Digital or film for wedding photography?

[jwyatt]

Thanks, some useful advice there. The wedding is in March, and as I'm on the verge of buying a 20D and a speedlite 580 I think I'll familiarise myself with it and then pop to the wedding location (luckily local) to take plenty of shots indoors and out. I'll take my wife along wearing something white! Then I'll have at least a feel for the capabilities of the metering system/flash. Because I've scanned slides to digital forthe last few years I'm well aware of the issues of dark areas and highlights, it could well prove tricky with digital given that I've little experience of flash work at all!

[Franglais]

Thanks, some useful advice there. The wedding is in March, and as I'm on the verge of buying a 20D and a speedlite 580 I think I'll familiarise myself with it and then pop to the wedding location (luckily local) to take plenty of shots indoors and out. I'll take my wife along wearing something white! Then I'll have at least a feel for the capabilities of the metering system/flash. Because I've scanned slides to digital forthe last few years I'm well aware of the issues of dark areas and highlights, it could well prove tricky with digital given that I've little experience of flash work at all!

I scan a lot of slides myself. Shooting digital requires as much care as shooting slides - digital burns out in the same sort of contrasty light conditions but it looks even worse. Highlights go unpleasantly off-colour without the clean washed-out look of slides. (Shooting RAW probably improves things).

On the other hand, under the right conditions, digital can look brilliant. It's sharp, precise, hyper-realistic.

This is not the same subject, but here's an image I did a couple of weeks ago on the way to Calais - one of the first digital images that I'm actually pleased with. No real subject, just the figure poised there at an instant in time. Everything is perfectly clear. It wouldn't have worked on film.

(Taking details: D70 at 200ISO onto JPG, 18-70 kit lens)

Charles

[jwyatt]

Right, I now have a EOS20D with speedlite 580EX, and also a Speedlite 540EZ for my EOS 50E.

Time to learn about flash!

For a landscape photographer it all seems a bit complicated !