Wedding Photography and primes

I went to a friends wedding a few months ago and I was surprised that my photographer friend was now using primes in covering a wedding. His setup is two Nikon D700's and 35mm, 50mm and 85mm nikkors. Most of the time its the 50mm and the 85mm. I just have to check the exif of some of his photos that I got. With this in mind I got a wee bit excited since a friend will also get married at the end of May, I decided to shoot a few pictures in his wedding with a prime, print one 8 x 10 and 4 5r's and give it to the couple as a gift.

Being a non-pro, the wedding starts at 4 in the afternoon so I expected low-light from the wedding towards the reception afterwards so I decided to bring my canon 580EXII flash with me. At the church I took pictures of the couple without flash and to be honest I did find a hard time getting decent images. I got alot of out of focus images since I wanted to shoot near wide open. Canon 7d is quite known for being "unforgiving" in terms of focusing and couple it with shallow depth of field of the 50mm 1.4.

Anyway here are the shots in the church that I printed and framed for the couple as a gift.

edit: click the pictures to view it in bigger sizes, web resizing loses details. In print all of this pictures looked really awesome and sharp.

Printed this on 8r
Exif: ISO 800, f/2. 1/125sec

Printed this on 5r
Exif: ISO 1600, f/2.8 1/125sec

Printed this on 5r
Exif: ISO 1600, f/2.8 1/125sec

And the shots during the reception. (I used the external flash bounced and on ETTL)

Printed this on 5r
Exif: ISO 800, f/2 1/100sec

Printed this on 5r
Exif: ISO 800, f/2.8 1/60sec

Lessons I learned in this shoot. I need to be better with my handholding techniques, improve on my composition. Also I need to improve on my skills in post processing, I need to aim to atleast have uniform skin tones on the pics that I take. Still have soooo much to learn!

As an aside I shot this all in large RAW so that I have the freedom to crop.

Cheers!

Things to do for this blog

I have been out for awhile. I'm working for a new company now and had to do alot of things before that. I failed to update this blog. And i'm sorry for that. So a few things that I realized that I should be adding here. Aside from what I mentioned before that I need to update this at least once a week. That I'll try. To complement this once a week blog with a once a week photography project. I intended to do a 365 days project but hell, I can't think about that. 

So here's the deal. My Eos 7d would be a year old by July 2011. It's gone thru more that 20000+ actuations. I'll start my weekly pic from there and blog from there. :) And I wanted to try something different for this whole new year with my camera, all shots from my 52-week project will come from the 7d and from canon 50mm 1.4 lens.

Also I'll post next week the subjects or the themes that I'll be taking for that 52-week journey and I'll try to illustrate as much as possible how I'll be doing and did the shots.

Cheers!