The wedding industry is a funny little world, one person will tell you that the market is saturated with suppliers, another one will tell you that they are turning people away. Some people will tell you that you need to book a venue at least a year in advance, others will tell you that you need to find your photographer before your venue. I’m sure its the same in any industry, although it does become more interesting when you have non-repeat customers.

Photographers compete on bizarre terms for clients, I’ve seen people marketing based on the number of cameras they have(????), the number of photos they take, the megapixels on their cameras, the number of prints they provide and the price of their packages. I’m not sure why the number of cameras one has anything to do with anything. The number of photos, fair enough, if you’re going to choose 150 prints you need at least 450 photos to choose from, but the number of megapixels and the number of prints. Prints are cheap to the point where the number is really irrelevant if you have the negatives – I suspect that this is a leftover from the days when negatives weren’t handed over with the final package and were held by the photographer who made their income on the after wedding prints that they sold. Price of the package is obviously important when you have to work within a budget, but rather get a photographer whose work you appreciate and get less prints, hours, albums etc then someone who offers everything but the kitchen sink and produces arbitrary work. You can always print a couple more later.

The reason I bring this up now, is that it seems that some studios have started using production times as a marketing tool, some offering their clients full albums and prints within a month of the wedding. Well, I take longer, for one thing it takes us about 80-100 hours per wedding to edit and do post production on the photos. Once these are chosen either for the album or the prints then we do a bit more post production on them and once we have sign-off we send them off to Japan to be printed. It takes another 4-5 weeks for the albums to be custom made and sent back to our clients. We chose Asuka book as our album company for the quality and design of their albums after trying quite a few options locally and internationally – if you are a local album company and feel yours is better I’d be happy to take a look.

We produce very different photography from most other studios and I believe that is the reason that we are booked a year in advance while most other boutique studios are struggling to fill their calendars, and why our clients are still showing off their wedding albums, two and three years later.

When I first started, people who were booking me were told that Dror is good but he only shoots photojourn, later when other studios were advertising themselves as photojourn my clients were told that Dror is good, but he is very expensive. Now clients are being told that Dror is very good, but he is very expensive and he takes a long time to finish your album. Yep.

btw if you’re planning on buying a digital camera – Pixels Are Like Cupcakes is a must. Read it and the next time some photography geek asks you about number of megapixels on your camera … well, read it, its a 5 minute read, you’ll know what I mean.

UPDATE: A couple of people have asked about this effect. It is an on camera flash set to 1/8 power, post production and vignetting in Lightroom 1.4

When I was born, my parents planted a tree in Israel, I still have the certificate somewhere. Planting trees to commemorate special events is ingrained in my family mythology. Its just one of those things that resonate with me. On Saturday, Sandra and Stephen planted a seed at their ceremony, and I don’t mean that in the wishy-washy-poetry-writing-I’m-batting-for-Jesh-de-Rox’s-team metaphorical sense, but an actual seed. They also gave each of their guests a Hessian bag with soil, seeds and instructions on how to plant an indigenous South African tree. V and I, two natural born non-gardeners, planted ours this morning.

I’ve been trying to search for a phrase to describe the actual wedding, and the only thing that springs to mind is understated elegance, but it isn’t exactly right and kind of misses out on the warmth and fun of the day. Probably why I take pics and don’t write speeches. The actual event was natural and personal, and classical and just right from the dress, to the location, to the neck pieces that the groom and groomsmen wore, to the food, to the music (I suspect that these guys were teenagers around the same time as me), to the people.

Thank you guys for trusting V and I with the photos, for clambering all over Letamo with us, dodging wildebeest and standing on ledges clearly marked no entry. It wouldn’t be a wedding in Africa unless a large wild animal made grunting noise and looked menacingly in your direction.

We’re back, slowly recovering from overindulging and what could only be described as a turkey coma. Xmas day was filled with fun, family and loads of kids, as it should be. I’ll diet in the new year.

Before I start this post, I just want to say that its late, I can’t choose and hence no fancy photoshop and a large number of photos, none of them in order.

Kalika and Gerhard got married at the always amazing Forum Homini (its at The Cradle of Humankind), and as if to prove the weather man wrong, the sun shone like global warming wasn’t just something they talk about on the news, and we set out to prove that, contrary to recent popular belief, we can photograph without amazing cloud formations in the sky. Loads more on Andrea’s blog, soon.

Kalika and Gerhard, you guys are rock stars, and it was a joy to bear witness to such honest love for each other. The weather was perfect, the day was amazing and you looked incredible. Forum Homini and Roots Restaurant were what you’d expect from one of the top three restaurants in the country, elegant, luxurious, and perfect. Nice choice.

We no longer do the whole vendor prop thing, but check out Forum Homini if you are looking for somewhere classic, elegant, underexposed and just over-the-top amazing food. The MC/Chef Patron was not bad either