TECHNICAL DETAILS
Sony A7iii
Sony FE 28-70 GM
1/25 at f/6.3, ISO 16,000

LOW LIGHT WONDER

I just had the good fortune of shooting a wedding for someone I’ve known for probably 40 years. She’s a step-mother to one of my oldest friends, and the occasion of her re-marriage was a happy milestone all around. I met with her and her then fiancée at the venue, a country club in the greater Twin Cities area, for lunch before the event to review plans and check out the location. Lunch was mid-day, and even then, the dark paneling and little overhead lighting made me keenly aware that a winter wedding in the late afternoon was going to make for some very challenging lighting conditions on the day of the ceremony. I spent a little time in the room where the ceremony would take place looking at the arrangement of the windows, exterior lighting sources and what there would be for overheads. With flash out of the question for a low-key, candlelit ceremony, it was evident I was going to be pushing the limits of any camera’s capabilities.

A week or two prior to the wedding event, I had upgraded one of my camera bodies to the new Sony A7iii. I am not generally an early adopter of upgrading bodies, but there were a couple of really killer features of the mark iii Sony that pushed me to do it. Among those, was increased low-light performance. And the A7ii was already pretty good in low light. So I was eager to see if the new body could buy me a stop or two while shooting this event.

Wedding day arrived, and it was beautiful. A fresh coating of snow dusted the outside environs, and the inside was decked out beautifully. I arrived early and we did a lot of portraits and other shots while it was still light outside. As the ceremony neared – a 5:00 p.m. scheduled start just a week after the winter solstice – my predictions about tricky lighting were indeed validated. The ceremony room was lit mostly by candles and some quite dim overhead recessed incandescents. Outside the main windows behind where the participants and officiant would stand, the last of the Blue Hour was enough to outline trees, and the club’s holiday decoration lights glowed across the fresh snow from trees and bushes in the distance. If I could balance the inside and outside lighting, I knew it would make for a really memorable shot of the actual event.

For the ceremony, I kept my A7ii on a big tripod at the back of the room with the 70-200 on for closer shots of the couple and speakers. I hand held the A7iii with the 28-70 G Master on it to get shots from different angles in the back. There was little I could control for lighting, so I shot aperture priority, set manual white balance, and used Auto ISO. I captured a number of shots that seemed to balance interior and exterior conditions pretty well, at least as far as I could tell while chimping a bit while shooting. I had to pay attention to events too closely to do more than a cursory inspection to ensure I was getting something recorded.

Back home after the event, I uploaded and backed up all the data, and took a quick look through. This image jumped out, and with some moderate post-processing, I was able to really capture the feel of the dramatic lighting, balancing the outside holiday lights, a little remaining light in the western sky, and the interior candles and overheads. Despite having a fast lens on with the 28-70 GM, I used a moderate f6.3 exposure to ensure I had gradual focus fall-off from through the audience and into the far background with the trees and lights.

It was only after working on the shot for a little bit that I looked at the EXIF data from the image and noticed that the ISO was at 16,000! I was floored. While I was used to good low-light performance from the A7ii, the ability of the A7iii to capture this scene – hand held, no less – at that super high ISO and produce the image as well as it did was astounding to me. Perhaps still as a legacy of growing up shooting film, the concept of shooting usable images with only moderate grain at ISO 16,000 is just jaw-dropping. The bride loved the image, and I was happy knowing my upgraded camera body had indeed made a difference in my ability to create memorable images from this special day.

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