Photographing black person?

Maggie52

Maggie52

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Margaret
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Good Evening All
My son is getting married in Antigua in November:love: it is going to be a very informal affair with close family and friends. They have asked me if I would be willing to take the photos as long as it doesn't spoil my enjoyment of the day. They of course are trying to save on the expense as the hotel charge £500 just for some shots of the ceremony and a CD of the images. They are happy for me to do my best and are really not that worried about it.

The wedding is to take place at 4pm. Now, my sons best man is black and a couple of years ago I took some photos of them all at a barbecue. It was a bright day and I was basically only taking snapshots but noticed that the black guy was mostly shown in silhouette. Now I of course don't want this to happen on the wedding shots, and he will be standing next to my son who is of pale complection. Not sure the best way to do this. They are getting married on the beach and I believe there may be a gazebo thing in place but won't know until I get there. Can anyone give me advice as to the best approach? If I spot meter off the best man, how will that affect the exposure of my son and other guests.

Many thanks in advance
 
You need to take a reading of the light falling on the bride, and start from there

This is about dynamic range... i.e. the dynamic range in the scene is not matched by your camera... so you need to do stuff to mitigate this

Shoot in the shade where possible, use fill flash, use a reflector

I tend to ensure I nail the detail in the wedding dress in these situations, and then use a tweak in PP to make sure that the dark suit, or the dark skin of a person is rendered faithfully

Do not spot meter the best man
 
Maggie

I have sent you a Private Message which may be helpful for your son.

Realspeed
 
Richard King said:
You need to take a reading of the light falling on the bride, and start from there

This is about dynamic range... i.e. the dynamic range in the scene is not matched by your camera... so you need to do stuff to mitigate this

Shoot in the shade where possible, use fill flash, use a reflector

I tend to ensure I nail the detail in the wedding dress in these situations, and then use a tweak in PP to make sure that the dark suit, or the dark skin of a person is rendered faithfully

Do not spot meter the best man
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Thanks for the info Richard, i realise this could be tricky! I will do as you suggest and NOT spot meter off the best man :thumbs: knowing my luck it will be bright sunshine, no shade during ceremony!
 
Its no different to shooting a bride in a white dress and a groom in a dark suit. The sun in the UK, is just as bright as the sun anywhere else on the planet

Do watch out. In Antigua, the sun goes down quite fast. Find out when dusk is

The palm trees provide excellent shade, a polariser can do magic with the sea and sky
 
Thank you Richard. I will have 4 days to from when I get there to do a reccie (sp) hoping there will be shade of some sort for the ceremony, if not will do my best with what is available and take shots in grounds in the shade. I did wonder about how soon dusk falls so will need to find that out. I will take polariser, filters,reflector, tripod too I guess, may need to invest in a lightweight one as my manfrotto is way to heavy. This luggage gets more and more! Was planning on taking only one body but now wondering if I should take the D80 too. Lenses... Kit lens 18-135, 50mm 1.8, not sure about the 70-300 VR would be useful but thinking of hand luggage weight. Would also like to take my WA for my own pleasure but where do you stop? Suppose I could get my other half to carry some in his hand luggage:)
 
Remember I'm this situation it is about highlight and not shadows, so you need light to hit the face to give highlights

At the other end of the scale it is about shadows
 
esp if the sun is shining brightly this could be a problem irrespective of the skin colour of your subjects. I would say fill flash.
 
My husband and his family are black. As is expected in their culture (they are not British and don't live here) the rest of the family helps out where they can at weddings eg cooking, driving, serving guests, photography etc. Guess what my role is :bang: If I tried to get out of it, it would be seen as a slight to the family, unless I genuinely can't attend the wedding. (I don't really shoot weddings through choice, and certainly wouldn't do them for anyone else - I am not good enough!)

So far, ignoring the usual family snaps, I have shot two weddings with a third to do next year. The two weddings I have shot so far are for my sister in law, and her white Welsh husband (one was a cultural colourful one, the other was a traditional UK white wedding). Approx half the guests were black, the other half were white. Both times I have been lucky as the groom and his party and the father of the bride have all worn suits which are almost mid grey. Both times I metered off this, did a quick chimp to check for blown highlights, adjusted if necessary, then kept the settings fairly constant and kept a close eye on the changing light. As Richard says, try to keep the detail in the dress for the most part.

I am just processing the most recent wedding shots right now (literally taking a break at the moment), and on the whole the exposures are fairly accurate - the detail is in the dress and the Bride (and her family) are only a tiny bit under-exposed, which is easy to fix in PP.

I would take a grey card just in case the light gets tricky or you find you are having problems (have a practice a day or two in advance around the same time so you have an idea of what you are doing), if you don't have a grey card, the inside of many camera bags are approximately the same shade of grey, so you may not need one. If you have an external flash gun, make sure you know how to use it and how to use flash compensation too.

I don't know if that is the 'right' way to do it, but that is what I do with reasonably success. Hope that helps you somewhat.

BTW if you spot meter off the best man, everyone who is paler than him will be over exposed, with some particularly light objects (eg the brides dress and potentially the sky) being blown with no recoverable detail.
 
Richard King said:
You need to take a reading of the light falling on the bride, and start from there
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which she cant do with a camera ,,,she would need a light meter and would have to take an incident light reading, or as gembob says ,take a grey card and read up on how to use it

i dont know of any but there might be a special lens cap / cover that can be used to point the camera back towards the sun ( or light source ) and use it as an incident meter ,,then you can use the info to set the camera manually
 
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and make sure that everyone is in the same light ,,dont have some in shade and some in sunlight :)
 
donutagain said:
which she cant do with a camera ,,,she would need a light meter and would have to take an incident light reading, or as gembob says ,take a grey card and read up on how to use it
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Richard's far more technically trained than me, but I believe he means that by spot metering the white dress and setting that at 3 stops over, the (Caucasian) brides face would be 1 stop over etc.

This thread is just proof that there's more than one way to skin a cat. My preferred method is to meter a naturally occurring midtone, which might be difficult on a beach but is generally easy for me in a typical garden. On the beach I'd probably go with Richard's method.
 
On the beach, you also need to account for the sand and the sea reflecting a load of light straight back at you
 
I am in fact saying take an incident meter reading.. I.e. not the light reflected from the bride, but the light landing on the bride. I additionally said I use this as a starting point.


The point about a incident light reading is that it is subject agnostic.

If you took a reflective reading from the dress, you are pinning your exposure to the max hilights (which inst a bad starting place)

If you took a reflective meter reading from the brides face, or the black person, you would blow the dress

If you took a reflective meter reading from a std. grey card, you would most likely have a similar result to the incident reading

the crux of this issue is understanding dynamic range.. the black suit the black trousers, the coloured gentleman - are all at one end of the dynamic range. Fabric generally reflects less than skin). The detail in the white dress at the other. the major issue here is that the dynamic range of yoru sensor is not high enough to record the range in the scene

As more information is in the white end of the scale, we naturally bias to the white end, and punch up the shadows.. however a smart photographer lowers the dynamic range in the scene (or at least the important bits) by using shade, fill flash, and reflectors
 
The most important person at the ceremony is the bride, so make sure her face is exposed perfectly (unless it's a shot of the details on the dress). Maybe the best man's face can be dodged back a little in PP? Don't overdo it and the results should be quite convincing.
 
Sorry for not getting back to you all and to thank you all for your helpful posts. (been celebrating my 60th:))
The bride as far as I know will be wearing a cream coloured dress and the groom, best man, and children in cream coloured outfits. I think where possible I will shoot in the shade, will meter from the brides dress, use fill flash and make use of reflector. I realised after I posted my initial query and gave it more thought that I would of course blow out the highlights if I spot metered from the best man, quite obvious really.. Doh!
Fortunately they are really chilled about it all, so I should not feel under pressure but I of course want to do the best I can for them.
Thanks again all x
 
I'm an ex-wedding photographer,and my approach would be different from most of those posted here.

Your question seem to relate to taking photos during the ceremony. It's highly unlikely that the light will change during this time (although obviously it could happen), and also the bride and groom are not going to be moving around very much, so why meter every single shot? Just get it right at the beginning and retain those settings unless the bride and groom move in or out of shade

So with that in mind I would prepare a rough exposure at the very start using the M mode, in sunshine it might be something like F4-F5.6, 1000-2000th of a sec, 100 ISO and then check the histogram and blinking highlights. Make sure anything white is not blowing out but is very much towards the right side of the histogram (maybe with a very small amount of clipping - shoot in RAW so you can pull it back).

And that's it, there may not be any need to adjust the exposure again throughout the whole ceremony, but if there is, just adjust aperture or shutter speed accordingly, no need to even mess around with exposure compensation.

This is the way I would do it, and might not suit everyone, especially those not familiar with the M mode, but it's really quite easy and it works.

Cheers,
Bernie
www.greatphotographytips.co.uk
 
bernieraffe said:
Your question seem to relate to taking photos during the ceremony. It's highly unlikely that the light will change during this time (although obviously it could happen), and also the bride and groom are not going to be moving around very much, so why meter every single shot? Just get it right at the beginning and retain those settings unless the bride and groom move in or out of shade



Cheers,
Bernie
QUOTE]

ok own up , who said meter every single shot ?
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ok own up , who said meter every single shot ?
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Nobody, but that's what will happen if you don't shoot in the M mode or use exposure lock (neither of which has been mentioned).

I'm really just trying to help the original poster, it may not have occurred to him when reading the previous posts that once he's got a good exposure, generally speaking, he can stick with it, at least until circumstances change (which won't happen much during the ceremony).
 
So do you reckon you use any mode other than M if you "take an incident reading and start from there"?

By that I mean - take an incident reading, and use those settings on your camera as a starting point. Choice of f-stop is a matter of taste
 
So do you reckon you use any mode other than M if you "take an incident reading and start from there"?
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Reading between the lines of the original poster, do you really think she has an exposure meter and knows what an incident reading is?

She may do I don't know, but my guess is that if she does, she wouldn't have needed to ask the question in the first place!!
 
Thanks guys.
You are correct Bernie, I don't have an exposure meter, something I have thought of as a possible purchase but can't really afford a good one right now. This wedding is getting very expensive. I understand the principle of the light meter giving a reading of the light falling on the subject as opposed to the reflected light from the subject and this is what the camera will read. (at least I think I understand this)
I always shoot raw and usually in manual mode, but in all of this I think I did overlook locking the exposure so I don't have to keep changing the settings, so long as the light is at a constant.
I really am grateful for all your assistance everyone and do understand there is more than one way to skin a cat. I am looking for the easiest option for me on the day as I want to enjoy it too:)
 
bernieraffe said:
Nobody, but that's what will happen if you don't shoot in the M mode or use exposure lock (neither of which has been mentioned).

I'm really just trying to help the original poster, it may not have occurred to him when reading the previous posts that once he's got a good exposure, generally speaking, he can stick with it, at least until circumstances change (which won't happen much during the ceremony).
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yep point taken ,,,what may seem obvious to one person may not be to every other person ,( and i think the op is called Margaret ,although that may only be on weekends , i dont know :D )
 
donutagain said:
yep point taken ,,,what may seem obvious to one person may not be to every other person ,( and i think the op is called Margaret ,although that may only be on weekends , i dont know :D )
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:eek: You are correct, Margaret is indeed the name I answer to..weekends only:D Couldn't possibly tell you what I am called during the week :cuckoo:
 
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