Patrick + Makara Wedding P2 ~ Hansel Doan

This is the last post in series of wedding pictures of Patrick and Makara, and I want to save this one to talk about how I photograph a wedding reception. Please keep in mind that this set up is for typical Asian weddings, and I have a different process for Western weddings.

Challenges:

Most Asian weddings have quite small budget in decoration. And thus, there are not many nice details to photograph. My solid shoot list often includes just the wedding cake, table center piece, flowers, and some wide shots of the venue. I may also shoot some details at the reception table such as wedding favors and guest signing books.
The wedding reception is often held at an Asian restaurant, which is quite jam-packed and without any kind of formal and elegant decorations. So, I need to mostly focus on photographing people and not the venue.
As you may have attended an Asian wedding, the restaurant will bring all the foods to each table. The tables are literally covered by dishes. They may look nice at the beginning, but toward the end when the bride and groom tour the tables, all of them look quite messy with unfinished dishes. So, I have to be careful on how to frame the shots to eliminate the clusters.
Shooting a wedding can be very challenging because of the tricky lighting. The light is very low with heavy color-cast. So, it is a must to use flash and shoot in RAW to help resolve the exposure and color balance problems.
Shooting wedding reception can be very tiring because I have to focus and ready to shoot for a long period of time (normally 5 hours). Beside standing, running, and holding the heavy camera for that long, my eyes and brain have to be on for the whole time to instantly capture the right moments

The gears: well prepared gears are extremely important for shooting wedding because I cannot miss an important shoot. Due to the extreme conditions of wedding (low-light, fast moving objects, consecutive activities, etc), I have to use the best gears as much as possible to ensure the image quality. Since it is the starting stage of my business and I do not have money to invest in thousands of dollar equipments, I usually rent out more gears from professional photography services, and it is not cheap at all. The renting cost might take up to one third of the budget, but I decide to do it to make sure that my clients will be happy with the images that they will receive from me. And here is the list of equipments that I often use for a wedding reception:

Canon 16-35mm L f/2.8 : this is a must-have wide angle lens to help me shoot in tide space such as when the bride and groom do the table-tour.
Canon 50mm L f/1.2 : this lens is a saver. The large aperture lets me photograph without flash but use the ambient light to get the real atmosphere of the event. The 1.2 aperture also provides a nice shallow depth of field to help blur out the busy background and focus on the couples.
Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro: this lens products the most amazing close shoots for details (cake, flower, and rings) that I would not be able to get from other lens.
Canon 580 ii Speedlite flash : this is a must for all wedding reception. Without it, I properly cannot shoot the event in low-light. And I have to remember to bring extra batteries to fill it up.
Cameras: I always have 2 camera bodies with me, why? Because if one goes wrong or does not work, I will have a back-up one to use. Remember, there is no time to stop at the weeding, everything moves very fast.
Memory: I shoot in RAW, which means I need a lot of space for my memory cards... yes, a lot. Beside that, I normally take at least 2 images for each shoots to make sure no one close or blink their eyes... for a 5 hours shooting, I can easily shoot more than 2,000 images. So, I bring with me two 16GB CF cards, which can hold up to 5,000 images.

Yes, it is not an easy job to photograph a wedding. It requires a lot of practice, preparation, and energy. But at the end of the day, it is a very fun experience and definitely helps me a lot to improve my photography skills. However, this is just one phase of the process, and I will have another post later to share about how I process my images in post-production.

Here it comes to the exciting part, pictures from the wedding reception of Patrick and Makara at Jumbo restaurant in Seattle, Washington. These are some of my favorites to share with you.

Typical entrance greeting photos with wedding guests. This can be very intense for bride and groom, and even photographer, since we have just about 10-15 seconds to arrange people and snap pictures for each group.

Bride and groom entering the wedding hall and walking up to the stage. It was quite challenging to capture this moment since the couple usually move fast and there is not much space around.

The couple cutting cake. It is quite interesting to photograph this because I both want to capture them close up from a good angle but still not cover the screen for wedding guests to be able observe this important moment.