Wedding photography is a dynamic type of photography to dabble in. Not only do you have to take couple portraits, but you’ll have to take candid shots, group photos, and capture event details. However, wedding photography is a nerve-wracking task where you will find yourself struggling between switching lenses and choosing venues.
The couple and their guests expect you to capture hundreds of full-frame shots despite your limited movement during the wedding ceremony. If you want to overcome these barriers, read the following 5 tips on how you can use the Sony A7RIII for wedding photography.
The Sony A7RIII is a full-frame 24-megapixel optical sensor camera equipped with incredible features such as image stabilization, precise autofocus, and dual card slots. The camera itself is lightweight and compact, with easy accessibility to the required adjustment buttons and modes. Wedding events can span from 6 hours to 9 hours, so the all-new Z-battery of the Sony A7RIII will help you get through the day.
The 24-megapixel sensor is a perfect fit to capture photographs. It lets you save files as both RAW and JPEG photos, giving you more flexibility in post-processing. One of the main reasons behind the popularity of the Sony A7RIII for wedding photography is its flawless dynamic range feature, which is responsible for vibrant and accurate images. The in-built image stabilization feature allows you to capture sharp group photos without stressing about any unwanted blur caused by movement.
The following 5 tips will help you polish your wedding photography skills with the Sony A7RIII.
Find The Right Venue
Wedding photography not only tests your photography skills but your aesthetic sense as well. You need to be able to scan the wedding venue and mark different corners and locations for portrait, full-length, and wide-angle photos. Moreover, you need to utilize all the wedding décor in the background of candid and natural photographs.
The best practice is to visit the wedding venue one day before the main event. You can make a list of all potential backgrounds inside and outside.
You also need to check the lighting in all aspects of the venue. It is important to mark all the places which are a source of incoming natural light. Once you know the location well, you can also select the required focal lengths for these venues. For example, if the venue’s huge, you’ll need to use a zoom lens with your Sony A7RIII.
The Sony A7RIII is a mirrorless digital SR camera with 693 phase-detect AF points that cover 93% of the full-frame. An additional 425 contrast-detect points cover the entire image frame. You can focus either manually or automatically, depending upon your time management.
This Sony camera is an advanced camera with its continuous AF tracking ability, which enables you to track all the people in the frame. It’s a perfect camera to capture group photographs and portraits due to its Eye AF, which allows you to recognize any eye blink or any unwanted movement.
Know Your Equipment
Once you find the right venue, the next step is to familiarize yourself with all the modes and functions. It’s bad practice to test the camera’s different operations in the middle of the wedding event. Instead, get familiar with your camera beforehand. You can then make a list of all the features of the Sony A7RIII that you’re going to use to capture wedding photographs prior to the event.
The Sony A7RIII gives you complete freedom to customize the button layout according to the type of photography you’re doing. This functionality, which allows you to modify the functionality of every single button and even the dial available on the camera body, is available only in Sony cameras.
You can also change the functionality of the Fn and My Menu options. For instance, you can modify the control wheel’s functionality from ISO to focus area or aperture. There are countless options to customize the camera settings according to your liking and ease.
The top dial button allows toggling between shooting modes such as M S A, and P, but there are three customizable shooting modes. This means that you can preset different shooting modes in the camera and capture photos without adjusting the settings every single time. It’s an added advantage offered by the Sony A7RIII, which makes wedding photography more manageable.
As a wedding photographer, you are always on your feet with minimum time to change settings in between shots. If you know your equipment well, you can preset three shooting modes depending upon the venue and lighting.
Always Have Backup Equipment
Now that you’re done with the two most important parts of wedding photography, another important tip to nail wedding photography is to have backup gear. Having backup equipment helps you avoid any real-time mishaps.
The Sony A7RIII makes for a great back up camera if it’s not in your primary gear. This full-frame (FE) mirrorless camera is a perfect DSLR to capture wedding photographs with its dual card slots. The purpose of these dual memory cards is to create copies of the photographs while shooting. You don’t need to worry about connecting your camera to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth if you’re using the Sony A7RIII. All you need to do is set the recording mode to simultaneously with one primary and the other backup memory card.
There are almost minimal chances of losing any images with a continuous backup. You can use either a 64 GB or a 128 GB Sony card with 300 MB/s read, and 299 MB/s write speeds.
Some other backup pieces of equipment to have are a dual-battery charger and an external battery charger. The first charger allows you to charge two batteries simultaneously. It’s an impossible mission to find a charging slot at the wedding venue, and hence you should keep a backup external battery charger too.
Manage Your Gear
Gear management can make or break your career as a wedding photographer. People don’t want to hire clumsy photographers, who are juggling different lenses and flashlights throughout the event. Covering a wedding ceremony is a stressful job. Our foremost task is to minimize the fatigue of carrying a lot of equipment. Luckily, the Sony A7RIII has premium features, saving you from the hassle of needing to carry additional equipment such as flashlights, lenses, additional cameras, and tripod stands.
Gear management is not just about the logistics of your equipment, but their simultaneous and ad hoc utilization during the wedding ceremony. A wedding photographer cannot single-handedly carry two cameras in his hands while concentrating on capturing wedding moments. It is necessary to carry a lightweight and compact camera like the Sony A7RIII to capture the photographs. It is a portable compact camera that can be carried around the wedding venue with ease and comfort.
Another important aspect of gear management is its protection. For this purpose, you can use a metallic camera case or an L-bracket. The camera case acts as an extra protective layer, which saves the camera from any external damage in case it drops on the floor accidentally.
The L-bracket is used to mount the camera on the tripod stand. It allows you to switch from shooting in a horizontal direction to a vertical direction, without causing it to hang on one side of the tripod stand. The L-bracket manages the weight of the camera and saves the camera from falling off.
Be Invisible
This is the hardest part of a wedding photographer’s job. The clients expect photographers to be on the sidelines but still capture all the priceless wedding moments. At most weddings, the photographer’s movement is quite restricted due to the arrangement. This adds to the difficulty of taking wide-angle or full-frame photographs of the couple.
People become self-conscious of the camera pointing towards them. On the contrary, you intend to capture natural and pure emotions and expressions. For this very reason, it is important to be invisible at the wedding event.
If you don’t want to be noticed at the wedding venue, you need to capture photographs without the flashlight. The mirrorless Sony A7RIII won’t disappoint you with its shutter speed and ISO to maintain good exposure of the people in the frame. You can use one of the custom settings for this purpose.
You can save the aperture priority, auto ISO, flash off, and AF mode on one of the dial options. The next and final step is to select to compensate for the exposure using the exposure dial.With the above settings, you can capture the natural poses of the people without getting noticed.
The Sony A7RIII has an incredible feature that gives the wedding photographer the power to become invisible at the wedding venue and still capture the photos. All this is possible because of its silent shutter feature. You can select 8 frames per second to shot dozens of wedding photographs silently. With the silent shutter option, you can capture unlimited wedding images without disrupting the wedding ceremony.
