Self Critique: Wedding Pictures

So, if you take a look at this article, self critique isn't really worth it.

I call shenanigans.

Although you're certainly biased by the act of creation, there is no reason that a skilled and knowledgeable photographer cannot critique their own images, to an extent. Critique from others is a very valuable tool and input should be accepted, since ultimately we photograph to be able to please other people that look at our pictures. But, as an artist, a photographer also should have an idea of how he wants his pictures to look - and vision is not something that can be judged by another photographer.

So, critique should be done by yourself and accepted from others, together. Walk the middle path. Now that that's out of the way, I'm going to do some self critique of some pictures I took at my first wedding.

Before I start though, I would like to say that the only reason I was able to shoot at this wedding was because of the generosity of wedding photographer Deborah Cull, whose website can be found here. She is one of the nicest people I have ever met and has been more than willing to take time with me when she has no obligation to do so, and I am very grateful for that.


I like this one, just because it's about the only time I was able to capture a "moment". I'm glad I didn't use flash, because that would have ruined the mood, and the light as-is gave them a sort of rim light. The DOF is good, because the background was distracting, and it still kind of is - I should have moved the flower behind her head out of the frame, as it's too bright as is relatively distracting. Looking at it right now I'm thinking their faces should be a little brighter as well - maybe I need to spend some more time with this in PP.






Paparazzi shot. I did bounce flash on this, behind me and to my left (there was little to no ambient). I light the quality of it, for the most part, but I can still see shadows from the flash. Unfortunately, I don't think I could have done much about that without setting up an umbrella or two. The sign up top is slighting distracting, but the exposure looks good (to me). I like the expressions.








The moment and expression make this photo worth something - the light is terrible. She was directly under an overhead tungsten light in this one, and I definitely should have bounced some flash here to relieve those shadows a little bit. I actually did do that later on, which yielded technically better pictures, but none of them had this mood to it. The shoulder in the lower left bothers me as well - goes to show how hard it was to remove unwanted elements from the frame. The flowers are overexposed, but I don't think it's a huge problem. The white balance might be just a tad warm.




And here we have shadows generated from flash bounced overhead. Dark eye sockets are certainly not attractive - a bounce fill card might have helped out.

Shooting this wedding was a good experience. It let me see what the experience was like, and I got to watch some professional photographers at work. I got an idea of what I need to work on, and it made me realize I still have a lot of work to do technically before I can really express myself and capture what I want to capture.

In any case - I've critiqued myself. I'd love it if you'd drop me a line in the comments and give me your critique now.