What you are actually paying for.

The pandal bulbs burn orange, around 3000 kelvin. The videographer’s LED panel is daylight, around 5600. The street lamp leaking in through the entrance is sodium, close to 2000 and barely a colour at all. And if there is a gap in the shamiana, actual daylight comes through it at something else again.

One white balance setting cannot serve four sources. So you choose: match your own light to the room and let the room be warm, or overpower the room and let it go cold behind you. Both are decisions. What you must not do is leave it to the camera, which will average all four and make everybody look faintly green.

This is also why we shoot raw. White balance then stops being a mistake you made at 8pm and becomes a decision made calmly afterwards, with the bride’s actual lehenga colour to check against.

At 1/125 of a second the flowers smear and the hands blur. At 1/500 the garland freezes mid-air with every marigold separate. That single stop-and-a-bit is the difference between a photograph the family frames and one they scroll past.

The floor is the reciprocal rule: hand-held, keep the shutter at least 1 over the focal length. A 200mm lens wants 1/200 before stabilisation is doing anything for you, and stabilisation steadies the camera — it does nothing at all about a groom who is moving.

Buying that speed indoors costs you something. Wider aperture, higher ISO, or your own light. There is no fourth option, and pretending otherwise is how people come home with a blurred varmala.

An 85mm lens at f/1.2, focused three metres away, holds about four centimetres in focus. A bride and groom are almost never in the same four centimetres. You get her eyelashes perfect and his nose already going soft — and nobody looking at that photograph can say why it feels wrong, only that it does.

Two people standing together want roughly f/2.8 to f/4. A row of six at the reception wants f/5.6. Thirty relatives arranged on the stage want f/8 and light of your own, because at f/8 in a dark hall you are not getting there on ambient.

The background still goes soft at f/4 — separation comes from distance and focal length as much as from aperture. Stand the couple further from the wall and the wall disappears anyway.

There is a habit of treating high ISO as a failure of nerve. It is not. A sharp, slightly grainy frame of the moment somebody’s mother started crying is worth incalculably more than a clean, smooth photograph of the place where that moment used to be.

Sensors have moved on. ISO 6400 is a working number now, not an emergency, and grain at 6400 is finer than the grain everybody happily paid for on film. How much noise reduction to apply is a decision made afterwards, on a big screen, with the print size known.

The order of priorities inside a dark mandap is: get the moment, keep it sharp, then worry about how clean it is. In that order, every time.

Candid work runs in continuous autofocus with eye detection, because the subject is walking, turning and being hugged by an aunt. Single-shot focus locks once and then politely watches the subject leave it.

Back-button focus separates focusing from the shutter release: the thumb focuses, the finger only takes the picture. Now you can hold focus and recompose without the camera helpfully re-focusing on the shoulder of whoever stepped in front of you.

For a portrait it goes back to a single point, placed on the near eye. Not the face, not the nose. The eye — and the near one, because that is what a viewer looks at first and the only place softness is unforgivable.

Every large coloured surface at a wedding is a light source. A red shamiana bounces red onto everybody underneath it. Marigold throws yellow. A pink uplighter behind the stage puts a magenta rim on the back of the groom’s head, which is either a beautiful separation or a mistake, depending entirely on whether you meant it.

Correcting for that without flattening everyone to the same beige is the actual work. Indian skin runs across a wide range, and a grade that flatters one tone can turn another grey or orange. It is done per photograph where it matters, not with one preset dropped on nine hundred frames.

A neutral reference in one frame per lighting setup — a grey card, or honestly just a white napkin — saves an hour of guessing later and costs three seconds at the time.

Every other kind of photography has a second chance. A product can go back on the table, a portrait sitting can be rebooked. A saptapadi happens once, in front of everybody, and if the card holding it fails there is no version of the afternoon in which it happens again.

So: two cards written simultaneously, not one card and hope. A second body, so that a failure is an inconvenience rather than the end of the coverage. Batteries counted before leaving, not discovered at the reception.

And copies made before the gear goes back in the bag at the venue — because the drive home is where a bag gets left in an autorickshaw, and one copy is not a backup.

At a Maharashtrian wedding the antarpat — the cloth held between them — comes down at the end of the mangalashtak, and for about one second the couple see each other. A photographer who has to look around to find out why everyone is throwing rice has already missed it.

At a Bengali wedding, shubho drishti is the moment she lowers the betel leaves and looks at him for the first time. It is quiet, it is quick, and it is usually the single best frame of the day. You have to be standing in the right place before it starts.

Thirty-odd years in one town means knowing the order of both, and knowing which uncle will step in front of you at kanyadaan. That is not a service you can buy in a shop.

Motion on screen looks natural when the shutter is roughly double the frame rate. Shoot 24 frames a second and the shutter wants to be about 1/50. Faster and movement gets a hard, stuttering edge; much slower and it smears.

Outdoors in Indian daylight that rule is expensive. Holding 1/50 in full sun means the aperture would have to close to something that ruins the look, so the light gets cut with a neutral density filter instead — sunglasses for the lens. It is why a film crew carries filters and a photographer does not.

And slow motion is a punctuation mark, not a language. Everything at half speed stops reading as cinematic within about forty seconds and starts reading as a screensaver.

Print wants about 300 dots to the inch at final size. A photograph that looks flawless filling a phone screen can be well short of that blown up across a 12-inch spread, and you find out at the printer rather than on the screen.

A screen is backlit and a page is not, so an image approved on a bright phone comes back off the press looking heavy. Soft-proofing to the printer’s own profile before the file goes is the difference between one round of printing and three.

Lay-flat binding matters more than people expect: on a normal bound album, the middle of a spread disappears into the gutter, and the middle of a spread is exactly where a designer wants to put the couple. Lay-flat lets a picture cross the fold with nobody’s face folded in half.