Wedding Photography Kent - Manual Mode

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If you struggle to understand what follows, I'd recommend you read the post on metering and exposure.

Exposure is determined by incident light. Cameras, however, measure reflected light. Therefore, to estimate the incident light from the reflected light measurement, cameras assume that a scene has an overall reflectance of 18% (equivalent to a tonality termed middle grey). In most cases this works very well, but when the overall tonality of a scene is not middle grey, a situation which occurs frequently at weddings, exposure inaccuracies result. Exposure compensation is one way of correcting for this and is a technique that photographers need to be familiar with. Under the correct circumstances though, an alternative approach is possible - using the manual mode of your camera.

Let's say you're shooting outside at a wedding reception. All the guests are standing in open ground, not shaded by trees or buildings. It's a lovely sunny day and there are no clouds in the sky. In this case all of the guests are being lit by the same amount of incident light and the exposure settings will therefore be identical for any shot you take under these conditions. Once you've found an exposure that you're happy with, using the camera's reflected-light meter and by checking the histogram, you can put these settings into your camera's manual mode and shoot away without worrying whether a scene's reflectance deviates from middle grey. If you keep an eye on your camera's light meter, you'll notice that when taking shots of the bride in her white dress the camera will think you're overexposing (which would have resulted in underexposure if left in an automatic mode such as aperture priority, requiring positive exposure compensation) and that with the groom in his dark suit the camera will think you're underexposing. You know, however, that your exposure is spot on and that it's the camera's reflected-light meter being fooled. If you do this, don't forget to regularly review your exposures, just in case a cloud has crept in front of the sun and reduced the amount of incident light!

Manual mode is also extremely useful when shooting indoors in low light. Let's say, for example, that the maximum ISO setting you're prepared to use on your camera is 1600, that the minimum shutter speed you're prepared to use when shooting people is 1/60 sec, and that the maximum aperture of your lens is f/2.8. These personal criteria determine the maximum amount of ambient light that you can capture.

Let's say you're in a dark wedding reception venue. To correctly expose for ambient light requires an exposure of 1/15 sec at f/2.8 and ISO 1600 - 2-stops lower than your exposure criteria. What you can do in this situation is to dial 1/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1600 into manual mode, underexposing for the ambient light, and then use flash to illuminate your subjects. You'll be capturing the maximum amount of ambient light allowed by your exposure criteria and not allowing your camera to give an unusably slow shutter speed, which would occur if it tried to correctly expose for ambient light.

manual, 1/50, f/2.8, ISO 1600, 0 EV, -1 FEC, 35mm

If you've not done this before you'll probably be surprised to see how much detail you capture in the background with this amount of underexposure. The image above was taken using this approach and the background is over two stops underexposed (and I've added a vignette).

1/25, f/2.8, ISO 6400, +1 EV, 16mm

If you have a DSLR which performs well at high ISO, and you're happy to use these settings, then you can expose correctly for just ambient light in very low light settings. Check out the shot above taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II.

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