Part of my reason for buying a G11 recently was my daughter's upcoming wedding. Not being the "official" photographer for obvious reasons, I did want to be able to capture images and memories of family and guests that the paid photographer would not be getting.

Well, the wedding is over and I have begun looking at and processing photos. This post will be more about thoughts, and impressions about the camera and flash when used at this kind of event. I'll post a few sample images at a later time.

For starters, the G11 was a great "take along" camera that on a Op/Tech neoprene neck strap was easily hidden under my tux. Even as I walked my daughter down the aisle. The 270EX flash was concealed in my tux pants pocket when not being used. I did use the little flash most of the evening, however, and after more than 500 flashes, it was still going strong on the first set of AA batteries! I was impressed. And this was in bounce mode most of the time with at least 20' (if not higher) ceilings so the unit was really having to put out some serious light. Recycle times were quite speedy.

The venue where the wedding took place was pretty dim inside. Light colored walls, but not a true neutral. Warm Tungsten lighting complicated matters. I knew I would be mixing light sources. I set the ISO on the G11 to 400 and stayed in "P" mode most of the time. A few times some exposure compensation was needed on either the flash or the camera, but not that often. One thing I would have done differently had I been using my usual DSLR bodies is set the white balance manually to about 3000k and gel my flash to match. Unfortunately, with the G11 you cannot specify the precise color temperature and I decided that the AWB was giving me okay results.

I shot RAW + JPEG in hopes that some if not most of the JPEG images straight from the camera would be decent and not require too much post processing. I soon determined this was not to be the case. With the cream colored walls (not a true white) and the warm tungsten light, the G11's AWB was all over the place. Choosing the tungsten setting helped except for then when the flash was used which was most of the time. Once again, mixing light sources is never an easy thing to do. Anyway, I just decided I would tweak the RAW files after the fact and not be too concerned about what I was seeing on my G11 LCD.

I had the camera's focus set to servo as most of my shooting was un-posed candids and people were often walking in the shots. Compared to a DSLR, the auto focus was having a bit more trouble locking on the subject and keeping it in focus. The inherently deeper DOF of the small sensor helped, but there were a good number of shots that just were out of focus by a small margin even using the AF assist beam.

Exposures were generally decent, but bouncing off the high ceiling did tend to cause a fair number of underexposed shots. Although this did help to mitigate the vast color temperature differences of the flash output and the ambient light. As I will show in another post (with actual photo examples), the reasons for shooting RAW files in a situation like this are easy to understand. I was able to salvage useable images from many of the RAW files where the JPEGs would have begun to break apart if I'd had to try and "massage" them enough to get decent color and exposure, not too mention noise.

Speaking of noise, I was quite pleased with the G11 noise levels at ISO 400. I also did some shots without flash at ISO 800 and the noise there, though more obvious, was not a deal breaker, just a bit more pronounced. Beyond ISO 800 though, it gets pretty dicey.

I processed all the images though DPP because I think it it currently does much better than ACR based on my limited testing prior to the wedding. The thing with DPP is that it is a bit slower, kind of awkward in certain ways, and some of the controls are not as precise as ACR. Having said that, if you take the time to become familiar with the software, it really can pull some outstanding results from the G11 files even the poorly exposed and badly white balanced ones.

After quite a bit of time at the computer working with the RAW files I have to say that I am still quite pleased with how both the camera and the flash performed. I'm sure that with more practice and familiarity I could have gotten even better results right out of the camera, but it was great seeing files that had their share of technical challenges process quite nicely in DPP.

So am I ready to give up my DSLRs, interchangeable lenses, and more powerful fIash units? No, not at all. I could not even if I wanted to since I rely on them for my work. The G11 overall handling and results, while very good, are not the same as using a DSLR especially in certain challenging situations. However, I look forward to capturing a lot more important memories and moments with the G11 at times when my DSLR kit is either not appropriate (for me to be using) or when I just want to leave it at home.

One final thing, I also played around with some video clips using the G11 and the smoothness of images and the sound quality are really quite excellent for a non HD video cam. The G11 is a wonderful all around package.

Happy Shooting,

TomJ