The market for Wedding Photographers has been getting very crowded the last two years. This is not surprising given the current issues with the economy and so many individuals who are out of work, and willing to take their own digital cameras and offer to shoot anyone and anything for some extra money. The new digital technology has opened up competition, by offering digital cameras which allow most anyone the ability to grab fairly decent 'snapshots", however, that is what they are...snapshots. The way we, as professional wedding photographers, differentiate ourselves (from Aunt Mary with her latest digital camera bought at Best Buy or Target) is in the quality of our work and in our working relationship with our clients. The Bride and Groom (along with their famly and invited wedding guests) are expecting much more from photographers than simple snapshots. They wish to 'enjoy the experience' as well as capturing those special moments! The 'photographic experience' and the 'quality of the final images' is what will make the difference and make one stand out from the crowd. I will be following up with a post regarding the 'photographic experience' next week, however this time I wish to speak about the quality of the images.

Regardless if one takes a photojounalistic, classical, or illustrative approach to their wedding photography, what is critical is the quality of the final image. That means taking that wonderful technology called digital cameras, off of their 'P"-for Professional Mode (just kidding...P is Program Mode) and put the camera on Manual. Setting the camera on to Manual Mode is the only way one can override what the 'camera thinks' is the proper exposure and have control over that yourself and allow your creativity to shine. Yes, I do take a 'test shot, in Program or Aperture Priority Mode, in order to understand the exposure parameters (yes...I am using my in camera metering system as my own Light Meter), but then I switch to manual and reset my exposure (shutter and aperture) to match my light settings on my Quantum (power and distance from the subject) in order to take advantage of the available ambient light, and then take my shot. I also recommend not using that on-camera direct flash in simple TTL mode, except in the case of tight quarters where I would use a bounce off of a wall, a reflector, umbrella, or even use one of the groomsmen and bounce the light off of his shirt if needed (yes I have been in the position where I have done that too). In most cases I have an assistant who holds a Quantum T5DR flash mounted on a Monfrotto monopod controlled by a freewire transmitter velcro-ed to my on camera flash and plugged into my camera sync outlet of my Canon 7D. I set the Quantum, again to manual mode, and have my assistant control the quantity of light (the Quantum is 150 WS of power which is almost three times the power of a Canon 580EX II Speedlight).

In this image I decided to use the Canon 70-200mm f2.8 Model II Telephoto lens. Yikes...this costs more than the Canon 7D body, as I almost had an earlier heart attack when I discovered the price prior to purchasing this lens from B&H Photo last Spring. This lens, albiet expensive, was well worth the investment as you can see from this image. The background is pleasantly out of focus (what us photographers refer to as Bokeh) with a sharp crisp image of the subjects. Again I was using off camera flash using the Quantum from camera left at 45 degrees from the axis of the Bride's face, shot through a translucent Umbrella (to diffuse the key light source) and create a flattering loop lighting pattern on the subjects. I used the camera in manual mode as I changed my shutter speed, above what would be considered the 'correct in-camera exposure' in order to allow the lens to capture the ambient light available at the location. Notice I also paid attention to the specific lighting pattern. In this case I used a modified 'loop lighting pattern' on my subjects. I also took the final image into Adobe Lightroom 3 and make some needed adjustments, using the 'Develop' module, and added some vingette around the edges (very fashionable now) in order to focus the viewers attention further on the subjects.

1. Shoot I, along with my second shooter, currently use a Canon 7D and a Canon 5D Mark II to shoot the wedding. The 7D  is my backup, but I have it over my shoulder most of the time with the EF-S 10-22mm lens attached to get my ultra-wide angle shots. The 5D Mark II is loaded with a 32Gb CF card which is more than enough for the whole shoot; the 7D is also fed with 32Gb CF cards throughout the shoot. I tend to grab in the region of 1600-1700 images over the whole day, most of which are on 32Gb cards in the 5D. I shoot entirely in RAW.

2. Ingest I use a SanDisk Extreme Firewire Reader to pull data into my PC off the cards. My relationship with this gadget has been rocky: I’ve already had to send two back to the manufacturers, the first would only show up on my system intermittently, the replacement they sent eventually suffered from a broken connector pin inside. SanDisk customer services is pretty good, although they took ages to replace the second device. I’ve got another replacement now and it seems to be working okay.

When it works, it’s fast.

Everything goes into a specific wedding catalogue in Lightroom 3. I don’t keyword anything or apply any custom presets upon import other than my own default one which reduces sharpening and turns off all noise reduction, but I do attach copyright and basic metadata. I rename my files to ‘bridegroomdatelocation0001′. The RAWs get their own folder on a seperate, non-boot partition of my hard drive. I have all my files on a set of disks configured in a RAID 5 redundant disk striping configuration, in order to prevent losing data if there is a hard disk failure of any kind. I have a separate disk controllers and have four separate disk packs which are backed up weekly. I also back up the RAW images to a set of DVDs and store those off-site and in a fireproof safe onsite. Call me anal, but I was once a Database Administrator and I am a bit nervous regarding the protection and backup of my data.

3. Cull & Select Out of the 1700-2000 shots now in the catalogue, many can be deleted straight away. I go through the whole collection in the Library module, Loupe view and hit the X key for the unsatisfactory shots – the badly exposed, the out of focus and the plain bad. At this stage, I’m also making my initial selection – those images which have a chance of making it to the final edit, i.e. they contribute to the story of the day and they are techincally good enough to make the grade. I hit B on this to add to the Quick Collection.

4. RAW processing:  I typically end up with 500-600 selected subset of images in the Quick Collection and each is initially scrutunised for imperfections such as dust on the sensor, closed eyes, trees and branches sticking out of people’s head, etc. If an image needs a lot of cleaning up in Photoshop, I consider dropping it from the collection if another image fits the bill in the story. I wish to complete as much editing in Lightroom as possible without doing much heavy lifting in Photoshop.

Each image undergoes adjustments in the basic Develop module panel – exposure, fill light, recovery and blacks are my sliders here. Often I will apply the Auto Tone to see if equalises the exposure correctly and often it does. My primary aim is to reduce contrast and even out the histogram, making sure nothing (shadows, highlights, and mdi-tones) is clipped at either end of the spectrum.

I then use a number of sliders to “style” the image, which for me varies from shoot to shoot. Sometimes a muted palette of colors suits the wedding, other times I go for a warmer, more colorful, saturated look. Depends on the weather, the venue, the people and the clothes.

Here I’m using vibrance, split tonining and the whole arsenal of color sliders – as well as the camera profile settings – to achieve the look I want. The reliable ones get added as a preset to use in future. I have about six self-created presets I use regularly.

If I’m happy after making the edits, I apply a color label to the image which marks it as final. If I want to take an image into Photoshop for further work, it gets a different color label.

This process takes the best part of a full day’s work, sometimes two. Files selected for editing in Photoshop are exported to a separate folder as 16-bit PSD files – which from the 7D are in the range of 100Mb in size. Duplicate a few layers on these images and pretty quickly you find yourself working on a file approaching 1Gb in size, which takes an athletic system to deal with, so plenty is RAM needed (I have about 4Gb of RAM and actually I am looking to increase that to 8 Gb with a new Toshiba Satellite Pro soon).

5. Photoshop: Photoshop  is an absolute brutal powerhouse of an application but of course you can be as subtle or as devastating as you want. Often, I’ll use it purely to clone out imperfections and nothing more. Selecting in Photoshop has got better with every version, and now with CS5 it is even better. I would say it still cannnot seem to be able to select hair yet without going into monstrous detail with channel masking, but it’s pretty darn improved from the prior release. The extra time spent cleaning up an image to remove hairs, flare, reflections, stray limbs, dust, etc – is time well woth it in my opinion. It is one of the key things that separates the amateur from the pro in my opinion and it is vital for shooting weddings, when you can rarely control the background as you’d want.

Many of my signature images, such as the bride and groom portraits, get special treatment in Photoshop. I initially run this set through a Photoshop plugin call 'Beauty Box' developed by a software company by the name of Digital Anarchy. They have been developing software for the motion picture indistry for a number of years using the same technology and they recently migrated this technology to assist in still photography as well. My only complaint is that they would better serve the photographer by supporting this plugin in Lightroom (I understand this is currently in development).  I use a number of self-created actions to do this or make simple adjustments individually to improve an image. Here, depending on the lighting conditions at the time of the shoot and whether or not I was able to use flash or not, I’m concentrating on adding fill light to the subject and burning or vignetting the edges or the background – I want the subject to be at the forefront of the image. I might also increase the contrast in the key areas such as the eyes and the hair by applying masked S-Curves in Luminosity mode.

I save the important images (basically anything the client may want printed) with layers intact as PSD files and import these back into the Lightroom catalogue. These become my master files. I then convert and save them as Adobe DNG files.

6. Sharpening:  Never underestimate how important sharpening is in any digitial photography workflow. RAW files come off camera inherently soft. You tend to get used to them when you’re editing and see them as sharp, but when you sharpen properly, the difference is amazing and is often the key ingredient to people being impressed with your images, or at least commenting on the quality of your glass. Sharp glass is essential but if you don’t properly sharpen in post-production, and by that I mean sharpen correctly for the intended media, you might as well use a cheap kit lens.

Once I’ve done all my Photoshop edits, I select all RAW and PSD files in Lightroom, add some useful metadata, such as details of the shoot, and export them out to a seperate folder as JPGs at 72ppi, quality 10. Each of these is run through Nik Software Output Sharpener Pro which I’ve found to be the best sharpening algorithm around. I apply sharpening selectively so only the main subject gets it. The background should be soft.

At this stage, I am only sharpening for viewing onscreen, which means less sharpening than if I intended to print the image. These images are for viewing on my web site – if used for printing they’d be too small (72ppi) and and too soft.

7. Export for web gallery All sharpened JPGs are then uploading to my Gallery web site password protected for each client. This whole process can take hours (and sometimes even days) as I’m talking about uploading several hundred Mb of data here and upload speeds are appalling even using Comcast Cable High Speed Internet bandwidth.

Along with 19 other wedding photographers from across the country,  I had the opportunity to spend a week, working with David Ziser. The accompanying photo, David's wife LaDawn, David Ziser, and I, was taken on the last day of the workshop right before we all packed up and headed back home.

David takes a very interesting approach to wedding photography, having worked in this industry for over 35 years and having studied under such luminaries as Rocky Gunn & Monte Zucker. We spent 5 days discussing, eating, shooting, and sleeping photography. It was a combination of formal class sessions discussing techniques and approach to lighting, composition, post-processing (Lightroom 3 & Photoshop CS5.), studio business organization/practices, client relationship management,  and post-production processing & workflow. We were immersed in a number of days of live shooting, in various locales around the city, under different environmental conditions (lighting, indoor/outdoor, & weather) and worked on techniques related to on- and off-camera lighting, pictorial composition, etc.. We broke up into four groups and each group had their own set of specialized off-camera lighting gear, reflectors, umbrellas, and diffusers. We were handed scripted exercises to complete in order to understand and practice the new lighting and composition techniques he had taught formally with the whole group prior to each day's shoot.  After each period of live shooting we would assemble into groups and work on the images using Lightroom 3 & Photoshop CS5 and each photographer selected a sub-set of images for each group to review. These combined group images were given to David that evening. The very next morning, prior to the shoot for that day, David, and LeDawn, spent over 6 hours reviewing and critiquing the various images for composition, lighting (he is a big fan of loop lighting as am I by the way), posing, exposure, and post-processing. He ended up recording all of these review sessions for the class and gave each participant a DVD with the recordings (MPG format) which is a tremendous value! David and his wife LeDawn hosted the entire group for dinner twice at their home that week and also gave us a studio tour (they also have a home studio), during which, we discussed post-production processing, client management, vendor management, scheduling best practices, product development, and marketing approaches for professional studios. David also conducted some 'hand's on' sessions (installing the latest versions of CS5/Lightroom 3 on participants laptops as needed) in post-processing the images and demonstrated some interesting techniques, short-cuts, and suggestions for increasing productivity in our workflows. At the end of the week, as is customary for David's city-to-city seminars by now, David conducted a 'door prize' session where he gave away thousands of dollars of products and services offered by his vendor partners. I actually won a copy of NIK Software's new version of Viveza 2 Plugin for Photoshop CS5/Lightroom 3 that just recently came out. I have been using NIK's DEFINE 2.0 product for reducing noise, so this is a great opportunity to have some experience with another one of their offerings.

I feel especially privileged to have had the opportunity to study, be mentored and work along-side a true 'master of his craft'! I will be attending his next Fall Master Class. A great value for the investment! Highly recommended.

 have had a chance to play with an iPad application called ‘ShutterSnitch’.It’s the $7.99 iPad app that let’s you shoot directly into to your iPad when using the Eye-Fi cards. This app can accept pictures from any camera transmitter that’s capable of an FTP transfer, which includes all past and current Canon and Nikon digital SLR transmitter accessories. I use Canon’s wireless transmitter  for the 7D for this purpose. What is this good for you ask? I am always looking for ways to provide really great value to my clients. Recently I shot an event where I had some time, while everyone had sat down to dinner at the reception, to transmit some of the key images of the day, along with some of the outdoor Bridals taken earlier, to an Apple iPad. I set up the iPad in SlideShow mode for these shots and just passed the iPad to the Bride & Groom, who were just so pleasantly surprised. They ended up passing this around to some of the other guests in the wedding as well (some of whom came up to me, while I had commenced taking reception candids) to ask me for specific images. I was not only able to save their picks, but also able to collect their contact information and email addresses and send them their requests right on the spot from the iPad!

Here is an article which describes how this all works:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-10055-10851

Jeff Ascough is one of those leading wedding photographers, whose craft and style, I follow and learn tremendously from. Here is a recent interview with him that I wished to share. http://photo.net/photographer-interviews/jeff-ascough/

Jeff’s Blog can be located here:

http://jeffascough.typepad.com/

The question always comes up, when photographers get together and discuss methods and techniques, as to whether one should invest in an outdoor lighting kit. I am a bit ‘old school’, having been involved with photography as a child watching my father take and develop his own images during the film/darkroom days of the 1960s-1970s. The method I was taught is called subtractive lighting and it works by realizing that you have an over-abundance of natural light that needs to be controlled. This can easily be done by moving your subject under an overhang such as a building eave or (much better) the leafy branches of a tree. This subtracts the scatter light that comes from one side and from overhead, thus allowing only light from one side and the front of the subject to illuminate the face.

There are often no trees or buildings near at hand or they are away from the background you wish to use, so a brilliant photographer named Leon Kennamer came up with a subtractive lighting system back in the late seventies/early eighties that incorporated a weighted light stand with one six foot black reflectasol along the side and a 40 inch black reflectasol across the top. This could be easily placed alongside the subject to completely control the outdoor scatter light and to create a near perfect light pattern on the face. Sometimes this is supplimented with a gold reflecter bouncing light into the face from the side, sometimes not.

Kennamer was often associated with Larson lighting products who are still in business and who still sell the reflectasols. They used to have a nice little brochure of Kennamer’s techniques which might still be available. If so, it will teach you everything you need to know regarding true control of outdoor portrait lighting.

One of the big benefits of this technique is that you will actually see the effect of the lightning pattern. When using outdoor strobes it is ‘simply a by guess and by golly situation’ with a fill flash system, which is one of the reasons why those outdoor portraits often have poor to disastrous results.

Another way to handle outdoor lighting is to purchase a ‘SunSpotz’ Reflector made by Westcott and designed/marketed by David Ziser.. This reflector is a very bright silver on one side and black (for the subtactive lighting) on the other. There is a very interesting recent video post by veteran wedding photographer David Ziser, which demonstrates this technique:

I am always working with two cameras while shooting wedding events. About mid-day-towards the evening the strain on one’s neck from lugging two cameras with attachments tends to be a bit taxing. I have recently found a few products such as the DoubleStrap from a company called Black Rapid. Another option is a product called Cotton-Carrier. There is now a fabulous deal being marketed by B&H Photo in New York, which is offering the Quantum off-camera Lighting (including the radio receivers/transmitters & new Turbo 3 Battery Pack) as a combined kit saving us a bit of money. The off-camera lighting is really critical to achieving that sense of depth and dimension in our images.