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Originally Posted by Saphire
Thank you Duncan,Stephen and Adey for your help it is appreciated. What I am really after is help and guidance in setting up a digital camera not film for reasonable wedding shots, rough exposer settings for the white wedding dress, is it better to underexpose or overexpose, spot metering for the dress, that type of thing Is it better with digital indoors to use a tripod and not use flash and correct colour on the computer. Just basic things to get reasonable exposers. With most non professional cameras being a 1.6 crop what would be a good size lens to use. I would like this thread to be useful starting point for others, not just me, to come too for guidance on the above things rather then having to keep asking.
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Despite being a die-hard jpeg shooter, I think this is one occasion where using raw capture will have benefits. Before everyone jumps on this and says "all the pro wedding photographers shoot jpeg", I say yes, they have tight time limits to work to in order to get the proofs out. They also have a lot of experience in how to shoot weddings (one hopes).
As Adey has said, white dresses and black suits are a nightmare for light meters. They also make it very difficult to get the exposure compensation right - what's right for one part of the scene will not be right for the other. Using raw capture will give greater flexibility to apply exposure compensation and correct the white balance after the event. Remember, you can always brighten things up if they are a bit dark. Once you've burnt out detail from over-exposure you can never get it back. I'd suggest spot metering from a white dress, not applying any major exposure compensation, perhaps 0 or 0.3 positive compensation and letting it look a bit grey to begin with. This can easily be brightened up in post-processing and you won't have blown out the detail.
You ask about using flash/tripod for indoor shots. Using flash is a fine art in itself, just ask Don. If you are using built-in flash units, you will not get anything like the same results as a pro using off-camera units and reflectors etc. Unless you have the gear and/or a lot of experience in this area, prepare to be disappointed. Another reason to leave this kind of things to the pros in my book. I'll leave it to someone more experienced with flash to expand on this area. You'll also find just about every pro will use a tripod for indoor and outdoor shots, this is just plain common sense for those staged shots where you have control over the subjects.
Which lenses to use? Depends very much on your style and what kind of pictures the bride and groom are expecting. Large parties need either wide angles (and a remarkably large number of steps back), or superb organisational skills to squeeze people in. I think you'd use a variety of focal lengths, depending on what kind of picture you are taking. Overall, a typical 18-55 kit lens (on a 1.6 crop factor dSLR) is likely to cover most of the kind of situations you are likely to need.
Duncan
P.S. There's an extensive article in this month's "Digital Photo" magazine, specifically on shooting weddings.