Church Wedding with Sony A7riii

First Church Wedding with Sony A7riii

church wedding with Sony 55mm f/1.8 at f2.2 and ISO 1000, backing up the aisle

I previously wrote about the first wedding I shot with the Sony A7riii, here.  More recently, I had the opportunity to shoot a Catholic wedding for the first time.   This event was purely the wedding service as well as a baptism in the church, with some pre-wedding portraits.   As someone who is not a full time professional, I fully admit I’m still learning and getting better with each opportunity.   I invite you to read this post to learn from my experience using the Sony A7riii for a Catholic church wedding.

The Formal Portaits

A bright sunny summer afternoon right at noon, with just 20 to 30 minutes to shoot portraits of the bride and the couple. Though now when shooting portraits of one to two people, I have a routine down pretty well.

I found a small somewhat shaded patch for more even light, though the sun was still very strong.  My assistant had the Godox AD200 in a softbox.  (You can learn more about my portrait lighting kit in this post).   Due to the strong sun, I had to shoot with HSS, often with shutter speeds of 1/1000 or faster.   The Godox AD200 gives me far more power than I can get with a speedlight and it’s far more portable than most strobes.  My lens of choice is the Sony 85mm F/1.8 whenever I’m working outdoors, so there is enough room for me to zoom in and out with my feet.

The bridal portraits.

Eye-AF paired with the Sony A7riii really does nail focus perfectly on the eyes with a very high hit rate.  Between the lens and the fill flash coming from the strobe, there really is lovely contrast and color rendition.   For those images in which you see vignette, that was a post-processing choice.

A review of my gear for the wedding portraits:

• Sony A7riii (Best Amazon bundle here).
• Sony 85mm F/1.8 (review here)
• Godox AD200
• Godox XPro-S trigger
• Godox 32×32 softbox  (I often use the 24×24 as it is easier to use in the field but thought it wide to use the larger softbox for full length couple portraits)
• Godox portable boom (thereby allowing my assistant to become a mobile light stand, constantly adjusting to a better spot)

A couple of the couple……

Inside the Church, the Baptism

I have a confession.  Not being Christian, I’ve never actually attended a baptism and didn’t know entirely what to expect.   I realized I needed a fast lens and wide enough to avoid cutting off the action.   I intended to shoot silently so as not to distract from the service, and shooting silently is part of the beauty of the Sony cameras.   As long as the camera is silent, I set the camera to shoot 10 frames per second, so that I could make sure to get the best micro expressions.   Too often when I shoot candids, too many of the images have my subject blinking or making an off putting expression.

My lens choice was the Rokinon 35mm F/1.4.   I previously reviewed the Sony 35mm F/1.4 (review here), with which I wasn’t especially impressed.  It was a good enough lens, but didn’t blow me away for the $1500 price tag.  (Here on Amazon).  For a fraction of the price, I added the Rokinon 35mm F/1.4 to my bag.  My review will be coming in the future, but for now I’ll say it is an excellent value and definitely very valuable for this type of shooting.

Baptism, Rokinon 35mm f/1.4

To some extent, I would have liked to have a zoom lens to be able to get some closer shots of individual expressions but that would have required a slower lens (2.8 at the fastest).   Additionally, the fast primes do seem to focus consistently more reliably in low light.  In the course of this day, I shot several primes as well as the Tamron 28-75mm F/2.8 and the primes were always noticeably sharper.  With the Rokinon 35mm F/1.4, I consistently kept my aperture between F1.6 and F2, and I was happy with the results.

Whenever using the silent shutter on the Sony A7riii indoors in artificial light, I’m a bit afraid of banding ruining my shots.  I have a much bigger wedding coming up in a few weeks and I may borrow the Sony A9, the master of silent electronic shutter shooting.

Fortunately, after some research, I found how to most confidently use the silent shutter on the A7riii:   In North America, the frequency of artificial light is 60hz.   If you match the frequency, you should avoid banding.  I didn’t want to shoot at 1/60th of a second, as that would invite motion blur and possibly camera shake.  But I set my shutter speed to double that frequency — 1/125, and I didn’t notice any banding.

I again relied on eye-AF, though here, as I was dealing with large aperture and narrow depth of field, I had to be extra careful as to the eye and face being chosen.  I did sometimes have to simply used a small flexible spot for autofocus.

Just to note in post-processing, in situations like this, the Sony A7riii meters the face a bit too dark for my taste in multi-metering mode.  I found myself raising the exposure in post processing in lightroom by about 0.75.  The Sony sensor is nearly ISO invariant, so there is no penalty for raising exposure in post-processing, as opposed to raising the ISO.

For the baptism and wedding ceremony, shooting at apertures between 1.6 and 2.8, my ISO was mostly between 1000 and 3200.  While you can definitely get usable high ISO shots on the Sony A7riii, once your ISO goes above about 1000, you start to notice the difference when pixel peeping.

The Wedding Ceremony

A Catholic mass presents a fairly long wedding service, allowing me repetitive time to take similar images.  I opted to start with the Tamron 28-75mm F/2.8 (my review here).   I wanted the focal length flexibility.

While it’s a good lens, it is noticeably less sharp than my primes.  Obviously, the aperture is slower.  As shown above, it did give me the flexibility to both go wide and telephoto.  It’s a very good value lens.  (Purchase from Amazon here ).  As I took an opportunity to review some images as the wedding progressed, I did start to notice a pixel peeping flaw.  I was continuing to shoot 10 fps silently, accumulating many shots.  But it seemed that while the first shot in every sequence was acceptably sharp, the later frames seemed softer.   As I was largely taking the same repetitive shots anyway, I decided to switch to some prime lens shooting.

First I switched to the Sony 85mm f/1.8.   Nearly every image was perfectly focused with eye-AF, nearly every image was remarkably sharp..

Church wedding with Sony 85mm F/1.8 at F2, ISO 1600

It reinforced my conclusion that the Sony 85mm f/1.8 is the best value in the Sony lineup.  (Purchase on Amazon here).

Of course, shooting with the 85mm lens had some downsides.  Unlike working outdoors, I didn’t have limitless room to backup.   Thus, I often couldn’t get shots wide enough.   Additionally, with a fast aperture, I was working with a very narrow depth of field.   While I was getting the bride’s eye consistently tack sharp, one could find the softness of other people in the frame distracting.

For the remainder of the ceremony, I turned back to the Rokinon 35mm F/1.4 and the Sony 55mm F/1.8  (Review here).  The 55mm is indeed very useful as coming pretty close to the human eye perspective.

I probably  should have brought a true ultra wide angle lens for a couple of wide church shots but backing down the aisle with the 55mm F/1.8 allowed for some lovely wide images:

I stuck with the Sony 55mm F/1.8 for a couple portraits after the ceremony ended, the fast aperture allowing me to forgo flash:

 

Portrait without flash, Sony 55mm F/1.8 at 2.2 and ISO 1600

I then returned to the Godox softbox.  What I love about the entire Godox system for Sony is that all their products are wirlelessly compatible with each other.  Thus, in addition to the Godox AD200 on camera left, I set up a Godox V860ii speedlight at back right.   My one error is that I should have gelled the off-camera lights to match the ambient light.   I set ISO to 800, to maintain high image quality but also keep ISO high enough not to entirely rely on the off camera lights.

Sony A7riii Battery

The battery was one of the major complaints of the older Sony cameras.  I’ve heard tales of wedding photographers going through five or six batteries in a single wedding.

I shot the wedding portraits, baptism and ceremony over a course of a bit over 2 hours.  In that time, I took 926 images and still had almost half the battery left (40%).   For a full wedding (formals, ceremony, reception), I would still take 3 batteries to be safe but it is highly unlikely you would need more than 2 batteries.  (Extra batteries on Amazon here).

Conclusion — Sony A7riii for Church Wedding

I continue to be pleased that I switched from the Nikon D750 to the Sony A7riii for my primary shooting.   The lower weight of the Sony A7riii compared to most dSLRs is something I definitely appreciate when I’m shooting for hours at a time.  In events such as weddings, it is clear that Sony and the Sony A7riii present some fairly unique advantages that you won’t find in most other cameras or brands:

• Eye-AF
• Truly silent shooting via EVF and live view
• 10 fps (even silently)
• Less weight than most other full frame cameras
• Among the best performing high ISO cameras
• High resolution of the A7riii allows flexibility to shoot with a wide prime and crop composition later

In about a month, I’ll be shooting a large full day wedding.  My plan is to use the same gear I used for this wedding but with the addition of an A9 and Sony 70-200 f/2.8.   At the ceremony, I’ll use the A9 and 70-200/2.8 while keeping the 35mm F/1.4 on the Sony A7riii.   I’ll switch it up at the reception:  I’ll set up off camera lights around the dance floor with the trigger on the Sony A7riii, and probably the Tamron 28-75/2.8.   I’ll use the A9 with the 35mm/f/1.4 for some flashless silent candids.

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