These photographs were taken with a Nikon Coolpix 990 digital camera. While the Coolpix is an excellent camera in many respects, it performs rather poorly in low-light situations--and, unfortunately, in some situations where the light isn't all that low. This makes a number of photos come out "wrong" in various ways.

Most of these "wrong" shots come out underexposed--unfortunately, most of the photos I took during the actual wedding suffered in this way. I corrected some of them in Photoshop by fiddling with the levels, resulting in weirdly oversaturated colors. I actually sort of like this effect--it's reminiscent of old hand-colored photographs--but I wish i'd gotten more naturalistic shots. Here are two examples of photos that came out this way.

Some of the underexposed shots really didn't look very good at all when I did this, so I took the even more drastic step of converting them to black and white. Again, the result isn't unpleasant to look at, but it doesn't really look as good as "real" black and white photos. Here are two examples of this approach.

The Nikon's built-in flash isn't very good--it's too close to the lens, which results in heavy shadowing and red-eye. As a result, I almost always use an external flash. However, in various situations it's still too harsh, and often results in the background looking very dark (because the flash only illuminates objects close to the camera). I sometimes try to compensate for this by doing a "slow sync", which leaves the shutter open for a normal exposure after the flash has fired. Because of the slow lens on the Nikon, this often leaves the shutter open for a rather long time (1/4-1/2 sec), leading to an unusual "blurring" effect, where the "flashed" image of the object is sharp, but a "ghost" image caused by motion is also visible. The picture of Paul and his friend laughing is an extreme example of this, but it also occurs in more normal shots. Like the oversaturated shots, this effect is actually kind of interesting as a novelty shot, but I wish I didn't have to rely on it when I just want a normal, realistic shot.

So--I guess I'm apologizing for the odd quality of some of the pictures :) Still, I hope you like them.

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Copyright © 2001 Narciso Jaramillo

nj's face : viz : photos : people : bryan and shannon