Wedding photographs are only rarely ever hidden inside old albums and memory cards. Most people like to print them out on large canvases and hang them over their fireplace or above their beds, just like a large painting. However, for the couple to be able to do this, you, as a photographer, must ensure that the camera you’re using supports such sizable stretching of a photograph. And if you’re looking to invest in a high-resolution camera to do so, then the Nikon D810 is the best you’ll find on the market.
This camera has a 36.3 megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor that can support very large zoom-ins and stretches without breaking the image or getting it pixelated. It has one of the most powerful sensors across the camera industry and optimizes images for very crisp and clear results. It also has a whopping 91,000-pixel RGB metering sensor for advanced subject tracking and metering. This will allow you to retain full focus on the couple and any other subject you’re shooting.
In fact, it’s Scene Recognition System allows face detection in OVF mode, which is a remarkable way of keeping sight on the focused subject and not getting a blurred out image. This camera is a very professional piece of equipment and helps make wedding photography a serious business. With this camera, you will be able to utilize the many multimedia features it offers. You can also experiment with different kinds of photography styles, lighting, and forms to create a diverse portfolio for yourself and happy memories for the couple.
Here are 5 tips on using the Nikon D810 for wedding photography.
The Right Lighting
As a photographer, you must always remember the significance of lighting. Each image is essentially a product of the light that falls onto the camera sensors and creates a spectrum of shadows and highlights to bring out the subject. Hence, you should always ensure that you’re using the right kind of lighting to bring out the right features.
You may want to focus on the hands or the ring, the face, the hair or the dress, and accentuate them individually in different pictures. This you’ll do through the appropriate use of lighting. The indoor-outdoor dynamic will also heavily influence the kind of lighting you get and the natural-artificial lighting parallel.
This is where the Nikon D810 comes in handy. With its extensive ISO range of 64-12,800, which further expands to ISO 32-51,200, you can be sure to get the perfect images in all lighting conditions. In fact, if you’re indoors and are not sure about what ISO levels set for the best photos, you can also use the auto ISO available in manual exposure movie mode. This way, the camera enables you to perhaps spend more time focusing on external lighting rather than fuss over the right ISO levels. It takes care of all that.
The D810 gives you additional features for exposure metering, including 3D color matrix III, center-weighted, highlight-weighted, and spot. These features make the photographs ever more clear and well-focused without any noise or grain disturbing the image.
Picture Composition
Another important thing for a wedding photographer to be conscious of is picture composition. This part encompasses the many different aspects of taking a picture. It is essentially what makes a picture breathe. The couple always expects the photographer to take mesmerizing pictures, depicting their emotions and their joy of the happy day.
However, that may not happen very easily. You have to take calculated steps to figure out the framing, lighting, posing, and backgrounds of the images to create a nuanced story out of the picture you take.
To get the best composition, you should focus on what the couple’s story is, and depict it using visual tools. For example, you should ask them in the consultation about where they met, and perhaps you can recreate some of those elements in the pictures you take.
Additionally, you can also ask them what their pet peeves are concerning each other, and perhaps you can depict those in the posing. Maybe you can even use the framing to highlight the scope and length of their relationship. All this becomes very metaphorical but important nonetheless, which creates a well thought out image.
You can use the Nikon D810 to create these images without worrying about the technicalities too much. The camera allows you multiple ways to do so. Through its 51 point autofocus system, you will be able to focus on every aspect of the subject and not lose a single detail.
With a shutter speed at 1/8000 second, you can take the perfect candids and capture all those important moments that seem ever so fleeting. And with its exposure compensation of ±5 EV range, in 1, 1/2, or 1/3 EV steps, you can easily get the best images at any location.
Use Your Style
Wedding photographers are hired based on their portfolios. The couple must have seen your Instagram or Pinterest profile, and your aesthetic must have matched theirs, which is why they wanted to work with you. This is why it becomes important for you to develop your personal style in photography to capture that niche market.
Another reason is to provide consistency in imaging because it represents consistency in emotion. For example, if your portfolio was all black and white and that kind of style is romantic and appropriate for the couple, keep all the photos that way so that the couple feels the romantic aesthetic throughout the album.
The Nikon D810 offers you a wide range of photography styles to choose from. Firstly, it has a whole manual section, which means you can combine different levels of ISO, aperture, and AF systems to create your own unique style.
However, if not, you can simply choose from an assortment of special effects. These include Black ; White, Blue, Color outline, Color sketch, Cross Screen, Cyanotype, Fisheye, Flat, Green, Image Overlay, Landscape, Miniature, Monochrome, Neutral, Portrait, Red, Selective Color, Sepia, Skylight Filter, Soft, Vivid, Warm Filter. All these features and more will allow you to choose how you want to construct the album and what the couple wants.
A Low Key Presence
Maintaining distance is important! The wedding day should be all about the couple, and they should have fun. You should make sure that they do so without any major interjections from your end. As a photographer, you may have the urge to fix the or the lighting or even ask them to move locations repeatedly.
However, you need to ensure that all this agitation can become a cause for distress, and the couple may get annoyed. To avoid such a situation, you should make the best of what you have; getting candid shots from afar, or wide-lens images with full background coverage. Such fixtures will allow you to improvise and get better pictures and maintain a low key presence at the wedding.
You can stay invisible very easily if you have the right gear. With the Nikon D810, you can capture silent shots if you’re near and wide-angles full focus shots if you’re far away. With its electronic first-curtain shutter, you can take pictures without any noise or disruption, and with its 51 AF points, along with the group-area AF system, you can take images from afar, with crisp details for everything that you view.
The camera also boasts a fixed eye-level pentaprism viewfinder with 100% visibility and functionality, which allows you to clearly view every last detail on the wedding dress or the tuxedo without coming super close to the couple.
File Back up
Last but not least, the photographer should always make sure to back up their files. This point cannot be stressed over enough. Backing Up is essential to the survival of the images that you take. If you don’t want to lose precious memories of a happy couple, then you better back up.
You can do this through multiple ways, including getting extra memory cards to transfer files to, transferring files to a laptop after every 30 minutes, uploading all the RAW files onto online cloud storage, or transferring the files onto a hard-drive or USB. All these measures will ensure that the files are kept safe.
The Nikon D810 supports many different types of memory cards, including compact flash, SD, SDHC UHS-I, and SDXC UHS-I. It does so through the two available slots, one for a compact flash and another for an SD format. The camera also comes with a USB port that connects to any external device like a PC or a laptop. You can directly transfer your images without the use of an additional card reader.
The D810 also supports wifi connectivity, which makes it super accessible and easy to use. You can use this function to backup images and videos as you take them. You simply have to set it up in the settings. Additionally, you can always print your images out as well. The also camera supports direct printing and other forms, including DPOF, Exif Print, and PictBridge.
