Weddings, oh, such a sweet subject.
Small wedding, indoors, relative. Recipe for
headache. I hope you have an agreement as to cost.
For friends and family I charge $200 plus double all
costs. For this you can expect to shoot 4-6 rolls of
film. I try not to blast everything because printing
costs will eat ya alive. Leave the "Cousin George
yacking with Uncle Fred" pictures to those with their
point-and-shoots or shoot that stuff digitally.
>From your equipment list I would primarily use the
OM-4 or the OM-2S (whichever is most reliable) and the
flash equipment set for OTF control. The 35-70/4 zoom
will be your bread and butter lens and will be the one
you use 900f the time. The 100/2 will be perfect
for portraits of the couple (closeups, headshots,
romantic shots, etc).
With Kodak Portra 400NC (absolutely the best wedding
film available) you will be using an F-stop of 5.6-8
which will put your background down a couple stops
without making them cave-dweller shots. Don't bother
with slaved flashes unless you have them blasting into
an umbrella during the formals. However, if you do
decide to slave flashes at all you will really want to
use a flash meter to set everything with.
B&W film for weddings? No question that the new Kodak
T400CN is the best film available for this
application. Shots taken with T400CN essentially grow
a film format in comparision to other B&W 400 speed
films. (35mm=645, 645=6x7, 6x7=4x5).
>From what you mentioned, I wouldn't use anything but
400speed film The pro emulsions from Kodak are supurb
and flexible enough to go from indoor to outdoor to
natural lighting to flash exposure to over and under
expusure with little problem. Unless I have a wedding
shoot which is exclusively outdoors in bright light I
will only use Portra 400NC.
Again, plan on shooting a maximum of 6 rolls of color
and 1 roll of B&W for this wedding. Concentrate on
framing and always shoot for 8x10 cropping. In other
words--DON'T FILL THE FRAME! Beginners have a
tendency to take group pictures by filling the width
of the viewfinder. Don't. Give yourself lot's of
margin both top and sides.
Keep your working kit small. Two cameras with you and
one spare sitting in your main bag either in the car
or with your wife. Two lenses--the 100/2 and the
35-70 mounted and a super-wide in your pocket. Shoot
everything critical with two cameras.
If you can, try to borrow, rent, buy or build a flash
bracket that holds the flash above the lens (for both
horizontal and vertical shots). This top-and-center
lighting keeps unsightly shadows down and behind the
subjects and prevents the nasty side-shadow.
Otherwise get one of those soft-box style snoots for
your flash.
Just a note on batteries: Nicads recharge the flash
much faster than alkalines. I find that two sets of
nicads suffice nicely for an entire wedding shoot but
I'll keep a set of alkalines in the bag--just in case.
Worse comes to worse I just hijack the batteries out
of my winder.
Yes you will want to use the tripod if during the
ceremony you don't want to or can't use flash. Small
weddings typically aren't problems, though.
Ken Norton
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