My Wife’s sister recently got married. A few months before the wedding she called me and asked if I would be her “Wedding Photographer”. I enjoy taking pictures and on occasion get a few good ones, but I don’t do weddings. I had photographed one wedding a few years before and decided at that time that wedding photography wasn’t for me. Recently, I have had the privilege to tag along as a second shooter on a few weddings. I enjoyed that because I could sneak around the edges and do my thing. With that in mind I said I would help her out if she hired a professional wedding photographer, (I’ll call them a Wedding Pro for the rest of this article), for the ceremony at City Hall in San Francisco and I would handle all the other locations around the city. She said, “ok that sounds great”!
Fast forward a few months I arrive the night before the wedding and have dinner with the family and started to discuss what was going to happen the next day and I learn, there is no other photographer! It’s me and a few point and shoots. i wasn’t nervous since I was going to do my best and hopefully that would be ok. I started to think about the difference between a regular guy/family member that can take some great shots and a Wedding Pro.
I started to think/get nervous about how un-prepared I was.
I had two lenses, a 70-200 and a 24-70 with one body and a couple camera batteries.
I had one flash unit with some extra batteries that I quickly went and doubled my supply at a nearby drugstore.
I had no idea what the venue was like. How high the ceilings were, what the wall colors were,(in fact they were very yellow), I had no gels for my flash. Of course had I had Gels for my flash I would have no idea how or when to use them.
I didn’t have a list of “have to have” images.
With that in mind I told myself, who cares, just go shoot, and keep checking the histogram!
I’m proud of the images I came up with, but in reflection the real difference between a guy that loves to take photos and a guy or gal that makes a living photographing weddings is experience. Experience teaches preparation. Experience and preparation are worth paying for!
It’s not mandatory to have two camera bodies, but I did miss at least 2 shots I would have loved to have back, had I had quick access to a wide angle lens at a moments notice.
Having had experience to adjust white balance in the camera/flash would have saved considerable time in Post Process. A neutral grey card would have been helpful.
Worrying about what the light from the flash and correct exposure, deters your attention from what you’re actually seeing.
The ceremony was in the rotunda of City Hall. The ceiling was really tall, which meant my flash did nothing coming off of it. And I couldn’t find a wall to bounce off of consistently. So I noticed the way a Wedding Pro had adjusted his flash, bent slightly forward(one click forward) from straight up with the little reflector standing straight up. I borrowed from his experience to help me out. That saved me. I actually chatted with him a bit, nice guy.
In retrospect I think I would have liked carrying 2 bodies, one with a 35mm ƒ1.4 and one with a 135mm ƒ2 or my 70-200 2.8L IS. It also would had been great to have a set of gels for my flash and actually know how to use them. Stopping to think about a shot or two would have been beneficial, I missed the brides flowers a few times just because I didn’t have her fix it.
One thing about wedding photography that often goes unnoticed is the amount of post wedding editing it takes. I took just over 1200 photos, which means selecting and editing the best ones. This is a laborious process. Some images require a few clicks to improve, others might be 15min. This can take hours, but also completely necessary. If I had shot this wedding and dumped the files to a disk without any editing, many of her photos would have looked like the image below:
the second image is after edits in post process. I don’t claim to be professional photo editor, but I think the version on the right is worthy of a few minutes of effort.
After having photographed 2 weddings I have utmost respect for the guys and gals that make a living as a wedding photographer. I’ve gained a bit of experience and will continue to refer friends and family to the real pro’s with experience.
My Daughter has been a bit under the weather the passed few days, but today she wanted me to photograph her butterfly barrette. So here’s J and her butterfly barrette.
ISO 1000 ƒ/3.5 T 1/100
Spent the day in San Francisco, with amazing weather, btw. The shadow of this sign caught my eye. Grenard Terrace is where my Sister and Brother-in-Law live. It’s tucked away on the top of Russian Hill, with fabulous views of the Bay!. As i write this I’m thinking I should have removed the shadow in the lower left hand corner as it does nothing for the image. Maybe tomorrow..
Too tired to post edits… I did clone out some wires at the top right corner and should have cloned out the shadow in the lower left hand corner. I did so a levels adjustment and added some contrast to enhance the blue sky and help the blacks be blacker.
Wedding Day… My wife’s sister got married today, and she was supposed to have hired a photographer for the ceremony and I was going to do backup. I didn’t work out quite like that as there was no other photographer. So I was the guy. I caught this shot after they were married and taking a quick breather at their house before the reception party. I liked the glow and yes that’s the Golden Gate in the background.
ISO 1000 ƒ/5.6 T 1/160
View of valley fog from from 30,000ft.
Taken with an iPhone 4s and edited with Snapseed for iPhone
So it’s Wednesday, and I think it’s a great day for a Root Beer Float…
ISO 1000 ƒ/4 T 1/40
Here’s the saved JPG from the RAW file:
So I just used a few tools in Aperture to edit.
Fun image and one where a few edits really helps.
The challenge of having a first grader is finishing homework at a decent hour. It’s not that he has volumes of it each day, it’s just that he often doesn’t quite get it all done during school time. So what is probably 20 min of homework extends to 1-2hours! There is always something to get distracted by. This time it was dad with his camera! I took this of R tonight as he was working on it… I liked the hi key aspect to this portrait
ISO 1000 ƒ/3.2 T 1/40 with a flash bounced off the wall to the left.
Heres the saved JPG from the RAW file:
Here are the edits from Aperture:
I then went into Perfect Photo Studio-Effects and applied a Simplify Man filter and an Anime filter set at about 40%. Then back to Aperture for a final crop
I liked the over exposed aspects of this image, shows off the deep brown color of his eyes.
This morning I ordered a proof of my Father-in-Laws memoir, Thank You, America. Orphaned at a very early age in war torn South Korea. Forced to flee his village as an early teen because of the advancing North. With a little bit of luck and lots of perseverance he found his way to America to become a doctor. This is his story.
I decided to use Amazon’s CreateSpace for the project. CreateSpace’s tools are very easy to work with. They have downloadable templates that you can use with Word or InDesign to format your pages correctly. Then you can either upload a pdf file or a Word doc and their servers do their magic. They have automatic checkers that check to make sure things are with their printers limits. And before you can order a proof a human will check your file to the printers specs.
The easiest part was the CreateSpace process. The hard part was getting to the final edits. This project was a team effort. My Father-in-Law wrote the original manuscript by hand. His secretary typed those pages out. My brother-in-law(from the other side of the family) edited those drafts. I then had a friend Reese Spykerman(DesignbyReese who graciously carved some time to help) lay the pages out in the 6X9 format and create the cover and back graphics. I am grateful for everyone that has helped get this project to this point. We live in a amazing time where this type of content can be created so in such a cost effective manner. If anyone is interested in his story watch this space for info on how to order. I’m also working on Kindle and Apple iBook versions coming soon. I’m definitely not an expert in Self Publishing but it’s fun to have made it through book 1.
I was going it quite a few directions tonight. Found a miniature angel under a lamp that was lit nice by the table lamp. Then my kids decided to tuck all their stuffed animals into bed on the sofa. After they were finished they sat still for a few seconds to capture a portrait. I’m a little bummed that my aperture was stuck on 2.8 because I was messing around with shooting wide open with a flash bounced off the ceiling. I would have rather been closer to ƒ/8 so that my daughters eyes would have been in focus. I liked the capture anyways and decided to play around with the tools to see what I could come up with.
ISO 1000 ƒ/2.8 T 1/80 with flash set on 1/128 manual and bounced off the ceiling.
Here’s the saved JPG from the RAW file:
It’s a bit orange and obviously needed more flash to reach J’s face… So into Aperture for initial edits:
I decided to move on the OnOneSoftware’s Photo Suite 6 to see what the effects would do:
I then used a couple of other tools from Nik Software to try and sharpen up J’s eyes a bit more and then used Dfine2.0 to reduce the overall noise of the image. Obviously a lot more work than necessary had I gotten the exposure and flash settings right before I started!
My wife had a baby shower this morning for a friend of ours, which of course left a few items to photograph! She had a couple of these hydrangea’s in glass jars in a few places. I liked this comp, but I think I’m might have over sharpened the leaves. I considered re-processing it, but I was torn, cause I kind of liked it this way.
White Hydrangea
ISO 1000 ƒ/5 T 1/50
Here’s the saved JPG from the RAW file:
The petals were kind of lost in the white background, so into Aperture we go:
Very glad that Aperture remembers all the edits in memory so that I can review what I did. Sometimes I know what I want to do based on the histogram, other times I just start to dabble.
