Ian and Lisa’s Hazlewood Castle Wedding Photography – Hazlewood Castle weddings
Ian and Lisa were married recently at St Edward the Confessor Church in Clifford before celebrating at Hazlewood Castle near York. The wedding photographs below start with our coverage of bridal preparation and finish with some end of night photographs outside in the castle courtyard, the difference between this and our normal blog posts is this wedding was photographed with our iPhones…..
It’s a common sight at almost every wedding we photograph, guests using their phone cameras to take photographs of themselves, family and of course the bride and groom. As phone technology and the quality of their camera and photographs have improved over recent years the compact camera market has seen a huge decline in sales as people replace their small camera with the more flexible and always with you mobile. Confident in the quality of photographs we create we don’t see guests with cameras as a threat to our business and so are happy for wedding guests to stand alongside and take photos at the same time, often we hear comments about the size of our camera and how their phone pictures won’t be anything like ours etc etc. Having played with the iPhone cameras and used them for family snaps when a big camera would be impractical I knew the quality was actually really good, and so just to prove it’s not all about size and cost, we recently we decided to shoot a wedding with our iPhones.
iPhone 5s vs Canon 5D MKIII Our weapon of choice at weddings are Canon 5D MKIII’s these 22.3 megapixel cameras allow us to use a variety of lenses and external lighting in the form of radio controlled flash guns. Our kit bags weigh in at a combined weight of around 30KG and a value of over £25,000. How would this compare with our day to day office phones, the £600 8megapixel iPhone 5s with a fixed lens and a small LED flash, the total weight a whopping 112grams. The lens on the iPhone is fixed wide angle and where we are used to swapping lenses over on the main cameras shooting with a single fixed lens was going to be a new experience and make us work a little differently. We were also going to shoot with just natural light and not rely on the small LED flash which we felt wouldn’t offer any enhancement to the photographs.
iPhone wedding photographs below, scroll down for our general comments and overall conclusions. Please feel free to leave comments….
Overall conclusions:
We have quite a distinctive shooting and edit style, often we will shoot with an edit already planned, the iPhones tap to focus and expose allowed us a degree of exposure control and ensured we were able to use some of our existing wedding editing actions and pre-sets on the photographs to bring them more into line with our usual style. The camera does manage to resolve an amazing amount of detail for such a a small sensor and although the photographs wouldn’t make for a double page album spread, they would comfortably print unto 12x8inches. In low light the camera performed very well and although the dynamic range dropped quite significantly the images were still of sufficient quality for printing.
By carefully choosing the time of day, we were able to make full use of the dynamic range of the iPhone sensor and retain detail in the shadow and highlights of the photos. In Lightroom there was a degree of noise evident in the shadows and with noise reduction applied we did see some evidence of softening and loss of clarity.
Knowing the limits of the phone camera helped to create a large selection of usable images for the bride and groom. Often users will push the phone too far causing under and over exposure, and of course camera shake. We were able to control our environments and shooting surroundings to ensure we remained within the limits and capabilities of the phone’s camera. By doing this we were pleasantly surprised at the final image quality and although not on a apr with a digital SLR, the quality is certainly on a par with a modern compact camera and maybe even better than an early Digital SLR like our first Canon D30’s.
Please feel free to leave your comments on this blog post.
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