Indian Wedding Photography : Challenges & Tips
Wedding in India is a festival of its own kind. You can be completely amazed and daunted by the sheer size of this event. Just to give you an idea of the size of these event, a typical Indian weeding could involve more than 1000 people!
Oh gosh! This must require professional event management skills to organize such a large-scale event. To add to your surprise most of the Indian weddings do not engage any kind of profession help in organizing the event. Thorough planning wherein you can sense obsession for detailing and immaculate execution, all these can make it look unbelievable that these guys never took any lesson in management.
In every wedding, the couple and their families want photographs which can be cherished for years. Due to such high expectation environment it is pretty easy to fall flat if you don’t know wedding photography challenges and how to tackle those.
Challenges in wedding photography
Photography in such an event in is a challenge in itself. As a photographer the key challenges that I often face in wedding are :
- No margin for error – Little carelessness and you can miss out the most significant moment of the wedding. Weddings don’t give you retake chances.
- Low Light – Unlike other countries weddings in India usually happen in night-time which means you don’t have enough ambient light. This problem is further aggravated by the fact that venue place which has huge gathering of crowd doesn’t allow you to place off-camera lights if you are not the official photographer. Off-course it’s not even worth mentioning that on camera flash will make photos flat and lifeless.
- Action shots – Indian weddings are full of dance, ritual and celebrations, all of which are action shots. Low light makes it extremely difficult to click action shots. Action shots require you to click photos at high shutter speed which becomes a challenge in night-time.
Tips
All of these challenges can be overcome with meticulous planning and by remaining heedful to situation. Here are few tips that I often follow to overcome above mentioned challenges and click some awesomely beautiful pictures.
Fast lens : The elixir for all above problem is a fast lens. It’s the big kahuna for low light situation. Fast lens is a lens with large maximum aperture or small f number. large aperture allows more light to hit the sensor and you can get properly exposed photos. Since it allows more light to come in which means you can increase your shutter speed and hence fast lens also helps you in clicking tricky actions shots in low light situations. I own a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens which is my go to lens in weddings.
Get rid of your shyness : Indian wedding is like a carnival and such a huge gathering of crowd it’s very easy and normal to feel shy. My personal experience in weddings has taught me one thing, throw away the shyness and be close to action. Trust me you will get the best shots. Be near to bride and groom, the most beautifully dressed people and click close-ups. Also click other people, things, make bokeh in your shots which other photographers are likely to miss out.
That’s it! Follow above two tips and you will get the best out of the wedding photography.
Like some of the above wedding photos, I’ve written a full blog post on “MUST HAVE LIST OF WEDDING SHOTS”. Check it out as well!
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WOW! truly beautiful pictures At the first glance, it can be seen that image are clicked by a professional. Capturing wedding photography specially Indian needs great experience, knowledge and skills which can be seen in this photographer by seeing his superlative quality work.