Bridal photography tips: a surefire way to preserve highlights in the wedding dress

jmeyer | Photography Tips | Weddings | 29/10/2012 11:46am

0 Comments

While there are all sorts of wedding photography tips out there advising on everything from portrait lighting and off-camera flash techniques to the best couple poses, we thought we would offer some very specific advice for which we often get asked: namely, how to preserve the highlights in the wedding dress when shooting bridal photography.

Follow the steps below in our fool-proof exposure guide to shooting bridal photography and you’ll never over-expose a white wedding dress ever again.

Choose the right metering mode
With harsh light falling on a white wedding dress, even the most sophisticated metering systems can struggle to get exposure right. Shoot in Evaluative mode, so that the camera takes a reading from the scene as a whole.

Use your histogram for perfect exposures
Take your shot, view it on your camera’s LCD screen, then call up the histogram. This shows the tonal range of your image. If it’s over-exposed, the body of the histogram will be stacked heavily to the far right of the graph.

Fine-tune the shot with Exposure Compensation
If your shot is over-exposed then re-shoot, bracketing your images with exposures either side of the metering system’s reading. Use the Exposure Compensation button to select how much to under or over-expose a scene.

Posted on Monday, October 29th, 2012 at 11:46 am under Photography Tips, Weddings.