The Forest Fairy

We shot this in Cameron Highland for our pre-wedding photos. It was in a forest behind a tea garden.

The sunlight at 5pm was very diffused esp it was a cloudy day. Not only that. it was windy and cold too (considering it is in Malaysia). I checked the temperature on my watch, it showed 23°C.

Bel (my fiancée then, my wife now) practically was wearing just a piece of white clothe, not a dress. It was a LONG clothe that wrapped around her body. Poor girl, you could actually see her shivering under such cold temperature, but like what they always said during wedding preparation “Once In A Lifetime, Never mind. Sacrifice for it”.

I took this using my old Fujifilm Finepix S3Pro with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. I chose this camera over my Nikon for its dynamic range. Until today, I still like the dynamic range and the colour produced by the Fujifilm Super CCD sensor. It is a REALLY nice camera to take scenery, portrait and espeacially wedding photos (Fujifilm don’t pay me to say this, in case you wonder )

However, The Fujifilm S3Pro and S5Pro (one of the camera bodies I am using today) are cameras which are known for high noise at high ISO.

I tried not to use high ISO to avoid noise as this is a wedding shoot which will go for print. Bel was actually sitting in a shaded area in a forest covered with trees. See, I was in a dilemma, I actually wanted to take this shot at a smaller aperture like f/9 or f/11 to have a deeper depth of field. But at that aperture in such shaded area, in order to handhold the camera at small aperture, I gotta use a high ISO, or I gotta use a slower shutter speed which very likely would produce a blur image.

I noticed Bel was sitting not too far from the background. That distance allowed me to use a smaller aperture. Set my exposure reading to ISO200, 1/60s @ f/2.8 and quickly took this before my wife turned into an “Ice Woman”.