It’s no secret that wedding photography is not for the faint-hearted - there’s an incredible amount of pressure on you, and expectations are high, too. You’ll need to capture all of the key beats throughout the day and nail them in-camera – asking everyone to come back again for a reshoot because you messed up is not an option.
After going freelance earlier this year I’ve been looking to take on more weddings to make a living - you’ll find all of the details on my website if you'd like to take a peek. Luckily, modern mirrorless cameras have some secret settings you may wish to take full advantage of to make the big day go as smoothly as possible.
For starters, I'll mention that I shoot on two cameras, both recording to dual memory card slots for redundancy. This way, should a camera break, or a memory card fail I have a backup and this is good common practice – I even have a third camera stashed in my car in case things really go wrong!
My other strong advice is to format your cards before the shoot and synchronize the time and date in both cameras to make them sync up neatly when you’re editing all of the files from various cards and cameras back home.
One of my favorite secret settings is making full use of the extremely quiet (near silent in many cases) electronic shutter on modern mirrorless cameras. But, I exclusively use this setting for the wedding ceremony when I don’t want a loud shutter clack to disrupt or draw attention away from the happy couple.
Electronic shutters have drawbacks, one of which is a defect called rolling shutter, which can cause unsightly distortions. It’s worth noting this has become less of an issue in some modern cameras that have very fast, or even instant readout speeds like with the Canon EOS R5 Mark II, or even Sony A9 III with its global shutter.
So after shooting the ceremony quietly with the silent shutter to keep a low profile I like to change my settings straight back to the mechanical shutter to keep rolling shutter distortion to a minimum. Call me old fashioned but I also like to hear the shutter clack which reassures me that I’ve taken the photo.
It’s worth noting that some older DSLRs have a quiet mode, though as they have a mirror to move up and out of the way, this didn’t tend to reduce the sound notably, it would just extend the shutter clack sound, if anything making it more pronounced.
So if you've got a mirrorless camera and a wedding or event coming up, be sure to try out the electronic shutter but save it for those moments where you want to keep a low profile and not draw attention with the sound of your camera's shutter firing.
