With this conversation in mind I performed an experiment yesterday. My wife and I were contracted for a very high dollar wedding involving 12 hours of shooting from noon to midnight in three locations: A clifftop meadow overlooking the ocean and surrounded by mountains; the seaside grounds and indoors of a winery; and very large white tents with both windows and artificial lighting. The wedding party was dressed in the usual mix of very subtle (and expensive) shades of white, black tuxes and midtones.
The cermony was conducted looking out over the brightly sunlit sea with subjects ranging from fully backlit to side lit or frontally lit, depending on our location. Leading up to that we shot formals with subjects partially frontlit to take advantage of the background scenes. Everything else was shot from constantly changing lighting angles depending on our changing locations and the movement of the action.
At the winery it was much the same but in and out of the shadows from the structures and large trees, with the light and lighting changing dramatically according to subjects, location and shooting angles. Over the course of the tent shooting, the balance of sunlight from the windows and artificial light changed by the minute and hour, as did shooting angles and subjects.
In all locations we augmented as required with camera mounted flash, remote flash, and full light kits, filtering the cameras as needed while also filtering all three varieties of strobes, as well as managing white balance. In essense it was an evolving mix of scenic or landscape shooting, action shooting, and studio style shooting.
As time permitted I switched my cameras from manual to program mode for comparative shooting, mostly to see if I was making too much of the question in my own mind. Why work so hard if I could do a good job while letting the cameras make the decisions?
We did a preliminary run through of my shots last night, but I didn't tell my wife that programmed shots were in the mix. She observerd "Boy, you really blew it on some of your stuff. What the heck was going on?"
Offending or failing images were shot on program, most typically with strong or partial backlighting, in direct sunlight with strong shadows, and late in the evening when whole scenes were in shadow but the sky was still bright. Some shots were "useable" but by no means professional, and certainly not without considerable photoshop work. "Action" shots were okay and some were quite good, especially with direct and uniform frontal lighting, provided I successfully compensated (+/-) for the range of tones in the scene. Frankly, in that fast-moving circumstance it would be a relief to rely more on programmed shooting, but I would have to preselect my shooting position relative to backgrounds and lighting angles and preset my compensation setting depending upon subjects.
I've seen the results of weddings shot in these same locations by photographers using programmed settings. I've also talked to their very unhappy clients- one of whom even demanded (and got) a full refund from the photographer in question. Without seeing my wife's shots yet, I'm confident that we're going to have some very happy clients while further augmenting our reputation and justifying our high fees compared to other local shooters. In fact, I'm likely to suggest to my wife that we once again raise our rates because additional weddings are going to result, even as the program shooters have lost business and reputation over their results.
And what about Photoshopping the "okay" images that resulted from my experiments with programmed shooting? We garnered just over 64gb of images on the shoot. If only 10% needed Photoshopping, we'd have to forego several well-paying shoots over the next few days to accomplish the task. I'd rather make money than clean up mistakes, I think.
