Digital Photography Tip Wedding
Get the most out of your wedding pictures using Digital Photography Tip Wedding
Creative digital imaging
It is very easy when manipulating a print digitally to get carried away with the
limitless changes you can make, overlooking what the client would like. Never lose
sight of what you have been commissioned to produce — a record of the bride and
groom’s wedding day, capturing the special moments for all time. As with all technical
creativity, the viewer should be admiring the image, not asking how it was done.
Fortunately, with digital work you can easily step back if you go too far. Make
sure you save the images as you make your changes, and use Photoshop layers in production.
Digital after-work is far easier to remove than when you have been overzealous with
a real airbrush!
Some laboratories are now offering to combine your wedding images with their stock
shots. You can order their images from a catalogue, and the results are not dissimilar
to the method of double printing popular a few years ago where, for example, an
image of the couple was placed in a champagne glass. However, these images are rather
banal and go against the very nature of wedding photography, which is all about
creating a unique record of the couple’s day, with individual images of them and
their guests in their own choice of settings.
Black and White
Monochrome pictures have become mainstream again, with a new generation of
photographers discovering the creative opportunities of
black-and-white photography. Clients seeking something different, who have been
brought up on colour school photographs and family snapshots, often request a selection
of black-and-white shots of the wedding day. If you decide to produce black-and-white
images, there are two aspects to consider the technical limitations and what you
would like to achieve aesthetically. If you want to produce neutral images, insist
that the laboratory prints them on black-and-white paper, and for a sepia effect
ask them to print on coloured paper.
Thinking in black and white
Simply printing original colour images in black and white does not produce the finest
black-and-white photographs. It is easy to create acceptable-quality colour photographs;
the various colours of the flesh, clothes and background echo those all around us
and the brain accepts them. Colour photographs can be taken in soft lighting conditions
as they rely on colour differences, not lighting contrast for effect. When these
colours are reduced to black and white, many tend to take on a similar shade of
grey and become flat and uninteresting. Good black and-white images demand a much
more skilful use of light to gain contrasts.
One of the benefits of photographing in black and white is that you can put an orange
and a pink dress next to each other with impunity, so the guests may dress in as
big a mix of colours as they like and you don’t have to waste valuable time rearranging
them.