"Love that photo.... you must have a good camera" I've heard that, more than just, a few times. Cameras certainly improve though a system is only as good as its weakest point - which generally is the person pointing the camera.
Yes, many other factors contribute to a good* photo: light, subject, background, camera.. however if I was going to pick one single element to have the biggest impact on a photo it would be: the lens. It's never mentioned, only the camera & its mega pixel count (don't get me started on that one)
So, the humble bit of glass sticking on the front of the camera body, for most cameras & certainly most cameras I'll use for wedding photography, that IMHO can do more than just record the scene. A quality wedding photography lens has to be able to create some magic also. I have in mind a little photo shoot where I'll show the difference lenses make to the same scene & subject - though that is for another day. Today I'm going to talk about just one lens - my macro lens: Nikkor 105 f/2.8.
Could I shoot an entire wedding with it? it would be very hard work & group photo could be a squeeze however for detail & portrait photos its ideal. I use it especially for the wedding ring shots. Why for the rings? Well it reproduces what I photograph at 1:1 - that is full size & because it will also focus as close as 30cm - it means those rings will be full of detail & if I print the image 24x12 ( double page spread in my wedding albums ) that will be a lot of detail & the rings will be huge.
Another - bonus - of the design of Macro lenses, including this lens, is something called bokeh: the nice blurry out of focus areas in a photo. Now I love bokeh though our brains generally like to see something sharp in a photo, we're just wired like that. So for me the secret is to have an area super sharp & gorgeous swirly colours & light in the background.
Without getting a lab coat on, big pointy stick & a wallboard to show some maths - which frankly I just wouldn't understand, the physics of construction of these lenses means they can have a - shallow depth of field. Which is: only a thin sliver of this scene is in focus; the diamonds in the ring & some of the flower petals. Anything about 9mm closer of further away from those diamonds is out of focus.
With this image, love it, you can clearly see the thin sliver of focus: the diamonds in the balanced ring & a tiny area stone. Everything else mushing into soft out-of-focusness © ™
You can get more in focus, if you want - add some light go to a small aperture.. techno whizz bang & I could, though my preference is smooth & dreamy bokeh.
This is why, for me, photography & including wedding photography very much in this, is a mix of both technical knowledge paired with artistic creativity & expression.. yin & yang.
If you've made it down to here, well done, I may have waded into the depths a little there.
* A little mantra I do fully endorse is: there are no good or bad photos, just photos you like or dislike. To prove that little saying: the most technically perfect photo can leave you feeling, meh... where a, technically, flawed photo can cause an emotional response.
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