those using the faveon chip have only one layer of light receptors called pixels. These pixels are only sensitive to three colors Red, Green, and Blue or RGB for short. Believe it or not these pixels don't see color just shades of grey 0-254 shades to be exact 0 being black and 254 being white. When a Red pixel is exposed to red light its value is closer 254 and the less red light that is available to the pixel the lower its value. The same is true for the Green and Blue pixels (for more infomation on the bayer pattern visit www.siliconimaging.com/RGB%20Bayer.htm) Now that you are thoroughly confused I'm going to explain how this effects the ISO on a Digital camera. Unlike the film camera where changing the chemical make up of the film changed how fast it reacts to light. To make a digital camera more sensitive you have to increase the voltage at each pixel. The more voltage the less stable the pixel. In electrical terms this is described as gain but photographers can't relate to gain just ISO so you setup the camera so that the gain matches an ISO setting relative to what you would see in film. Like in film increasing the ISO degrades the image quality.
