Wedding photography is all about capturing every critical moment and detail of a wedding. Wedding photographs eternize these precious once-in-a-lifetime moments of the couple and their guests. With the Nikon z6 and its excellent features, it is impossible to miss out on capturing a single wedding moment. If you want to learn more about 5 tips on using the Nikon z6 for wedding photography, then keep reading!
Capturing wedding photographs is a challenging job as it requires you to be quick on your feet, creative, and prompt at the same time. The Nikon z6 converts this tedious task into a fun and easy-going job with its multiple release modes, which allow you to capture continuous photographs of the event.
Wedding photographers are always running around during the ceremony to capture essential details, which may also lead to blurry images. Luckily, the Nikon z6 comes with a 5-axis image sensor shift that reduces vibration and ensures sharp and crisp photographs. You can capture natural poses of the bride and groom with its highly functional dynamic-range feature.
From capturing the perfect amount of light to adjusting frame size, you can upgrade your wedding photography skills in several ways with the Nikon z6. The following guide will allow you to explore and implement some excellent tips. These will allow you to utilize the unmatched features of the Nikon z6 and capture wedding photographs like a professional.
The Right Lighting
The secret to becoming a successful wedding photographer lies in capturing and controlling lighting. Luckily, you can manipulate light coming from different directions by controlling exposure on the Nikon z6. You can capture wedding photographs by balancing incoming light using the Nikon z6’s Active D-Lighting feature. It becomes impossible to capture the detailing of the bride’s white gown and any light-colored decorations in a daytime event. With Active D-Lighting, the Nikon z6 increases the contrast between bright and dark areas to highlight details that aren’t visible to even the naked eye.
To capture the right lighting, you must adjust the four different levels of the Active D-Lighting feature manually or automatically. These levels are Low, Normal, High, and Extra High. They adjust the mid-tone contrast to reduce the surrounding light and make the photograph appear more natural. You can choose to keep the settings to Low and Normal for indoor wedding venues and High and Extra High for outdoor daytime weddings. The Nikon z6 is a powerful mirrorless camera with robust features, such as D-Lighting image optimization, that correct your photograph’s brightness.
Another alternative to adjust the lighting in wedding photographs is to adjust for it when retouching photographs during post-image-processing. Although post-processing fine-tuning isn’t as effective as using real-time D-Lighting image optimization, it is a great backup to adjust the mid-tone contrast, highlights, and shadows in wedding photographs.
Frame Correction
Another challenging aspect of wedding photography is being able to frame pictures in a matter of nanoseconds. This is essential if you wish to capture all the important moments in a wedding ceremony. Whether it’s the bride and groom’s photo shoot or spontaneous emotional moments of the wedding party, correctly framing pictures requires you to be extra vigilant and have a fast shutter release speed.
All you need to do to take beautiful wedding photographs is to set the frame in the viewfinder and then leave it to the shutter speed. The Nikon z6, in particular, comes with an optimized in-built algorithm to capture full-frame images. You can select from the following three types of shutter responses in the Nikon z6:
- Full Autofocus Single Point (Center) AF-S – The time taken from releasing the shutter button to capture an image varies from the mechanical shutter (0.219 seconds), electronic first curtain shutter (EFCS) (0.205 seconds), to the all-electronic shutter (0.137 seconds).
- Manual Focus – Shutter lag is usually lesser in manual focus as compared to autofocus, but it’s slower than the shutter lag in pre-focused mode.
- Pre-focused – It takes 0.065 seconds with a manual shutter, 0.056 seconds with EFCS, and 0.116 seconds with an all-electronic shutter to capture a photograph after the shutter button is pressed in this mode.
The Nikon z6 allows you to capture multiple photographs of the same target without changing the focus settings. Consequently, you save a lot of your time when the need to repeatedly adjusting the focus on the same person is eliminated. You can select from any of the three available choices discussed above to capture wedding photographs without worrying about frame correction.
If you do mess up the frame in a picture, you can always crop your picture to the correct frame. The Nikon z6 has an in-built crop function that allows you to crop the picture without affecting the image quality and resolution.
Get The Best Poses
The bride and groom are not professional models that can come up with excellent poses on the spot. Those days when the groom would simply stand behind the bride are long gone. Now, people expect incredibly creative poses for their wedding shoots, and they rely on the photographer to come up with these. As the bride and groom, the most they can do is laugh together. As a wedding photographer, you need to create magic by capturing natural poses using different techniques like background lighting, location, and prop usage.
Luckily, the Nikon z6 offers an in-built high dynamic range of image functionality, which allows you to capture underexposed and overexposed images at the same time. The resultant image is a high-dynamic-range JPEG photograph. You can select from three types of exposure value available (1,2 and 3 EV) in the auto option. Low, Normal, and High are the three smoothing options that can be combined with the exposure value to capture high-dynamic-range poses.
You can also capture sharp and detailed poses even at a camera’s default settings. Thanks to the Nikon z6’s 24MP image sensor, you can capture high-quality portrait images. You can also crop the image without losing the details of the poses due to the z6’s noise suppression feature. The Nikon z6 also comes with a wide range of ISO selection from 50 to 800, which helps you capture different poses in different lights and backgrounds.
Have The Right Gear
An essential tip to improve your wedding photography skills is to use the right gear. Ideally, you’d want to use a camera that has a wide range of features to offer you flexibility when you’re taking photos. The Nikon z6 is one such camera.
One of the best features of this camera is its face detection and eye detection feature. This autofocus feature automatically detects your subject’s eyes, face, or both – depending on the settings you use. An amber border will appear on the frame when this setting is on. The border indicates the focus point. In the AF-S mode, the borders will be green and not amber.
The z6 also has a range of picture control options. These include auto, standard, neutral, vivid, monochrome, portrait, landscape, flat, and creative control. The auto mode automatically adjusts the hues and tones of the image depending on the environment. In this mode, skin tones appear softer, and nature shots appear more vivid. The vivid mode is excellent if you want to take saturated wedding shots, where color pops out. For more natural texture, you can opt to use the portrait mode. The creative control option allows you to add effects such as ‘dramatic,’ ‘beached,’ and ‘pop.’ Each gives your photos a distinct style.
The Nikon z6 is an excellent camera to capture wedding photographs due to its back-illuminated 24.5-megapixel full-frame body.
Choose The Best Location
Choosing the best location is all about setting the scene. Not only do you have to choose a beautiful location, but a location where your camera performs well. Different locations imply using different settings. As a wedding photographer, you need to focus on the bride and groom, so you can’t choose a venue that is too flashy.
The chances of finding the perfect location are always low. This is where your camera’s features come in handy. You can use the z6’s white balance feature to capture vibrant photographers if you’re shooting somewhere relatively dull. Also, remember to select a suitable focus mode to keep the bride and groom in focus. If you’re shooting a nighttime wedding, you can use focus to create beautiful bokeh backgrounds. Hence, look for a venue that is decorated with many lights.
The Nikon z6 allows you to balance light in different locations too. You can change the white balance mode according to the location. For instance, you can balance any fluorescent white lights in an indoor venue or account for cloudiness in an outdoor photoshoot. The Nikon z6 image sensor also contains 273 on-chip autofocus points to cover maximum horizontal and vertical imaging locations.
The autofocus mechanism of the Nikon z6 performs exceptionally well in low light settings with its slower contrast-detect autofocus. The autofocus mode adapts itself to different locations and lighting conditions by automatically adjusting between the focal-plane phase-detect autofocus and contrast-detect autofocus modes.
