Wedding Photography at Whitstable, Kent

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I took this photo at Erina and Paul's wedding on Saturday. I wanted to capture detail in the very bright sky but without silhouetting them, so I decided to massively underexpose the sky and light them with flash. The constraints of the shot: time was limited (welcome to the world of wedding photography!) so I needed to use the Speedlite mounted on my camera (no time to set up a light off-camera) and several brightly coloured huts on the beach dictated my positioning of the couple. Since I knew I would need a lot of flash power to balance the very bright sky I needed to shoot slower than the X-sync speed (1/200 on an EOS 5D) - high speed flash sync allows you to use very fast shutter speeds but considerably reduces power output. No opportunity to underexpose by using a very fast shutter speed! I set the camera to ISO 50 and shot in manual mode. A shutter speed of 1/160 at f 5.6 gave me a good exposure for the sky (4 stops below the correct exposure for the couple which would have rendered the sky completely white). It took a couple of attempts to get an aperture that allowed me to light the scene with a single flash (I set it to overexpose by +1 stop) and get a shutter speed slower than the X-sync speed. Provided you're clear in your mind about what you need to achieve though you can set-up in less than a minute.