Tales from the dark (underexposed) side

If you are shooting weddings, you're shooting the dress. Period. In order of importance, you have the bride, her dress and then her mother. If you get them right, you've done a nice job. Be sure to get a few of the groom, but don't worry. As long as he shows up, sober he's fine.

In all seriousness, shooting a bride and groom together is a problem. No sensor in daylight can accommodate both the white dress details and the black tux. So what to do?

Expose for the dress, use RAW files exclusively and sort it out in post-production. It's much better to have a solid black tux, than screw up and overexpose the dress so all of the expensive detail is lost. On occasion, that's fine but as a rule of thumb, the bride will examine your images for dress details, and that will be her make or break position on how well you did. If you err slightly to underexposure; you can tell from the histogram then you'll be okay.

I love to use big, studio strobes at weddings. I think that I'm the only one, but that's fine. Someone has to be right. As long as you have a white ceiling, preferably 12-15 feet high, and white walls if possible you can position a big strobe in the corner and shoot the light out towards the room ceiling center and you'll get very nice soft directional light. You can add a small 1/128th manual setting on the on-camera strobe for fill to taste and you'll do very well. If you shoot against the light, or farther down the room, just change the manual to 1/64th or similar and view the LCD for results. Of course, the strobe and wireless trigger must work together.