To protect the "guilty", I'll just say that "one of my assistants", overexposed an entire ceremony, the first time she'd done anything like that in a couple years, but it looked pretty bad, at least two stops off.

I'd taught her to zoom in on a face and set the exposure button and/or use her 70% zebra settings to double-check exposure, but these are for caucasian faces. This wedding was black people. The groom, who was from Liberia, and many of the participants were particularly dark-skinned. For some reason, possibly it's just this part of the country, but we don't get many black weddings. Now that we're doing weddings all over the country, we're being exposed to a variety of cultures and peoples..

Skin color makes a difference for several reasons. We don't tend to think of black weddings as being different at all and we tend not to think about skin color - and this is great for society in general (although we still have a very long ways to go), but it can be disasterous for videographers.

To simplify the learning process, when it comes to exposure, I'd taught my wife to always expose for the face and to heck with everything else. So that's what she did, only she exposed trying to make a black-skin face look like a caucasian face. She didn't do this consciously of course, but by zooming in on a black face and hitting the automatic exposure button or going by 70% with zebra settings, that is exactly what you are doing.

To properly expose for dark-skinned people, you cannot use auto-exposure and you cannot use 70% zebra. In fact, you can't even use 100% zebra. The reason is that digital video doesn't handle contrast well. You have a white dress and dark skin and something has to give. That "something" will be the gown. It'll just have to blow out much of the time. Therefore, the point where Zs cover the gown doesn't tell us anything useful when we want to expose for skin tones. (So it's a good idea to shoot it hanging, before the bride puts it on).

As a good starting point, have a caucasian person (perhaps your assistant) stand where the couple will be, then expose for them and note your f-stop and gain settings. Or you could use an 18% gray card under the lighting conditions you'll be shooting in, then - (depending on your camera) you'll probably need to open a half-stop wider. This should be close to the proper exposure setting. Be sure the gray card is held at 1/3rd angle away from your camera, both horizontally and vertically toward the light source. Also, make sure your LCD is properly adjusted (see "The LCD Blues" article) and keep a close eye on your exposure as the wedding progresses.

If this article is too late and you've already blown your exposure, look for our upcoming article on how to repair improperly exposed video. I've progressed through a variety of techniques for exposure repair over the years until I finally came upon one that works much better than all the others.

While we're on the topic of black weddings, some may include an event called "jump the broom". You'll need to know if this is planned because if you're shooting from behind the couple and your rear camera is wide, you won't get proper coverage. The couple will likely come down the steps where a ceremonial broom is laid before them which they will jump over, together. You'll want to be able to move so that you can cover this or set up a fourth camera, next to the rear static camera, but preset with a somewhat lower and somewhat tighter frame.

One last point, I recently wrote an article reminding wedding videographers to try and stay out of each others' shots. I think this is doubly important if you are caucasian, asian, etc. and your client and most guests are black. Same thing goes if you are black and your clients and most guests are white. Anything that makes you stand out will make you just that much more distracting in the video.

Our differences may only be skin deep, but that's a big difference when it comes to videography. I hope this article helps you give better service to your black clients.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.