Blowing the dress

Richard King

Richard King

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Richard King
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I have been looking at a lot of wedding photographers work recently, and often when critiqued (by others) the fact a blown dress is pretty obvious, no one ever flags it up as an issue

Has there been and "acceptable" shift in technique to produce a (now acceptable style, or is it still plain wrong to blow the dress

In the same shots, ironically, the grooms suits also have no detail (too dark)

Any opinions?
 
I dont know if its become 'acceptable' as such, more that its such a common thing now you'd be better off having "And you've blown the dress" permanently in your clipboard ready to paste.
 
Richard King said:
I have been looking at a lot of wedding photographers work recently, and often when critiqued (by others) the fact a blown dress is pretty obvious, no one ever flags it up as an issue

Has there been and "acceptable" shift in technique to produce a (now acceptable style, or is it still plain wrong to blow the dress

In the same shots, ironically, the grooms suits also have no detail (too dark)

Any opinions?
Click to expand...

now oddly, the last 3 times I saw 'the dress is blown' as a critique [not of my own pics I hasten to add, this is not a biased observation], it was actually wrong on all 3 occasions, the viewers monitor may have had a problem, or whatever, but all 3 had perfect dress detail, and many other comments were in agreement.


As for your point, I think it is acceptable to have some degree of blowing, in some shots and in some circumstances - it becomes almost impossible to avoid in certain lighting situations. However, I wouldn't want to see it on every shot, or even most, in the collection and/or the entire dress.
 
I shot a friends wedding the other week and not blowing the dress was my main concern as there was a lot of detail in it and was a huge part of the wedding budget. On the other hand there are a few shots where i purposefully blew the dress out
 
I see this from time to time on student work. Usual cause is that they tend to crank up in-camera saturation and sharpness for added punch, but don't realise that reducing contrast can help in bright sunlight.
 
I think there are a few 'trendy' techniques which aren't helping dress detail, high key, heavy backlighting and some pp looks that add loads of 'punch'.

Add to that the usual scenario of newbies wanting pics critiqued and you've headed down an alley. Are we seeing a real issue or is it just a narrowed view.

OTOH I recently removed some of the trendy pp from my online galleries just because it showed some blown dresses where the original exposures were fine.
 
+1 to Phil Re: trendy techniques. Punchy, high contrast, high saturation seem to be 'in' and blown dresses is a by product of that. We tend to have the 'dress shots' to show the detail and the overall image style then takes presidence over the dress in the rest. Sells at the mo.
 
Whenever I shot a wedding I would expose for the dress and bring light into the faces of the B&G in ps. Modern in camera light metering systems are very good at coping with the contrast of the white dress and the dark suit, I find. I would also use a blip of fill flash to lighten the faces sometimes.
 
Richard raises a good point and it is something I have also noticed but more so with inexperienced photographers although we have all been there. I'm not sure if it is down to lack of understanding exposure and/or letting the camera do it for you.

Something else to consider, when displaying on the web a lot of detail can be lost and give the appearance of being blown. I've had this a few times when some of my images have been critiqued on here, the original (large) files are fine with plenty of detail but when compressed for the web turn to mush. :)
 
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