Before…. then happily ever After
There are a lot of great photographers out and about in today’s age… especially thanks to the digital era (that is a whole different post in itself). Chase Jarvis, Paul Johnson and Dave Ziser are a few of my favorite photographers because their style and images just “wow” me. I consider myself a very good photographer and I am fairly technically sound when it comes to working the camera and adjusting to different situations on the fly. The general public has the assumption that when we snap the shutter release button the image is perfect. Which is actually the same frame of mind that I used to have when I first got started. I couldn’t understand for the life of me why a photographer would charge $2500 for a wedding or why a photographer would charge $100 for a sitting fee just to shot a few pictures. For those of you who share the same thoughts right now…. let me open your mind and show you the light to a photographers work load on an average shoot
I’m just going to start the “workload” story after the drive time, hours spent shooting, wear and tear on the equipment and the stress of getting everything right on the first go….. b/c lets face it…. it’s not like we can reschedule most weddings…. =). So now I have all my images on the cards and I have just backed them up in two different locations. Rule of thumb is…for every hour spent shooting… I spend about 2 hours in post production. For example: (eight hour wedding + sixteen hours in post production = 24 hours of total work). Anyway i proceed to go through and “cull” all of my shots. Culling is the process of closely and carefully examining each picture to decide if it makes the cut or not. I then go from culling all of my images down to the very best ones of the shoot to then the “color correcting” process. This probably is where most of the time is spent. I go through each individual image and color correct them. I probably could get away with not doing it on all the images, but this is that extra step that I feel like that I give to my clients that the other photographers in town do not (not calling any names). So if you figure a 1500 picture wedding or a 250 picture toddler shoot… there is a lot of color correcting going on. After the long process of coloring correcting I go to what I call the “artistic tweaking”. This to me is the fun part (well its all fun of course), I go through the pictures yet again and pick out some of my personal favorites and add some sort of artistic twist in them. These are the ones that give the “wow” factor to my pictures. The reason I pick out certain ones and not all of them… well let’s just say that the picture of posing with grandma is not going to wow you like the one of your emotional first dance. This is a quick scaled down version of my workload at the least. I hope you can now appreciate more the final images from me or any photographer at that.
Here are a couple of before and afters……
Leave a Reply