commercial photographer Wakefield | Wakefield commercial photographer 

commercial photographer Wakefield: Today was the first meeting of the autumn for the cathedral choir and, as always, at the first meeting all the members of the choir are gathered together so it is an ideal opportunity to get the annual photographs taken. I was first commissioned to do the photographs last year and the choir master was so happy with the results he commissioned me again this year. They’ve had some pretty disappointing results in the past from other photographers, mainly due to using inadequate lighting resulting in poorly exposed images. The cathedral is huge and a speedlight on top of the camera is not going to cut the mustard in terms of getting an even exposure across such a large group! I used a couple of 500w monoblocs running from a large battery pack to get a lot of light into the images at a low ISO resulting in crisp bright shots with a lot of detail.

After doing a combination of shots of the whole choir and the different sections, we shot some individual portraits for those that wanted them, including this year, shots of the choir boys and girls with their parents. I chose to shoot the individual shots in the choir stalls as I really like the carved wooden pews and the altar candles. This brings some inherent problems of capturing the ambient background light while at the same time lighting the subject but by understanding how to control both ambient and flash together by dragging the shutter, it’s possible to create some lovely portraits. The individual portraits were all taken with the awesome 70-200mm lens, handheld at 1/10 of a second :¬)