| Gear: Cameras Wedding Photography GearMaybe you're wondering what kind of equipment your wedding photographer should? There is no straight answer to this question, since each photographer has his/her own preferences. However, if you hire Dreamtime Images to photograph your wedding, you're hiring an all-digital studio -- please follow this link to see why digital work better for us for wedding photography. You can also click here to peek inside our gear bag here. DigitalThe recent and very powerful competitor in wedding photography is of course the digital camera. Just as negative size determines picture quality in film photography, size of the sensor, or number of pixels, determines the quality in digital photography. Digital camera sensor quality has improved dramatically, increasing from the 640 x 480 or 0.309 Megapixels cameras of just a few years ago to 40 Megapixels or even bigger sensor sizes today, yielding extremely sharp images that could be enlarged even to a wall sizes. The cameras with the highest MP ratings can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but the images appearing in newspapers and magazines usually come out of cameras feature no more than 6 to 8 megapixels. At Dreamtime Images we use cameras that feature 8 and 13 megapixels. One cool thing about digital cameras is that you don't have to spend time reloading the camera with film and you can change the film's sensitivity to light with the press of a button. If you suddenly walk from a bright outdoor ceremony to a dimly-lit reception hall, you would need to kick up the film speed so it can gather more light from the dark room. With a film camera, you'd have to change rolls of film and start using a fast film. That takes time and can result in missed images. Digital vs. film wedding photography
Large formatLarge format cameras use negatives can be as big as a piece of paper. That's impressive -- and expensive. The result, however, is that the negatives are 10 times larger than comparable 35mm cameras (the cameras that most people use). That means you can blow the images up so big they can fill walls and still look great. Unfortunately, the expense and hassle of large format doesn't make it a practical medium for wedding photography. Each image costs about $20 to produce! Medium formatMedium format is more common than large format and it has a smaller negative with the dimensions of 2.25" x 2.25". Some wedding photographers use medium format cameras with wonderful results. The negatives are about thrice the size of a 35mm film camera. The film comes in 12 to 24 exposure rolls and can take a few minutes to reload, which isn't practical for our style of fast, light and photojournalistic wedding photography. 35mmDuring the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s -- before the advent of Digital SLRs, 35mm cameras were great for wedding photography thanks to advances in film quality. The newer 35mm films rendered truer, deeper colors, better contrast and less grain -- also known as noise. Film quality is still continuing to improve, although some companies have announced that they will not continue to research or even make 35mm film. That's because digital has become so popular. 35mm film is used in point and shoot and single lens reflex (SLR) cameras, whcih are the ones with interchangeable lenses. Digital SLRs are the same form and use the same interchangeable lenses as 35mm SLR cameras. The format is very convenient for fast and light wedding photography. The cameras use extremely advanced autofocusing systems these days, and can track moving subjects -- such as a bride walking down an aisle -- with shocking precision. The lenses are capable of gathering massive amounts of light, are very sharp, and produce beautiful images. The 35mm format is, along with digital SLR cameras, the most popular format for the wedding photogrpahy industry. |
