I often wonder how camera manufacturers feel when they spend so much money expanding the dynamic range that their cameras are capturing and I end up spending so much time decreasing the dynamic range of my images so that they look more like film. Anyway, I’m grumpy, I’m hating photoshop at the moment, my last cup of coffee was hours ago, its way past midnight and I need some sleep.

“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 think it was Saturday, maybe it was Sunday, I was sitting under some shade trying to avoid the sun when the sound engineer seated next to me, he may actually not have been a sound engineer, it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, the guy sitting next to me, mentioned in passing that photography was about getting things in focus. Wow! Hang on, hold the conversation, add some more ice to my glass, pass me a cigarette and add that one to the list of lies that photographers tell each other: Bigger lenses = better photos, more mega pixels means better quality, you must use off camera flash, shoot raw or your photo quality will be too low and more rubbish that could possibly be swallowed by anyone. Sheesh, sharper photos.

Then scarcely a day later, I get a request to recommend a good photoshop book, followed swiftly by two separate requests to shoot with me by two guys who shoot landscapes and wildlife images. Since when did wedding photography become about getting the sharpest image with the biggest camera using an off camera flash and then photoshoping it, let me rephrase that, when did photography become the province of geeks with a gear fetish? Yep, welcome to another Dror rant, cause sometimes my mind just get blown by people who claim to be photographers and spend all their time copying the latest technique or getting the latest bit of gear.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for experimenting, and trying out new gear, but not just because you want to get the effect that X gets. How about first learning about photography? You know it isn’t just about snapping a photograph using the sharpest lens possible and the most mega pixels that you can afford. Photographs should tell a story, it’s a visual language with all the nuances, verbs and sentence construction rules that any language has, and before you spend another small fortune on a new lens you don’t really need, you may want to learn how to communicate using that language. If you don’t know about balance and tension, colour, light, lines, gesture, frame dynamics and visual weight you may want to read up on it before rushing out and getting that off camera flash. I’m not saying that all images should tell a story, but come on, I can count the number of wedding photographers in this country who do actually photograph rather than snap on one hand, and they are all fully booked well into 2009.

“Most people using a camera for the first time try to master the controls but ignore the ideas. They photograph intuitively, liking or disliking what they see without stopping to think why, and framing the view in the same way. Anyone who does it well is a natural photographer. But knowing in advance why some compositions or certain combinations of colors seem to work better than others, better equips any photographer.” – Michael Freeman in The Photographer’s Eye (a must in any photographer’s collection – if you’re local, don’t bother with Kalahari, they don’t stock it).

btw in case you were wondering the latest trend in wedding photography this year has been off camera flash with many photographers, including myself, investing in radio receivers. It’s been around for a while, but reached tipping point earlier this year and essentially it allows the photographer to set up a mobile outdoor studio, some do it well, most miss the point. At least the whole video light thing is almost over. I somehow can’t image James Nachtwey or Selgado, or even Tim Hetherington pulling out their off camera flash units.

I was asked the other day how important photoshop is to our final images. I’d have to say that while photoshop doesn’t make an image it does bring it closer to the way I visualized it. A good photograph can be made into a great photograph with photoshop, a bad photograph will just look worse with photoshop. Here’s a quick before and after of an image from Matt and Eva’s wedding at The Cradle.

For those photographers that asked, I use a bunch of homemade actions to get that effect, and some dodge and burn. I do have some free actions and textures for download.