Shooting wedding with only Sony A7C? Possible, but here is what you should think about.
Intro.
Let’s get it straight from the beginning. I’m not shooting weddings. Not professionally. Projects published on this site are street photography related. This is what I enjoy taking picture of the most. My “photography background” is portraits and – already mentioned – streets. This helps me to understand the light and how to work with people when you need the best picture out of them. Weddings though are entirely different. So, why should you pay attention?
Several reasons:
Photographs of the last wedding I took.
2. These photos are sold for money and client is happy.
3. I’ve just did the journey you about to walk if you are thinking of shooting a wedding with Sony A7C.
4. In case you are new to the wedding photography I’m more than happy to share how to achieve saleable result with not the best gear for the mission.
Discussion scope.
One more thing to set before we go into the topic is the scope. We are talking about only gear I used for this wedding, not how to sell, not how to work with people during the occasion – just the gear. And the gear is simple. It’s Sony A7C, Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art lens and K&F Concept Variable ND8-ND2000 filter.
No flash, no reflector – nothing more.
What to think about.
The weather forecast.
This obvious point still worth mentioning for one big reason. The weather is going to dictate what your photos will look like in terms of colour. When you shoot in the bright sun the colours are popping, they are saturated, and the sky is adding a lot of blue colour into your frame. When it’s about to rain and the sky is grey, the colours are muted.
Another point here is what you are going to shoot if it rains. Not much of outside, I guess. That means high ISO and because of that potentially more grain in your photos. Going too high with ISO might even reduce the sharpness. And colours again. ISO tend to give slight shift to colours.Sony A7C limitations.
There are better cameras for wedding photography out there. And if you are planning of making money as wedding photographer you should purchase something better suited. My argument here, though, that Sony A7C can deliver magic. On two terms: the camera is coupled with a good lens and photographer knows what he/she is doing.
That leads us to the limitation of Sony A7C and how to deal with them.
One of the biggest Sony A7C’s limitation is the shutter speed. It goes only up to 1/4000 sec. In bright sun and at f1.4 this results in very bright photos. So bright that faces are not on the photos anymore – all are in white. Photographers call this “blown highlights”. Same happens with lovely blue sky – white and dull.
One way to prevent this is to dial down the aperture to a f-stop where A7C is going to let through less light. That is going to bring the faces and colour of the sky back but introduce darker shadows and less boke to the background. And boke is one of the signatures for the wedding photography. Ideally for weddings is to have opportunity of blurring out the background to let the couple stand out. In fact, 95% of this wedding I photographed at f1.4. Wide open aperture gives that soft character to pictures.
Smarter way of dealing with that is a variable ND-filter. I used KF Concept ND8-ND2000. It gives from 3 to 11 f-stops of blocking light. ND-filter is a piece of glass attached to the front of your lens that “filters out” the light compensating for the slow shutter speed. I suggest variable ND-filter because wedding photographer usually jump from one light situation to another – from sunlight outside to a dark church hall and back. All you need to do is simply adjust the ND-filter by turning its ring.
I know, "real pro Photographers (with capital "P") can advise against variable ND- filters. That can be because they are still searching for the "Sharpness" slider in Lightroom. Everybody else have nothing to worry about here.
Another limitation is combination of two things – small viewfinder and not bright enough articulating LCD screen. In bright light it’s much easier to see what you are taking picture of using the viewfinder because the screen brightness doesn’t always overpower the sun. This is important from the focus standpoint as well - you need to monitor what the camera focuses on. I’m wearing glasses. This leaves a small distance between the rubber around Sony A7C viewfinder and my face – I’m not able to block all light coming in. So, small viewfinder doesn’t help much. I tend to use the screen most of the time.
There is no workaround for that, just something to keep in mind.
Single SD-card slot is next – minor but worth mentioning – limitation of Sony A7C. Minor because I used this camera heavily for video capture in hours and taking lots of photos. It never failed me. Limitation is more about storage capacity. Exactly in the middle of shooting session the SD-card got full on 2256th photo. Bride had to wait a minute while I’m switching to a new one. Not a big deal this time but could be because I’m shooting weddings (when I do) in documentary style, meaning I mostly don’t pose anyone – I’m in the moment with everybody and photographing that moment. Some important moment could be missed while SD-card swap.
Another minor is dynamic range and high ISO performance in combination. Taking these two into a combo make sense because you want to use as low ISO value to get the cleanest picture possible. And you need to rely on Sony A7C dynamic range be able to recover some of highlight or shadows when those lose details. In practise, that means – I shoot a bit darker than the end-result should be (at lower ISO), trusting on the dynamic range be good enough to recover details from shadows. In most situations it works fine but only because I don’t push it too hard. Dynamic range of the image sensor Sony A7C is specced with is good for modern camera. You have to test it for yourself to understand how dark or bright you can go. Here is some samples from the wedding, where I had to recover highlights and shadows.
High ISO can add some grade of softness and colour shift to photos. Most of it can be solved in post.
Recovered shadows of intently darker shot photo.
Outro. What worked well.
Sony A7C is a great camera. Don’t take me wrong. It’s compact, lightweight has a full-frame sensor, good stabilization, quick and reliable autofocus with eye detection, articulated screen, and more helpful features. It has limitations we need to think about as well, but when you know what you are doing, Sony A7C is up to as tough challenge as photographing weddings and deliver saleable results.
It’s a working horse. As any camera from Sony these days, A7C just works. For hours and hours.
The battery life is very good. But have a spare.
A7C is quick. It starts fast, focuses fast, and takes 10 photos a second.
Coupled with good optics the image quality is surprisingly good.
And lastly. I still own a Sony A7R3 - camera that suits better for shooting weddings. It has better viewfinder, faster shutter, two SD-card slots, almost double resolution, easier handling… So, taking A7C to the wedding instead was a risk. And experiment to some extent. Again, if you know what you are doing as photographer, A7C delivers.
