“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.

This entry was posted Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 11:01 am and is filed under Info, Opinion, Packages, Photoshop.