On Monday we got the opportunity to shoot a good friend, Craig, parent’s 25th Wedding Anniversary as well as his brothers first communion. We started shooting preparation shots early in the morning around 10am as the hall was being set up for the reception after the renewal of the vows and the communion. Kenny, Tim, Veronica and myself went down to take photos as well as video. Getting inspiration from Still Motion’s tutorials and videos we utilized a monopod and a slider, but we didn’t end up using the slider all that much in the end. The monopod on the other hand was what I shot on the whole night and I couldn’t have done a lot of the shots without it.
After finishing up at the hall we headed straight for Craig’s place to get shots of his parents getting ready for the occasion. I ended up shooting all the video using the 50mm f1.8. On the crop sensor of the 7D it allowed me to get a focal length of roughly 80mm, which enabled me to get shots without invading personal space and it also allowed me to blow out the background when I needed. Photos were shot using three different focal lengths to get good coverage of the preparations.
We headed to the church after getting the shots we needed at Craig’s place. We used a three camera set up to get coverage of the Mass which were the Canon 7D, Nikon D90 and Nikon D7000. The D90 and 7D both had the Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 to have the same focal lengths making it easier to match shots in post and the D7000 had the 80-200mm. Compared to the reception, getting coverage of the Mass was relatively straight forward.
During the reception we were busy, there was a lot going on and we have to get coverage both in photos as well as in video. Luckily there were four of us which made the task much more manageable. We setup our base station at the back of the hall with a Macbook Pro ready for us to offload our cards when needed which were then backed up to another hard drive. For the duration of the reception we were rushing around gathering b-roll for the edit as well as photos of all the happenings during the reception. At the end of the night we ended up with just over 100GB of footage and photos.
It was truly a great experience and we all learnt so much about shooting weddings, media management and the need to have lots and lots of cards as well as batteries to last you how ever long your shooting. I hope that we will be able to shoot more events like this in the future.
- b