Fine printing in the wedding industry

[maiken]

I'm not a wedding photographer, and I don't really intend to become

one, but I've had a flurry of friends get married recently and I

tried my hand at getting candid / PJ shots at their weddings. The

experience has made me curious about the wedding photo industry.

 

In my usual work, I'm used to spending lots of time on individual

images in PS to get all the details just right, so reflexively, I've

wound up spending a lot of time tweaking the images from my friends'

weddings. I have lots of different crops, B&W conversions, some

retouching for distracting details like flashy clothing logos,

selective dodging and burning, etc. All this takes time, and I was

just shooting casually!

 

So, I'm curious: how much postprocessing effort do you put into the

images that your clients end up with? Do you do PP work of any

significance on ALL the final images? It seems like you must either

hold yourself to only simple adjustments, or get VERY quick in PS to

avoid burning dozens of extra hours in the digital darkroom?

 

In "art" photography, many would say that skill in producing a fine

print is essential, but rather separate from field proficiency and

composition skill. Do any of you break out a "fine art printing"

service, to recoup the time it takes to make a particularly

important image really sing? Or maybe break your services into two,

separately negotiable portions: event coverage and fine printing?

[todd frederick]

Mark,

 

You are expressing a question that I am also trying to resolve within my own work flow.

 

When I was doing weddings with film, I would just expose the photos and let the lab do the rest. My only real effort was to find a good lab. Life was easy with film.

 

Now that I am doing all of this with digital, thinking my life would be easier, I find that I spend hours preparing 300-400 images just to make proofs! Digital is not as easy as it may seem.

 

I also print my own proofs, and that also takes much time.

 

Right now I am trying to hone my digital photography capture skills in order to get as close to what I want right from the camera, but I have much to learn in that regard as well.

 

To answer your question: Yes, I do spend considerable time in PP to get even my proofs as good as they can be.

[ilkka_nissila]

I don't understand this. Since digital takes more time of the photographer, why do you do it with a digital camera then? I've found that even good minilab color prints from c-negs from my lab require quite a bit of effort from me to reach that quality by other means. From black and white I can easily improve (scan & tweak with curves) on quickly, but color .. it's hard to match plain old type C print quality. So, I just shoot color neg and have the lab do things. In special cases I do my own color prints but this takes such a lot of time for a typical event that I can't imagine doing it professionally that way. (I just shoot for friends.)

[mark_jacoby___raleigh__nc]

Ilkka, I suspect that lot of wedding guys, like me, complain about the amount of post processing work yet would hate to give up the level of control we have over the images.

 

Mark, I try to limit my general editing to culling out the really bad shots, adjusting exposure and to some degree color. I also will take a quick look to see if any shots can be improved by cropping.

 

Then I always make time to seriously edit (play around with) a handful of favorite images to see how I can inprove or make more artistic.

 

How much of this extra editing is required or is just me having fun, I couldn't honestly say. But I must admit to having spent an unreal amount of time in the darkroom back in my film days.

[bill_clark___minnetonka_mi]

Looking at it with my eyes I find digital is actually much easier than film. But my expectations are much higher with digital. If I do some chimping from a few photos created I may see something I can correct. And I can do so much more post processing than I ever thought of with film. For me, I generally accepted what the film produced. I don't have that mind-set with digital. I could tick off literally hunds of things I can do with PS I could never imagined doing with film. I understand how painters create, putting the brush down, thinking, coming back, changing, looking at the art in a different way, evolving, never ending quest to paint what I see. With digital photography I can do that but I'm not really an artist but I'm working at it.

 

It's this ebb and flow, things in flux, ever changing, thought processes and tinkeing that I love to do. And it's getting better because I want to delve into this more and more, getting better & better.

 

Do I spend a lot of time with each image. No but I'll pick a few and do a lot of different creative things. My clients love this!

 

I just did a wedding yesterday, an engagement session today and I'm excited about the wedding next weekend.

 

Wonderful!

[cjogo]

I have addressed this before----I shoot mainly film still. When digital is requested I explain the extra cost involved for PS >> if the B&G agree << then I proceed. There are many who sit in front of their screens, for hours, not receiving compensation ?

[fotografz]

Some of the best digital printers I've ever seen, all had one thing in common ... they

worked in PhotoShop the least amount possible.

 

The technology of post processing is advancing exponentially. The last digital job I

processed using PSCS2 took a fraction of the time previous jobs took. Of hundreds of

images processed ACR, I only had to open a handful in Photoshop for further work.

 

But I still prefer film for the most part.

[todd frederick]

I am not complaining about digital imaging and post processing. It is me; not the medium. I need to advance my skills to make the process easier and quicker.

 

What I like about digital is the instant feedback ("chimping"), and the ability to make my prints the way I want them made. For me, it's that simple.

[ilkka_nissila]

While I take a lot of digital pics of people, I get tired of it quickly if I don't shoot film in between. The digital pics often look like the faces were photographs of dolls, not people. People love them, but I don't.

 

I do get the control with film too. I just scan them, and photoshop them, and print them. This takes a long time though. But I also have the option of doing the bulk of the pics by a lab. Digital only is a frightening view of the future.

[gaetano catelli]

i still shoot, develop, and print film on my own (mainly 4x5 lately). but, i increasingly feel that it's more of an exercise in masochism than anything else.

<p>

then again, i used my RZ67 to shoot some pictures in Central Park yesterday of my boss and his young wife. he wasn't sure what he wanted to wind up with. so, i shot 3 rolls of 120 (1 Plus-X, the other 2 NPS), gave him the exposed rolls, and was done with it.

<p>

i figure any lab he takes it to will be a pro lab, because only pro labs still do 120 these days (at least in nyc). while it worked out in this particular case, i found myself repeating over and over to myself: thank goodness i didn't shoot my 'practice wedding' of 2 weeks ago with this blunderbuss.

<p>

if it weren't for the fact that it affords me an ongoing opportunity to work under the tutelage of Koichiro Kurita at <a href="http://www.fotosphere-ny.com">Fotosphere</a>, i'd probably have all but abandoned film since i got my first digicam in march 2004.

<p>

what drove me to try digital in the first place (against what i thought was my better judgment at the time) was the fact that i was scanning all my negatives anyway so that i could post-process them myself in PS. since a scanner is just a special purpose digital camera, i asked myself: why not shoot digital in the first place?

<p>

as for shooting weddings in the future, digital is just a way more convenient capture medium. the fine tuning comes later with PS CS.

<p><div></div>

[brian_osterhout]

This seems to be a recurring problem, I'm surprised there haven't been digital pro labs that have popped up to process digital files by hand in a mass market kind of way. Then you could just upload your files and be done with it.

[anner]

Gaetano, what a beautifully captured image!!

[gaetano catelli]

thanks, Anne. here's another rendering of the same shot (uploaded to <i>my</i> web host, not photo.net's). lots of PP in both cases:

<p>

<img src="http://www.r-s-r.org/rsr/images/lina/IMG_1513-1da-bw-cr.jpg">