Its been nearly 2 months and I finally got around to posting about how the vegas wedding went. In all honesty, the wedding was super quick. I guess that is just the way they do them out there in Sin City. I didn’t actually get to shoot the wedding because they already had a photographer with their package, but I did do before and after photos as well as the reception. I think the photos turned out quite nicely considering this was my first wedding with my Nikon D80.
The bride had told my wife (they work together) that she hated the photos from the photographer that came with her package. I was now scared of what she was going to think of the ones I took. I sent a CD of my photos with my wife to work and when the bride saw the photos, she was relieved to say the least. This, in-turn, gave me some relief. The bride was so excited and couldn’t wait to get her book.
Why don’t you all go check out some of the photos from the wedding and let me know what you think. I would love to hear some of your opinions 
This weekend I am photographing a wedding in Sin City. The wedding is going to take place at Caesar’s Palace. This will be my first wedding with my new Nikon D80 and the SB-800 flash that I used in the previous post I did about Dark Background portraits. I will be posting the photos of this event shortly after I return so be sure to check back for the highlights and see how it went. I also have done a couple other weddings in the last month and will be posting those as well, so stay tuned as I get those posted along with the settings I used and some tips so you can photograph weddings of your own.
I’ve always wanted to do a shot of a persons profile with a dark background. I’m sure their are a bunch of ways to do this, but I figured out one way that I really liked. I recently purchased a Nikon D80 Digital SLR camera, and I love it. A few days later I found that my Canon 580ex flash didn’t really work well with the camera so I purchased a Nikon SB-800. The Nikon flash blows away the Canon and it is about $200 cheaper. Anyhow, before I explain how I set this shot up I would like to let you know if you didn’t already that the Nikon Creative Lighting System is spectacular. The D80 has a featured called Advanced Wireless Lighting. The SB-800 flash supports this feature excellently. What it allows you to do is use the built in flash on the D80 as a commander and the SB-800 as the slave. So the D80 can trigger the SB-800. I used this feature in the shot I’m showing you here.
What I did was I had my friend get a nice big lung full of hookah smoke and then blow it out gradually. I then had my wife hold the SB-800 behind his head so that I could not see it through the D80’s viewfinder. I set the D80 and SB-800 up in wireless mode. I then gave my camera a faster shutter speed of 1/200. This faster shutter speed allowed me to capture the smoke in a still form rather than getting motion blur on it. I set my iso to 200 and my aperture to f/5. This gave me a crisp picture. I set the exposure compensation on the D80’s flash down 2 stops and set it on the SB-800 up 2 stops. This caused the background to not show up as much from the D80’s flash and the SB-800 helped emphasize the smoke and the lines of my friends profile. I zoomed in a little with my nikkor 18mm-135mm lens and then composed the shot. I was now ready to set my focus and take the shot.
When I took the shot, the SB-800 was trigger by the D80’s on camera flash and as you can see the image came out remarkably. Now don’t get me wrong, I had tons of trial and error shots to get the effect that I wanted. After all is said and done, I think this shot came out beautifully, and just the way I had expected and predicted it to.
Go ahead and take some shots like this one and leave them in the comments for me, I would love to see what you all come up with.
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