Quite often we’ll rent a lens to give things a bit of variety, but the 50mm 1.8 will always be my favorite lens. Its the most basic of lenses, I bought mine in 1991 and 18 years and over a million images later, I feel like I know most of her secrets.

I had another comment this morning from a fellow photographer that we deliver too many images. We deliver all the images that I am happy with, full stop. I also feel that I judge images based on artistic and documentary merit but our clients pick their images based on other criteria including things that they like or don’t like about the way that they look. I’d rather they had a couple of similar images with different expressions so that they are able to pick one that they are happiest with. Yes, it does make for longer selection times, but I can live with that.

“We love your style, and if we had known about you before our wedding we would have definitely hired you. Our photographer gave us a DVD with all of the photos taken on the day. Would you be able to edit them for us?”

I seem to be getting more and more of these types of mails recently, and I thought I would just clarify a couple of things. Editing pics only enhances what is already there, it can make a good photo look great, it can’t make an average photo look good and it definitely can’t do anything to a terrible photo. Editing is also an extension of the photography process, it enhances what the photographer was seeing when he or she took the photo, getting someone else to edit your pics wouldn’t result in the vision that your original photographer had.

The camera isn’t a human eye, it can’t see the range of colours that our eyes can, or the same amount of tones. It also can’t photograph what your mind sees as a photographer, we try to correct that in the post production process and get it closer to what we saw when we made the image. Its a myth that you can take a terrible image, club it to death with a canned photoshop action or preset and get an amazing image. Post-production is a part of the artistic process of getting a great image, not something you can add on at the end as an after thought.

Secondly, the process of editing is part of what makes wedding photography so expensive. For every hour out photographing a wedding, we budget at least 5 hours of post production work. We look at an eight hour wedding and allocate 80-90 hours of admin, photography, post-production and design.

Some photographers, and I am assuming this on the basis of emails I get from prospective clients, charge extra for doing post production on your images and apparently this is something you need to ask before you hire someone (it would never have occurred to me that one needed to ask, but apparently you do). We routinely hand over around 800-1000 images for a wedding, and each one goes through our post production workflow, the cost of this time is part of our packages, not an extra. Long story short, ask what is extra and whether you can see a representative full wedding. Wedding photography in SA is an industry with no barrier to entry.

I’m really enjoying Anne-Celine Jaeger’s, Image Makers, Image Takers.

Martin Parr: “You usually have a hunch, but the great thing about photography is that it’s so unpredictable, so you never quite understand how and when a good photograph comes about.
But when editing, I do contact sheets, then machine prints and then select from that.”
And when asked what makes one image stand out more than another, is it emotional or an intellectual reaction he answers: “It must be intuitive. If it were intellectual, I’d be able to explain what happens. That’s why I’m a photographer. I express myself visually, not verbally.”

I watched two movies this weekend, lying in a sleep deprived half state, trying to clear my head a bit from the relentless photo editing. First up was The Mist, which I’m not sure if it has been released in SA yet, but our video shop has this TBYB section where stuff that has not yet hit the screens is often for rent.

The movie started off innocently enough with the usual, army stuffs up, opens a portal into another dimension, bad critters come through, humans get eaten, that is the standard fare for this kind of date night horror. Bubble gum for the brain and eyes, just what the doctor ordered. Then the twist, and not what you expect either; dark, post-existentialist, psycho drama that leaves you feeling drained, slightly twisted and very much wondering why. I’m not sure why anyone would want to watch this.

Desperate for something a bit happier, we put on I’m Not There, the Bob Dylan movie with the six different people playing him. I went through a big Bob Dylan phase when I was in my teens. This was beautifully shot, long, ambitious, complex meander through I’m not sure what. The only person who looked like Robert was Cate Blanchett, who was smoking, literally and figuratively, in the role. It was the kind of movie that I would have loved ten years ago, today it was eye candy. If you’re a photographer, or you just like to shoot, highly recommended. Edward Lachman, simply kicks ass as a cinematographer.

“For a scene showing young Robbie and Claire in a New York diner, Lachman framed the two so that they didn’t always seem to be the subject of their own shots; he accomplished this effect by using a mirror behind the actors, deliberately disorienting the viewer and introducing shifts in screen direction that would create an awkwardness that reflected the characters’ emotions.” from American Cinematographer