Okay so today’s installment for photographers is all about seeing the shot in your head and knowing your gear.

Often when I’m at weddings I like to show the bride or groom or guest an image or two off the back of my camera. Sometimes I’m so excited I just have to show someone. [ASIDE: I'm not the gushing emotional type, so what is uber excitement to me, might come off strikingly similar to a simple smile to you.] At other times I do it to boost the confidence of the person I’m shooting. I want them to see how great they look in the hands of someone that knows how to make them look their best. IOW, I want to build trust.

That said, I show images off my camera against my better judgement. The reason is actually pretty simple: I feel like it fosters the idea that we photographers take all these photos at your wedding and then we go home, download the images from the cards, then upload them to facebook or twitter or whatever proofing system we use. I mean, it can’t be THAT hard to press the upload button, can it?

See It In Your Head
If you’ve read my previous posts about how I process images behind the scenes, you know that couldn’t possibly be farther from the truth. A lot of the time when I’m shooting and deciding how I want to frame a photo or what exposure I want, I’m not thinking about what the image will look like when I click the shutter. No, I’m thinking about what type of photo is going to make it the easiest for me to get to the image I see in my head once I take the image home, process it in Lightroom (and maybe Photoshop) and output it. In other words, I see the final result in my head and work backwards.

If you saw one of my previous posts, you saw the image of Nikki standing in front of a large set of french doors…

So here we have Nikki standing in front of those same doors. But here’s the problem: the blazing sun outside is AT LEAST 5 or 6 stops brighter than she is standing inside this comparatively dark room. I knew I didn’t want to create a “properly” exposed image. If I wanted to do that, I would have set the camera so the outside looks correct and then light Nikki up with a death ray flash pop that would probably send my flash in for service when I got done.

Not very compelling is it? No, I wanted to create Nikki engulfed in that light.

Know Your Gear
One way to do that is simply to overexpose the image so much that Nikki begins to look “normal” while the rest of the image blows out to pure white. One problem with that approach is that once the detail is gone, it’s gone. In this case, I’m dealing with a white dress and a fairly dark-skinned bride so that approach makes it nearly impossible to preserve the dress detail and brighten Nikki enough at the same time. The other problem with that approach is simply dealing with lens flare issues and the loss of contrast that come with it.

So I decided to split the difference. IOW, I didn’t care about the details in the trees outside, but I DID care about her dress and I know the Nikon D3 well enough to know that it preserves an amazing amount of detail in the shadows. More importantly, I know how to get all those details back using Adobe Lightroom. So this is what is going through my head when I’m telling a bride to “turn around and face me but try to twist at the hips.” And here’s the image I was seeing in my head, the same image as above but processed in Lightroom…

Everything you see above is straight Lightroom. Zero Photoshop. In addition to pushing and pulling the exposure of the image, I rotated it ever so slightly so the railing is level and I added two masks: one to increase the contrast in her face that was lost to flare and another to add color saturation to her flowers. Oh, and I toned the image slightly in the split toning panel.

Bottom Line
Know your gear! Every system (be it a camera/lens, strobes, printers, whatever) has strengths and weaknesses. I know what the Nikon D3 can give me and I know where it fails. Once you get there, you can take artistic advantage of it’s strengths and in some cases, even the weaknesses. Go out and shoot!

For the technical among you, here are all the relevant adjustments in Lightroom: