Park Tavern Wedding

Park Tavern / Piedmont Room | Atlanta, GA

Helped out a friend at a wedding, and being the second or third option makes for a less stressful situation, and you can be more free in getting the shots.  It was blazing hot in the Georgia summer, and me sweating, loaded down with gear.  I shoot lots of cameras/lens combos because each one gives me a different look for different situations.  While I could possibly cover most things with a simple 50mm lens, sometimes it’s good to have more crayons in the box.  The gear you have, expensive or otherwise, does nothing sitting back at the house or in your trunk.

Above: Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 after perspective correction
Below: Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 Micro VR

Above: Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR
Below: Canon body and can’t remember if it was the Nikkor 50mm or 85mm f/1.4

Above and Below: Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 Manual Focus on the Canon, could not stay in the sun for longer than a few minutes, the heat this summer is really oppressive.  Strobist stuff wasn’t working for me outside, and the setup time was a bit too long, time was short, so good practice to just take people into the shade.

Photographing anything exactly at noon in the summer is generally bad because of the harsh sun and shadows, but again, use it and work with it.  Next pix from the Sigma IR SD14.  This camera actually likes this light, and the healthy amount of sun really makes the plant life pulsate.  The images don’t look like this out of the camera, the .x3f’s get run through about 3 applications.

Luckily the heat drove away most of the ball players in the background at Piedmont Park, so less to touch up.

These days, a lot is still made out of megapixel ratings on cameras (which has nothing to do with sensor size or quality).  Even Sigma/Foveon still succumb to the inadequacies of their marketing department by rating their images as a ~14 MP canvas size coming from a 4 MP RGB sensor.  6 MP from an APS-C sized sensor if you ask me is still plenty for most things. We live in a world where we hardly look at prints anymore anyway, even these small images on my site here are, resolution wise, less than half of a megapixel.  Lenses and vision are still way more important than cramming pixels on to a chip to justify that one day people will print out native resolution 20×30″s.  Last time I checked most people keep photo albums on their phone anyway, and pictures in the wallet just don’t mean as much anymore…

Not quite 100% crop, but you get the idea.  Other places can best explain image resampling and interpolation when it comes to digital images, but no one really likes to talk about composition anymore.  While cameras and lenses and how you shot it f/stop and shutter speed wise are choices and decisions, most important is still composition, finding the patterns and lines that help a person construct a picture.

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