Then if I'm chosen, we have another meeting, sign contracts, and depending on how far in advance I'm booked, I start plotting. Yes, you heard me. Plotting. There are a litany of pieces of information that I generally require. The truth of the matter is, we are strangers. It's as simple as that. And the quicker I get to know the personality, the better I can tailor myself to fit your needs. Details like music, color selection, invitations, they're all subtle cues that lead me into your world. When the event gets closer, I try to work closely with the bride/groom in terms of their schedules, and offer any advice I can in terms of weddings. After all, I've been through many!

When the schedules are made, I determine what's most likely the best time to shoot formals, try to visualize the shots of the events that will transpire. About a week or so prior to the wedding, I will scout out the location. I think it's paramount that this is done for two reasons. Never walk into a situation where you're left feeling unprepared. As cliche as it sounds, It's almost like a battle. Me vs the light and scenery gods, and lets face it. I'm battling in their territory. What are the lighting conditions for the time that events transpire? Is it hot? sunny? where would the shots take place. Where should we do the fun shots. Time is a rare commodity during weddings, so the more I'm prepared, the better. We can go through the shots quickly as I've already visualized ahead of time what will be done. Yes I do realize pre-planning is one thing. The actual event is an entirely different story, but I feel more comfortable if I got the lay of the land, as opposed to jumping into the unknown.

A good weekend exercise to keep you on your toes? Pick a location, any location...and then tell yourself...you have about 30 minutes to make it look good. The crappier the location, the better. Because lets face it, not everyone gets to have the luxury of getting married by the ocean cliffs in the Ritz Carlton! The more you train yourself to see diamonds in the rough, the better off you are. Anyways I digress. So when the shots are semi-planned, the schedule is set, vendors or wedding planners are spoken to and dealt with, we fast foward to the night before the event.

It's the pre battle stage as I'd like to call it. It's the best and worse part. The worse part is I usually can never sleep. I'm thinking of the shots in my head. I'm too jittery and excited. What's the best part? Well when I was a kid, I loved that scene in Rambo II, where John ties his shoes, and gets all his gear in order before the battle. I pretty much do the same. Take out all the gigs of memory cards, make sure they're wiped. Set ISO's and all my cameras to 100, clean the lenses, clean the camera bodies. Make sure all the batteries are charged, go through my checklist of equipment and make sure that everything is accounted for and ready to go. Pack it all up in bags and hope for the best.

A lot of people ask what are my most used lenses in an event. Well, I pretty much make sure I get the entire range covered. From 10mm to 200mm. Usually, from experience anything above 200mm is overkill (unless it's a huge church and I'm relegated by the priest/minister to only be able to stand waaay in the back) I usually plan out with my 2nd shooter in advance which positions we're most likely to cover. For 80% of the event, my main choices are generally the 24-70 and 70-200. Grant (my 2nd shooter) generally prefers the 24-105 and the 17-55IS. In general. If we're indoors in very predictable environments, then we'll use primes. The holy trinity is usually a good starting point. 35, 50 and 85mms. Though to be honest my 50mm sees little action. The 135mm and 35mm are the top contenders. I'm not a 'primes' or zooms kinda guy. The situation dictates the lens choice. Simple as that. I think restricting yourself is retarded. Some snobs only shoot purely with primes. They think ooh no..zooms lack quality! or, Oh no! I hate primes! Zooms all the way! Well, that way of thinking is stupid. If the situation calls for equipment x, but you won't use equipment x based on principal, then good luck to you =) Why make things harder on yourself? A lot of people ask about brand names of lenses. We pretty much have sigma, canon, zeiss ef mount lenses at our disposal. One company isn't better than the other necessarily. Like I said, if you're good....Toy cameras can be deadly in your hands. But I generally prefer the build quality of the Canon lenses. Some of the L's are built like tanks. Once I rolled my 70-200 down 2 or 3 steps of concrete stairs. Picked it up, (silently cried) and was still able to shoot with it. It's really what are you comfortable with? Go with it and don't worry if your equipment is the right equipment. If it's right for you and you can make it work. Go with it.

Towards the end of the event, (and my assistants can attest to it) I always ask myself why the heck am I doing this again? By now we've most likely barely ate, have been standing for hours, have tired hands, sore fingers, and sweaty clothes. Every wedding I do, towards the end I swear up and down that it'll be my last wedding. No joke! I barely even want to see my camera the next day. But after a few weeks, I'm itching for the excitement and adrenaline for the next photoshoot. For me, I like to do one a month. Any more and it's not fair to the clients. I know some people book like crazy (or try to), cookie cutter their way into post processing and move onto the next client. Well generally I can be choosy like I said, and I try to limit myself to one a month and under extreme circumstances ( read: a truck load of money) will I typically do more than one. The wedding is not one day for a photographer. It's a few weeks and then some. Post processing can take a loooong time. Proofs, book planning, etc. Yes, it does take me about a month or so to finish up and recover for the next big event. But I think my work reflects that. If I did a gig each week, quality suffer, not to mention I'd be burnt out by 6 months!

So what is post processing? Well after the event, I take all the images on average I'd say about 30gigs of raw files between the two of us. And act primarily as a filter. I go through all the images and organize them chronologically by event. For example, 'getting ready bride', 'getting ready groom', 'guests', 'dancing' etc. This takes a few hours, but worth it because it makes it easier to begin the weeding process. So then I go through each category and go through every single image with a fine tooth comb. What do I look for? Candidates that will make it into the wedding book. Think of it as the best of the best, and that subset will be my sandbox. The pieces that I will eventually use to design the book to tell the story. This, believe it or not, takes me days. It's not easy being a filter, and this is just for the book pictures. During this time, I delete any sucky crappy underexposed, overexposed shots. Shots with eyes closed, etc. off to the trash can they go to get rid of clutter. When selection phase is done, I move into design phase. Say I took 300 pictures of the ceremony. On average, about 20 make it into the sandbox, and about 5 make it into the album. As I start laying out pages, some images just don't fit well together, so you have to see what works and what doesn't. The absolute worse is if you think a picture would be good. Spend hours fixing it up, then realizing..nope...won't be using it after all. haha...fun fun.

So about a week or so, sometimes more,the phase 1 prototype of the album is created and shown to the client. I choose pics based on artistic and technical merits, and no, I do not know who your favorite Aunt Buttercup is. This is when the client makes the minor modifications. "Hey, my aunt Buttercup isn't here", can you use her picture instead of uncle Inigo Montoya? It's an iterative approach, but I find as long as the foundation is set. Everything falls into place. Once book is finalized (usually takes a few weeks), then off to phase 2 of photo selection. And these are for prints and delivery to the bride/groom. Usually about 800 to 1000 of them on average. And trust me! That's a limited subset. Phase 2 is what I hate the most. Now after all that hard work and picture selection, I have to go back there to the hundreds upon hundreds of pictures and go through another round of selection! These are the good/avg pictures. Trust me, this is a royal pain and takes hours as well. This is usually the point where I want to hang myself. If I can outsource this I would, but they're my pictures, and I'm pretty much the gateway. I decide who can proceed and who gets dumped into oblivion.

Once those are selected and post processed, they are delivered to the client. A good analogy would be that the first pass are your superstar children. They are the creme de la creme. You parade them like they're on their way to Harvard medical school, stare at them at night. Pat yourself on the back for doing such a marvelous job. The 2nd phase selection is more your average kids. They're ok...some are good...some do well in one area, but not the others. You can still tell your friends and family about them, and occaisionally they can make you proud. You send them off into the world and hope someone loves them and that they are popular and people like them. There is a third pass that I sometimes go through. Those are more like the handicapped pictures. Sometimes blurry shots, out of focus, poorly framed, slightly over or under exposed. If they're salvagable, I'll try to save them (Otherwise they would have been deleted during the deweeeding portion). But I find that someone's trash is another person's treasure. I warn my clients these aren't great, but they are in fact pictures of your friends and family, and I really have no use for them, so if they want (and here's the big DISCLAIMER!) They can have them. Yes, I normally only show the best work, but I can't bear to throw away a picture that could be someone's elderly father or neice or something. To me it's worthless but to someone, it could be the best thing in the world. And that's a hard pill to swallow...it's tough to show the ugly side of things, but I think morally it's the correct thing to do. What good is a picture that is in the vault of my computer where only I can look at it?

The touchup phase can be very time consuming. But if people look at a picture and don't know any better. Then I have done my job. The goal is to be as transparent as possible. I feel like I'm a plastic surgeon at times. I see every little detail of the events that unfolded. Cellulite, nose hairs. Acne, bits of food stuck in teeth, exposed undergarments or tags. Wires or speakers in the shot, etc. I normally put a lot of effort on the superstar children. Those get the best treatment. I try to clean up the nooks and crannies. Someone told me, pictures are created not taken. And I can sometimes say, during post processing, that holds 100% true. You ever see the behind the scenes clips from movies? Where it looks crappy, fake, lit all bright and funky? Well that's like an unprocessed picture. Sometimes out of the camera, they're superstars, but lets face it. 70% or more of the shots need work. And that's where graphic design skills come in. And this is where people normally charge about 50 to 100 dollars an hour for touch up work. Why? it's time consuming as heck, requires a good amount of skill and patience. And no one likes to do it. What drives me bonkers though, is when I hear people say, "oh you can just fix it in photoshop". I've got news. Nothing is a good substitute for a good picture. If it's waay under exposed or burnt out, no amount of photoshop can save it. If the framing sucks and the photo lacks good composition, photoshop can't fix it. No I can't bend physics. If the person is too large or too skinny, photoshop is not an accelerated 24hr fitness or a magic anti emaciation cream. I can't convert toads into princes, with the all powerful magic photoshop wand. "I don't like the six fingered man in my shot. Can you remove him"? Ooh it drives me crazy! Um...yes, I can make him vanish into thin air. OOoh wait, now there's a huge dark void where he once stood. Um... should I replace that dark void with a tree? Thankfully, I've never had to deal with people like that. Anyways, I digress. Back to what I was talking about. Where was I? Oh yes, touch up I'd sayis another painful portion of workflow.

The best part of wedding photography? Taking the pictures. The worse part? Dealing with them afterwards. My 2nd shooter is lucky. He shoots and hands me the raw files. I get to deal with it all. Why don't I outsource that? Well, I'd love to,but sometime in me just won't let me. I feel like I've been hired for not only the picture aspect, but the layout/design post processing aspect. Handing that off to some unknown person to decide which picture is good and which ones to touchup and how to apply the final look and feel, would be like handing off my kids to a stranger and say, "deal with them". Lord only knows what the results would be. Now, don't get me wrong, there are very talented people out there that will do touch up work, and design work. But it's kinda like the horror stories of brides hiring photographers and getting a different one at the wedding. It feels like a bait and switch. I get hired for my work. Not oursourced work. At the end of the day, yes it's not efficient but at the end of the day, I can look at you in the face and say, I did this.

When asked how much do I make per event? It's like Wow? It's that much for one day of work? Haha...I wish. Take that, minus overhead, fuel, and time for scouting, costs for an assistant, about 3 weeks worth of time afterwards for post processing....and it doesn't seem so glamorous anymore. It's depressing to calculate the time put in compared to the sheer amount of hours it takes for the finished product. But I'd say it's worth it still. I wouldn't still be doing it if it wasn't. Anyways, so that's my process. Usually after a month or so give or take everything's delivered. Everyone is happy. Guests sometimes will order prints of the event. All is well in the world.

-NLE 03-10-07