How to Photograph a Sunday

At eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, somebody in your town is looking at your church’s social media feed. They have been thinking about giving church a try for a while. They are not evaluating the quality of your photography, the lighting, or composition. They are trying to work out one thing, which is whether there would be a place for them to fit in on a Sunday.

What Someone In The Community Is Looking For

They want to know your pastor is not weird. That he seems like a person you could talk to after a service without it being strange. They want to see who is actually there in the congregation. Not just the worship leader’s face, but what the crowd looks like while they are leading, and whether anybody in your church looks relatable.

They want to know their kids would have fun and be safe. They want to see people finding a place to belong in discipleship and worship. And underneath all of it, they want to see that your church has real people in it. People who do not have their lives together, but are a part of worship anyway.

That last one is the hardest to photograph and the most valuable when you do. A person considering your church is not looking for a congregation that has everything together. They are looking for somewhere they will not have to pretend.

Why the Stage Is the Wrong Subject

The stage or chancel is the easy shot. It is usually the best-lit part of the space, everyone on it is facing you, and the frames come out sharp without much effort. So that is where most people point, and forty frames later there is a good picture of the guitar player and nothing that answers the questions about finding a place to belong in that worship set.

Turning around to face the crowd and include them in the action is the solution. People singing and worshiping without noticing the camera is a more meaningful shot. So is the smiling conversation in the hallway that neither person planned. So is a kid dragging a friend toward the children’s area.

Staged photos have a place sometimes. You will need a clean headshot of the pastor and a usable image of the outside of the building. But a social media page full of arranged smiling under good lighting tells a stranger the church is the feature or that everyone in your church has no problems.

Determining Your Settings

Your building structure and lighting are the variables that decide everything else. An auditorium with theatrical lighting, a school cafeteria, and an older sanctuary with stained glass require three different lighting solutions. Settings that work in one might be wrong in the others.

I use custom modes to get me mostly in the right place for lighting a few different scenes on a Sunday. I’ve spent time waking my building to know how to group together different scenarios of lighting to quickly dial in exposure. If your camera has custom modes, take time to explore and save what you learn into those modes so you are not working through a menu while something is happening in front of you.

In an auditorium with theatrical lighting, your problem is probably a bright stage against a congregation sitting in almost complete shadow, and the camera in auto will average the two and way overexpose the shot to compensate for all the dark areas. For these, don’t be afraid to shoot in manual. Aperture priority and shutter priority both fail here the same way. Open the lens as wide as it goes, and 2.8 or wider is what you want for low lighting. Underexpose the stage lights on purpose, or switch from evaluative metering to spot so the camera reads one part of the frame instead of averaging all of it.

My first mode is set for theatrical lighting at 2.8, ISO 1250, 1/250, with white balance set by hand to match the kelvin of our stage washes. Those numbers are mine for my auditorium. The manual, the wide aperture, and the spot meter to evaluate exposure are yours to adjust.
Stop being afraid of high ISO while you are at it. Modern mirrorless bodies shoot 6400 without grain anybody would ever notice, and a frame of real emotion holds a little noise in the shadows without any trouble. A clean but blurry frame is pointless, right?

Wherever the light is even- meaning in a hallway, a classroom, the lobby, the place where people are talking after the service- use aperture priority, ISO around 3200, white balance on auto. If your church meets in a school cafeteria or a gym, this is not your second mode; it is your whole Sunday. Flat overhead light and daylight through a wall of windows fighting each other, nothing lit well and nothing hopelessly dark. Find where the window light falls on faces and shoot people standing near it when possible.

The third one changes depending on weather and refresh rates. Outdoors, drop the ISO to 100 and close the aperture down. Anywhere projectors, televisions, or cheap LED fixtures are in the shot, switch to shutter priority and set it to a multiple of 60 so you do not pull banding across the frame.

Before any of this is critical on Sunday, spend an hour in the space on a weekday if possible. Shoot it with nobody in it, look at the files on a real screen rather than just the back of the camera, and find out what your building does to an image. Every setting you use after that hour is downstream of what you learn in it.

Waiting Out the Opportunity

People behave differently for about two minutes after they notice someone with a camera. If you wait long enough, eventually they forget you are there, and everything worth photographing happens after that.

So pick your spot before the moment you want and stay in it far longer than feels reasonable. Most of what looks like luck in good church photography is somebody who stood still long enough and just waited for people to forget they were there.

Your people are going to be the church together this Sunday whether anyone catches it or not. Plan the spot, wait it out, and trust God to put something real in front of you worth capturing to help someone else find their place to belong.

One More Thing Before You Shoot

Find out what your church’s policy is on photographing people, and especially on photographing children, before you are standing in a hallway with a camera. Many churches have one, and most volunteers have never been told it exists. That conversation belongs before the first Sunday somebody holds a camera, not after a parent sees their kid on your Instagram feed.