Wedding photography requires you to be a creative person who is proficient with camera techniques and features. It’s a diverse genre that allows you to combine your aesthetic vision and photography skills to capture artistic wedding photographs. Using a good quality all-rounder DSLR, like the Fuji XT2, saves you from worrying about things like image quality so that you can focus on capturing the natural expressions of the couple with their guests.
You can capture high-quality wedding photographs with the Fuji XT2 mirrorless 24.3-megapixel camera, which comes with 325 AF points, dual SD card slots, and 2.36M-dot OLED EVF with 0.005 seconds refresh time.
Some genres of photography, such as landscape or street style, are all about capturing still objects and buildings. However, the ultimate challenge of wedding photography is to capture micro and macro details of a live wedding event with lots of guests moving around. Wedding photography is all about creating memorable photo stories that will remain a permanent part of the couple’s life.
Many photographers waste time fidgeting with their equipment and lose the opportunity to capture a perfect moment. The client expects you to be on your feet to cover the entire wedding shoot without missing anything. Luckily, if you use the Fuji XT2 to cover a wedding event, you can capture all types of photographs, such as portraits, close-ups, behind the shoulder, wide-angle, and full-frame shots without switching between different lenses or cameras.
We’ve listed down 5 tips on using the Fuji XT2 for wedding photography to help you polish your skills.
Capture Poses
The first and foremost responsibility of a wedding photographer is to capture the right poses, expressions, and emotions of the couple and their guests. Wedding photography trends are radically shifting from capturing still poses to real emotions. Now, people are more interested in candid photographs rather than robotic portraits. You must also remember that the people at a wedding event aren’t models, so don’t expect them to come up with perfect poses. Hence, the main responsibility of capturing the right poses falls on the photographer.
So, do you want to learn how to capture the perfect poses? The perfect pose primarily comprises of location, lighting, and props. A wedding venue has excellent backgrounds, beautiful chandeliers to illuminate hallways, sunlight coming through large windows, and the matching floral decorations. Utilizing them wisely to capture the couple’s memorable moments on their big day all drills down to the aesthetic sense of the wedding photographer.
The Fuji XT2 allows you to capture different poses, even candid shots, easily. With its 169 phase-detection points, the Fuji XT2 allows you to capture sharp and vibrant poses. Fujifilm has incorporated a high-speed processor to enhance camera shutter speed as well. This helps capture poses with phase detection, contrast detection, and hybrid AF. Another interesting functionality of the Fuji XT2 is that you can specify different types of subject movements so the camera can adjust its features accordingly to capture maximum details.
Know Your Camera
Get yourself familiar with the functionality and controls of the camera before the wedding event. One of the biggest mistakes wedding photographers tend to make is to test a camera right on the main event. This can ruin not only the image quality but also your reputation and career.
One major reason for selecting the Fuji XT2 camera for wedding photography is its simple construction and handling. The camera provides easy access to the external settings with its mode dials.
The exterior of the camera is made with magnesium-alloy to keep it lightweight and handy. It’s also slimmer as compared to other high-end DSLR cameras with solid ergonomics and metallic knobs.
The Fuji XT2 mirrorless single reflex camera has retro manual knobs to adjust the ISO, shutter speed, and exposure compensation. These three dials are bigger and taller in the Fuji XT2 as compared to the previous Fuji versions. There’s an addition of a dedicated focus point joystick, which ensures seamless adjustment of the focal distance.
The LCD of the viewfinder screen can be tilted upwards and downwards as well as sideways up to 45 degrees. The LCD movement allows you to capture photographs of the wedding ceremony from different angles using the live view option. The Fuji XT2 comes with two additional programmable buttons in addition to the already available customizable function on the top and back of the camera. You can preset the settings according to the wedding location, lighting, and portraits.
Back Up Your Files
Backing up wedding photographs is one of the primary responsibilities of wedding photographs. These photographs are what you’re getting paid for, and you can’t risk losing them by mishandling the camera or memory card. Sometimes, the data can get corrupted due to some internal issues, or an SD-card may get damaged accidentally. You can minimize the probability of these mishaps by creating continuous backups of the images.
The Fuji XT2 has solved your problem of doing a real-time back up on a second memory card by providing dual memory slots. Both these memory slots are UHS-II compatible, which implies that these slots can transfer the data at a whopping speed of 150 MB/second. You can select the backup option in the card slot setting to create simultaneous copies in the secondary memory card. It is up to the discretion of the photographer to use the dual SD card functionality either as a backup or extended memory system.
The Fuji XT2 also gives the photographers freedom to save the same photo in different formats on both the memory cards. You can post-process the photographs with the extra flexibility of having the RAW format backups of originally captured JPEG photographs. The camera comes with a built-in wireless system that allows you to backup files on your laptop during the wedding event too. This way, you can create multiple backups of the images by using any of the methods discussed above.
Manage Your Gear Well
Gear management is a challenge for a wedding photographer. Handle all photography equipment, including flashlights, lenses, tripod stands, and backup cameras, isn’t a one-man job. Your priority is to capture the wedding while maintaining image quality. There is no trade-off between the two, so the photographers keep switching lenses and cameras for macro and portrait shots, resulting in poor time and gear management.
The Fuji XT2 is an all-rounder camera, which minimizes the need for supporting gears. You can comfortably leave the task of capturing high-quality images to the camera and scan the wedding venue to shoot stunning photos. Once you minimize the pieces of equipment you’re carrying, you can easily manage to move around the wedding location to take pictures.
Fuji has also upgraded the camera strap to a sturdy and flexible leather strap, unlike other sharp-edged straps, which hurt your neck and may cause minor bruises or scratches. The Fuji leather strap is lightweight and durable. It distributes the weight of the camera equally without causing any discomfort around your neck.
You need to protect your camera from any type of accidental fall as well. You can encapsulate the camera in a metallic rectangular bracket or a T-bracket to save the camera body. The Fuji XT2 is also a compact and lightweight camera that can be transported easily in a small pouch or a camera bag.
Another aspect of gear management is waterproofing. There can be a sudden downpour of rain while shooting an outdoor wedding event, and you must ensure your equipment is safe in this case. The Fuji XT2 has a solution to this problem with its water seal, making this camera waterproof.
Keep A Low-Key Presence
Keeping a low-key presence during the wedding event enables you to capture candid photographs of the guests. Many people get conscious when the camera is pointing towards them, which can result in unnatural poses that look stiff and awkward.
Weddings events tend to go in a natural flow, and you certainly shouldn’t disturb the decorum by running around the wedding location. Here, the shooting speed of the Fuji XT2 helps you. You can capture the wedding photographs with an 8 FPS continuous burst rate. The burst rate can be extended to 11 FPS with a battery grip, and 14 FPS with an electronic shutter.
The toughest part of a wedding photographer’s job is to capture the bride’s photographs while she walks down the aisle. You can’t disturb the entire wedding ceremony environment by standing in the middle of the aisle. The tip is to switch to continuous tracking mode, which allows you to lock on the moving subject. Once the camera is locked, you can capture flawless photographs standing at a corner of the hall.
You can keep a low-key presence by taking full advantage of the AF system to focus on the farther objects with its 325 focus points’ setting. Capturing a wide full-frame photograph of the wedding ceremony is a piece of cake with the Fuji XT2 Zone or Wide/Tracking modes.
