stephen_lutz

I have used them for a birthday gift. I made my book, uploaded it and it was a nice gift. However, I would think that a wedding book would be higher quality than their product. My Publisher books are nice keepsakes, and pleasent gifts to give or receive, but they are not professional level products, in my opinion.

 

The person I gave it to loved it though. I think since people rarely see a photo of themselves on anything other than a 4x6 print they are impressed with any kind of bound book of photos which feature them.

 

I really dislike their software, however. It is very clumsy and non-intuitive.

I shot some in RAW, and, yes, they were better quality. Particularly for getting rid of vignetting. However, for my purposes (to make a quick PDF to email off to someone who just wants to know what the plan looks like and who isn't going to print it) it works fine. Distortion is an obvious issue, so I try to zoom out to about 85mm. That helps with distortion.

At work, I deal with large paper plans (24x36 inches) and need to turn them

into PDF's to email them to someone. That involves a walk upstairs to use the

large format scanner. Or did, until it occurred to me to use my Canon Pro1

(and 420EX flash) for the same purpose. I take a JPG, load it into Photo

Elements, do a levels adjustment and save it as a PDF. Quite acceptable

resolution, with all plan notes legible, and capable of 200% or even 300%

magnification in Adobe Reader. This is an 8MP camera, but I've used a 6 MP

camera and gotten acceptable results as well. You can do the same thing for

letters or other documents too. Works fine. I have to jack up the flash to +1

1/3, but other than that it is very simple to do. Just thought this was cool. :)

 

Here's a crop of a plan as an example.<div></div>

I guess I'm Uncle Bob. Er, Uncle Steve. I don't do photography for a living, but love to take photos. My friends like them, so it is sort of self-reinforcing. The more they like them, the more I take, the more often I get asked to take them, etc.

 

I have attended several weddings as a guest, and have tried to be non-intrusive with my photography, not getting in the professional's way, not standing behind him/her, etc. In fact, I try not to duplicate what the professional is doing. I figure I will look for the off-beat, or the shot that would otherwise get overlooked. There is always at least one moment at a wedding where I seem to blunder into the right spot at the right time, which is sort of cool. Technology allows for some pretty good shots, even in full auto mode. I was in the line for the men's room and the B&G were walking by, and I snapped this when he bent over to tell her something. They loved it. Pro1, 420EX, P mode, -1 1/3 stop on the flash.<div></div>

I have only a couple of simple suggestions, a cheat sheet, as it were. When in a hurry indoors with flash, I shoot RAW, -2/3 stop on the flash, Manual mode, with a 28-70 2.8L. Aperture around f/5.6 to start, then up or down depending on the focal length of the lens and/or the shutter speed I am using.

 

My exposures of a bride and groom in these circumstances are usually fine, and can be tweaked in Photoshop if need be. I use a 550EX flash, BTW, most of the time.

 

For the back lit picture of the bride and girl by the window, I would guess it was shot wide open at f/4, and close to 100mm, with the main meter on the window and the flash set a little low to not blow out the highlights. Looks like the flash may have been off camera on a cord or wireless to minimize shadows. Boy, what a great picture!

What camera are you using? What focus point are you using? What aperture are you using?

 

At 24mm the lens should focus very rapidly, almost instantaneously in good light.

The lens is 100% compatible with the camera. If it doesn't AutoFocus, there must be something wrong with it or (less likely) the camera. Go to a camera store, try one of their lenses on the camera and it will work perfectly.

I don't think the pop-up flash would serve to trigger external flashes, even if the pop up flash "popped up."

 

The E-TTL system uses a pre-flash for metering, and that would trigger your strobes too soon. Of course if you are using manual mode, perhaps the pop up doesn't use a pre-flash. Not sure.

 

You might use manual mode, and your metz, to trigger the external stobes.

Setting the clone tool to "darken" and the opacity at about 20% also works for getting rid of flash highlights on skin. Select a patch of skin that is normal, select "darken" and 20% opacity, then clone that on to a nose or cheekbone with flash blast. Blend it as you see fit. Works really well, and usually will leave something darker than the skin, like a stray hair, unaffected. The same method should work on sweat stains too, I imagine.

I have a Pro1 and it is a frustrating camera to use. On the one hand, at ISO 50, in controlled settings, it has outstanding image quality. But.... it is slow to focus for anything involving "decisive moment" photography. You will miss lots of shots because of this. In addition, there is heavy vignetting on "some" shots, and it is uneven. I.e. one corner will have vignetting but the other will have either none or much less. This does not occur on every shot, and one shot will have it when another (taken at the same aperture) will not. Weird.

 

However, I do enjoy using my Pro1 for static shots, or portraits, particularly when combined with the Canon wireless off-camera flash system.

 

If there is a Pro2 which is more responsive, has less vignetting and which has IS it would seriously undermine the Rebel XT market. Perhaps this is why we haven't seen a Pro2.

I've always thought of Flash as a solution in search of a problem. I wouldn't use it unless it is absolutely the only way to accomplish some critically important task.

According to the cost of wedding site, a wedding in Louisville will set a couple back about 36K. This may be accurate if all the various options are chosen, but in practice it is quite unusal for a wedding here to run more that 15K, in my experience. (The actual ceremony and reception.)

I shot this panorama with a Canon Pro1 at a Louisville Bats AAA baseball game in April, handheld. It actually turned out much better than I would have thought. This is not the final version, as there are still a couple of places where seams can be easily found. I cloned out and smoothed out as many seams as I could and then printed it at 72 inches wide. Surprisingly good quality print too. This jpg is a little jagged because I had to compress this file heavily to make it a reasonable size for web viewing.)

 

Panoramas are fun!

 

http://stevelutzphoto.smugmug.com/photos/64714633-O.jpg

Make sure your color space is RGB. As I recall, in PS CS if you are editting in some color spaces you can't save as JPG.

I got lucky with a point and shoot camera when a bridal party had the "release of the butterflies" as part of their ceremony. Granted. it was a nice point and shoot, a Canon Pro1, but it is not the camera I would have chosen for this task. I was at the wedding as a guest, and taking a few shots for the bride and groom, so I brought a small, light, but still "high image quality" camera with me. I shot a series of about four picture at 200mm with the Pro1 as the butterfly fluttered around and one landed on the flower girls finger. By good fortune, one of four turned out very good and made a nice 16x20 print for them. If I had my choice, I would have gone with a camera with a high frame rate, and a medium to telephoto lens like a 70-200 2.8 or 4. As it is, I had to use Photoshop to blur out the background on this.

 

http://stevelutzphoto.smugmug.com/photos/57228441-O.jpg

One other good thing about the kit lens is that it is cheap and fun to shoot. With a rifle. After my Rebel 300 died, I took it and the lens, to the range and shot it with an AR-15 from 150 meters (scoped). It was fun! It went 'poof'!

Thanks for the response Mary. It seems that for you prints are quite lucrative. I assume that you have a tangible "added value" to the photos themselves, in the form of perhaps a nice portfolio or other classy method to display the final prints? I can see how a high price for the prints themselves would be justified if there is 1st class presentation to go with them, as well as top-notch photo finishing. I have found that most people don't know how good a photo taken by a professional can actually be, so I can understand how this angle could make the price justifiable in the minds of a bride and groom.

 

While not a professional wedding photographer, I shot this at a friend's wedding, printed it at 24x36 at Perfectposter for $20, spent $50 to frame it and gave it to them as a wedding present. They thought I spent $500 on it. Presentation, presentation, presentation!<div></div>

Stopped down the 18-55 kit lens is pretty good at the long end. The main advantage (and it's a big one) with a 2.8 zoom is that you can stop down a one or two full stops and get a decent shutter speed in good light and not choke off too much light in flash photos.

 

You can also blur out a background and make the subject pop out of the photo with a 2.8 zoom, which is difficult if not impossible with the kit lens. Slow zooms are pretty good performers, particularly when stopped down, but the photos tend to look flat, with little foreground-background separation.

For what it's worth, my procedure with flash (indoors) with my 10D and a 28-70 2.8 is to shoot manual mode. I usually set the aperture to between f/4.5 and f/8 depending on focal length, subject distance, etc. I set the flash power to -2/3 to start and vary if needed. I usually shoot with a 550EX, pointed up, with a flash pocket bouncer. I frankly have never seen any difference between a cheap pocket bouncer and a lightsphere, but the idea is to diffuse the flash, so whichever way works best for you is what you should do.

 

I use the LCD to check exposure, mostly to insure no blown out highlights. Detail in the bride's dress is more important than a dark tux on the groom. RAW works best for post-exposure adjustments like critical skintone corrections. JPG can work ok, but if you are way off on color or exposure it is far more difficult to correct the problem. Basically shooting digital is similar to shooting slide, so RAW eases the correction problem. My main advice is: Watch out for overexposure! Digital is very unforgiving. There is zero headroom for exposure errors, unlike print film.

Well, RAW is the best format for post-shot editting and/or color/exposure adjustment. From what I gather, most of the pros shoot RAW for this reason. Nothing particulary wrong with JPG, but it is a lossy format, and isn't a full sensor capture. It is a better choice for, say, a sporting event where you are running a lot of shots through the camera in bursts. Why not just shoot RAW+superfine JPG? (Assuming you have the storage capacity)

An interesting topic, aside from the "scanning the proofs at Hell-Mart" is the actual business model used by a professional photographer.

 

Tell me (those who are in the business) what sort of income stream do you get from reprints, rather than from the fee to do the job? Is it so lucrative that you would need to protect it from illegal photo duplication? I would think, in this day and age with high quality (high quality being decidedly relative, but "enough" for grandma to get one to put on her night stand in a frame also bought at Hell-Mart) that it would be nigh impossible to realistically protect copyright on wedding photos.

 

Personally, I would think a wedding photographer would get his/her money up front and figure they would get very few, if any, print orders after the "package" was delivered.

As a Pro1 user, I would prefer they reduced the optical zoom to something like 24-135 and make ISO 400 actually useful. This particular camera is excellent at ISO 50 and very good at ISO 100. ISO 200 is acceptable, in a pinch, but ISO 400 is really bad. I am less interested in sensor size (number of Megapixels) than I am in sensor sensitivity. ISO 400 on my 10D is great. I use it 90% of the time. On my Pro1, I use ISO 50 90% of the time.

 

Also, the Pro1 is sluggish. Forget any action photography. Static scenes and portraits are what I use mine for. Any subject with movement requires the 10D.

Hire Private Investigator. Shouldn't cost too much, maybe $200. You will have to sign something that says you won't use the info to go to the person's house to commit an illegal act, though. :)

Buy some photo floodlights (Photoflex makes some affordable ones). They will put out light at a constant color temperature that you can calibrate your camera to. You can either used the "tungsten" setting, or set your camera to a specific Kelvin color temperture. Also, you should shoot RAW for maximum flexibility for adjusting the shot after you get it in Photoshop.

 

As others have said, color calibrate your monitor as well. All of this will allow you to correct the color as closely as possible on your end. All of this goes out the window when it hits the web, as colors on uncalibrated monitors will be all over the place. I only get really hyper concerned about color management when I am printing something.

I have an i9100, and it would work fine with the Canon Canvas paper. However, no other type of canvas paper will feed properly (gets stuck, won't go through the printer). Since Canon has stopped making canvas paper, I would be very interested to know of any brands that will work with an i9100.