My Wedding Photography Lenses Part 1: the 20mm

How does a lens I barely use for wedding photography make the best pictures?

I don’t just do wedding photography or portrait photography, I also do landscape or outdoors photography. For my landscape photography work I like using three prime lenses with one being ultra-wide, one being a normal lens, and one being a slight telephoto. As always I don’t like using zooms. My feelings about zooms are they weigh a ton and the photographer gets lazy. When I move around my brain turns on and I start seeing new ideas to try. I have indeed used and use zooms. My Canon wedding kit consists of the amazing RF 28-70mm f2 and the 70-200mm f2.8 lenses. However, since looking at the pictures I’ve shot with the Nikon primes I used just prior to switching over to mirrorless cameras, it’s made me think about how much fun it always was to use fast prime lenses for my work.

My new Black and White Only wedding photography option will be shot with the Fuji XT-5 and four prime lenses: an ultra-wide, an equivalent of the 35mm, a normal lens, and a slight telephoto. I’m curious to both see if anyone wants that option and how much fun it will be to go back to prime lenses for my work.

Way back in the day, when I bought my first ultra-wide lens, the venerable Nikon 18mm f2.8, the guy at B&H Photo said it was a lens that would get very little use. I won as many awards with that lens as any other lens. I shot more early landscapes with that lens than any other lens. I used it constantly with my friends in San Francisco. It only started staying in the bag for friend pictures when I started using the Nikon 35mm f2 lens. (I’ll do a post about the 35 in the future)

Almost by accident I started keeping it in the bag as an occasional whip out the ultra-wide in special circumstances lens. The Nikon 20mm lens I used was tiny and weighed almost nothing compared to the Profoto batteries or any other fast prime lenses I was using. So it was easy to keep handy for special occasions. I did use the amazing Nikon 14-24 f2.8 zoom for one important picture. The one that’s always in the mix for any portfolio showing. It was the sunrise picture from a Crater Lake wedding a few years ago. I shot it at 14mm and to this day is the widest I’ve ever gone at a wedding.

The Magic

The guy at B&H Photo was right in that the ultra-wides don’t get used much for people pictures, especially at weddings. I don’t use them for any of the regular type pictures of getting ready or at the reception. However they can be useful for portraits, the venue, and overalls of the ceremony. A show everything lens. But they need to be used sparingly to not overdo the look. You don’t want to eat pie and cake every day because you’ll get fat and bored with pie and cake. But every so often they’re like magic. Open up the look of the other pictures, especially if using just prime lenses for wedding photography. Shock the system. Excite the look of a portfolio. Add some spice. Whatever the simile, it just makes the overall look slightly different and for me, oftentimes becomes the picture of the day. Maybe it’s because of the influence of landscape photography I know when it will look the best.

Finding and Choosing the Pictures

Recently I re-signed up to advertise at the Wedding Wire and had to get a portfolio of pictures ready. The lady on the phone (I seem to get a lot of information from people on phones) told me the portfolio section needed 20 pictures. So I grabbed a bunch, but not all, of the weddings I’ve shot over the years and started combing through the pictures to find 20 winners. A couple things I love about using Lightroom for editing wedding, portrait, and landscape photography are the ability to load a pile of pictures into the program and then to be able to rate the pictures using stars. For this project I started with over 5,000 pictures from a bunch of weddings. These aren’t the entire wedding, they were the 150-200 keepers from the weddings. Going from no stars to one star I cut it down to maybe 400 pictures. Then from one star to two stars I cut it down to maybe 200 pictures. At four stars I had 52 pictures and then at five stars I had 20.

Side bar: of course when I went to load the portfolio onto the Wedding Wire site, they said a person could actually have 50 pictures. Which then took me about 30 seconds to dump the extra two pictures and end up with 50 four star pictures.

Being a curious person who likes to analyze numbers and patterns I went a step further and started to analyses what lenses made some of the better pictures. So I went back down to the two star edit and then hit the metadata button and looked at the lenses. The Nikon 20mm lens stood out with a few pictures that were some of my favorites. In the final 20 it was something like 4 pictures. Which was really high considering how rarely it gets used. Another lens that surprised me was the Zeiss 135mm f2 lens. I only used it at four weddings before selling it because of the manual focus being too slow and the image quality called bokeh being a little sloppy. I’ll blog about that later too.

The places where that lens was used always needed a wide lens to work. For example the only way to show the entire arc of a rainbow is to be at least 20mm wide. The Black Butte Ranch dock is one of my favorite locations for sunset portraits at weddings there. A 20mm lens really works well because I can walk right up to the edge of the dock and show the people in the cross of the dock with both the ends of the dock and a big sky above. Big group shots work nicely too.

It really can be fun to use in a wide variety of situations, but it needs to be used sparingly. Sometimes people, me included, start going ultra-wide and then don’t go back. All the pictures start looking kind of odd with the warping of bodies and objects in the pictures. So I’m guessing a photographer needs to use it when necessary but then put it away again and not fall too much in love with the look.

While studying photojournalism at San Francisco State, our professor Ken Kobre would sometimes bring in amazing photographers to look at our pictures and talk about photography. Being students we would all use the ultra-wides for almost everything. I loved my Nikon 18mm lens and while learning to use it, I would use it for everything. Oftentimes not using it very well.

One of the photographers Kobre brought in was Gideon Mendel, a world famous photojournalist from South Africa. I can still hear him saying in his accent telling us to “Take your super wide angle lenses to Pier 39 and drop them off into the bay. Don’t go wider than 28mm.” We all of course didn’t really listen, but I did save up for my 35mm f2 lens and start using it a lot more. Actually the 35mm lens is my most used wedding photography lens.

But when used judiciously, the ultra-wide 20mm lens is like magic.