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Hi! I'm G.E. Masana and I'm a wedding
photographer in the NYC-Long Island-TriState area. And sometimes other places too. After reading countless blogs of other photographers, I vowed that someday I too would have my very own, but with one BIG difference: My first line in my first post in my first blog was NOT going to be "Hi! This is my blog! This is my first post! Welcome to my blog! I'm going to blog now!" Why have a blog? Oh, there's all sorts of reasons, but among the saner ones... mainly for me to share what one client quaintly termed "My little treasures" (I love that). That is, my wedding photo images and ideas, my little creations, my little babies that I give birth to throughout the year. My little works of art fetched from life. Look! That one said "Dada!" What a clever kid! Check out the behind the scene stories about my photos in "Scene at a wedding" (clever category name, no?) or my rants and raves in "Musings", my "So What If" series of what to do for your wedding day photos if stuff happens under "Wedding Help". Or just look at the nice, pretty pictures. So, welcome! This is my blog! This is my first post! Welcome to my blog! I'm going to blog now! |
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01.26.10 / scene at a wedding / Author: G.E. Masana / Comments: (0)
Tags: nyc wedding photography, University Club NY wedding, Wedding photography at the University Club NYC
Wedding photography from the University Club, NY, NY
Claremont Strings & Ensembles: Musicians
I’m in the process of crafting their wedding album, and here’s a little sneak preview of some of their wedding photos:
click here to see my wedding website.
01.22.10 / scene at a wedding / Author: G.E. Masana / Comments: (0)
Tags: long island wedding photography, westbury manor wedding photography
wedding
location: westbury manor
long island, new york
click here to see my wedding website.
01.22.10 / behind the camera / Author: G.E. Masana / Comments: (0)
Tags: color space in wedding photography, jpg wedding photos vs raw
Maybe because digital is still relatively brand new that many wedding photographers haven’t caught on to its nuances yet, but the format in which they capture your images is a factor in how your images look.
As you go around interviewing photographers for your wedding day, perhaps it may be smart to ask: “Do you shoot RAW or JPG (pronounced ‘jay-peg’)?”
Some will say they shoot in the RAW format, some will say JPG. Shooting in JPG mode creates an image file wherein much of the data is deleted. The file is compressed down to a smaller size and usable to immediately make photos from without any more work being done. Therefore it’s a faster process, uses less hard drive storage space and doesn’t require any more work. Many choose the format for those reasons, which may be practical, but that doesn’t make it better. Just makes it convenient… for them.
RAW, on the other hand, is just that, a file containing all the “raw” data. It’s not a processed image file like a JPG is, but rather, still needs to be processed by the photographer. That means the photographer, not the camera, works with all the data afterwards and can individually decide, after the wedding shoot, what work to do on each image, while retaining all the data to do it with.
But that’s not what I wanted to bring to your attention today. There’s a piece of information I think you ought to know that’s never spoken about.
And that’s when a camera records an image as a JPG, it’s assigned a “Color Space”.
Color space does not affect RAW, only JPGs, but more about that in a bit.
If a photographer tells you he shoots JPGs, bad enough as that may be, then you should be asking, “In what Color Space”?
If they even know the answer (cameras come with factory default settings – it’s not like this is on the minds of most photographers!), they’ll likely say, “sRGB”.
That’s the default setting anyhow.
But if you hear that, it means they’re tossing away tons of color information from your photos.
sRGB is the smallest color space available, meaning it has less colors and tones available to it than any other color space. Nuances in colors, gradations in colors and tones, all that, can never be recorded in sRGB because they’re simply not there to begin with. Instead, you’ll get colors that are somewhat off or nearby, but not exactly true to life. You won’t see smooth gradations but bumps in colors. If the image needs to be darkened or lightened, as most images do, it won’t go smoothly but it will go to another color. Maybe blueish. Maybe purplish or red, but not the next subtle shade of color tone, because it’s simply not there.
This is not the stuff of good photography.
On the other hand, the largest color space, with the most colors available, is “ProPhoto RGB”. ProPhoto RGB covers just about every imaginable color a digital camera can capture. sRGB does not. RAW files aren’t subjected to color space when photographed, but when opening them in imaging software to process them into image files afterwards, they need to be. The RAW shooter can then opt to work in a large color space at that point, having retained all the color info in the RAW file, and process the image in ProPhoto RGB, rather than delete a host of colors in a limited space like sRGB upon capture in JPG.
Are you following me?
Here’s a diagram from Canon, the camera company, to give you a visual of the limited range of sRGB colors compared to other color spaces such as ProPhoto RGB.
I shoot RAW. Then I work in the largest space available, ProPhoto RGB, so I can have it all, all the colors, I shot, to work with. The final product has to be a JPG to be compatible with the web and printers, but it’s only at that final point when all the work is done that the color space is then converted to sRGB and retains the final colors, rather than deleting a bunch of them at the time of capture and not having them to work with at all. Make sense?
It simply gives that much more of an edge to obtaining a better look in the final image.
And I just want to do what makes for a better photo.
click here to see my wedding website.
01.19.10 / and anyhow / Author: G.E. Masana / Comments: (0)
Tags: new york city wedding photography at battery park
PHOTO © G.E. MASANA
Click here to read their story.
click here to see my wedding website.
01.14.10 / behind the camera / Author: G.E. Masana / Comments: (0)
location: long island, new york
I’ve got a thing about getting moonlit wedding photos of brides and grooms, I guess.
click here to see my wedding website.
01.12.10 / behind the camera / Author: G.E. Masana / Comments: (0)
Digital photography is still a relatively new development in the wedding photography world, and so, there’s a learning curve involved. It’s not a matter of simply picking up the camera and bingo! you’re getting top notch images because there are matters peculiar to digital needing to be addressed that, because it’s a somewhat newer process, haven’t dawned on many photographers.
I gave a couple of examples in a previous post showing how other wedding photographers are blowing out the details in the bridal gowns or not adjusting for the blue cast digital renders in the whites of the gowns. I really think they’re not “seeing” it because they’re unaware of it. That being the case, it’s as if invisible to them. Like the saying goes, “you don’t know what you don’t know!”
I’m going to open up your eyes.
It’s only then, after you’ve been made aware, that you’ll notice what I’m talking about again and again in wedding photo after wedding photo.
Are you ready, Neo?
Skin coloring, or “skin tones” is another area where post production work on the wedding images is often overlooked or passed on. You’ll see all sorts of color casts in the skin from photo to photo.
Now, granted, there’s a wide variety of skin coloring in the population (even in caucasians). Yet the idea, when it comes to photographs, is to kind of rein it all in and make it look pleasing so it flatters the subjects.
Commercial photographers, such as those doing fashion work for magazines, already know this and they do it. It’s not an option. But for some reason, many wedding photographers don’t do it at all (well, the reason is most likely because when it comes to wedding photography lately, all you need to do is pick up a camera and claim you’re a wedding photographer. And believe it or not, there are people who will hire you, sadly enough, even though you have the flimsiest of experience and entrust you to document their wedding; whereas with fashion photography, you actually have to be talented and proficient and prove yourself to experienced, demanding, nationally published photo editors who will only hire you if you have the right stuff to meet their exacting, high quality standards).
In my wedding album photos I follow the commercial photography wisdom to adjust skin tones in almost every image, just to make folks look wonderful. It’s not just done by eye to taste; there’s actually more or less a formula for what goes into a pleasing skin tone. Sometimes this can mean adjusting skin tones on different people separately within one wedding photo because of the wide diversity of skin coloring among people, even sometimes adjusting different parts of just one person’s own skin (as their arms, neck or face may all be way different tones) to harmonize it all together.
True, this is probably more labor than the typical studio would ever put into any one wedding album photo. But speaking just for me, this is where I find my personal standards lead me to, and I’ve found I have to honor that to be satisfied with my product.
So from now on, whenever you see a purple skin cast or a blue one or yellow (unless it’s specifically done as some kind of purposeful art tinting, as in rendering a vintage look for instance), you’ll know it’s because the photographer is most probably overlooking the finessing of their wedding photos.
As a matter of fact, in a recent consultation, a bride-to-be told me about how her friend’s wedding pictures from another studio had the “wrong colors” in them, explaining how the ring shot came out yellow instead of the white gold it was in real life. Again, this is all about wedding studios not taking the step of accurate post production work on their photographs, as most studios don’t take this step because they’re either not aware of the need for it, or even if they are, it’s not only time consuming to do, but also means someone has to be paid to do the labor – and be skilled enough to do it correctly – so it’s very often not something that can be done at all by the typical studio.
Here are a few before & after examples so you can see the difference it makes. The top row of straight-out-of-the-camera photos had an orange-yellow cast (the long island wedding studio they were shot for did not do any production work on the images at all); the bottom row are the remastered versions:
click here to see my wedding website.
01.06.10 / scene at a wedding / Author: G.E. Masana / Comments: (0)
Tags: Martha Clara Vineyard Wedding
Wedding at Martha Clara Vineyard
Caterer: Christopher Michael
Riverhead, New York
A wet and rainy day. Windy too! Happily, this smart cookie of a bride went ahead and procured a huge, empty luxurious house for us to photograph in before heading out to the vineyard on long island. My Assistant Photographer, Stephen, worked with me to capture some pretty fun in-the-moment photographs, and some pretty, warm portrait ones too.
click here to see my wedding website.
01.05.10 / scene at a wedding / Author: G.E. Masana / Comments: (0)
Tags: best of wedding photography 2009, wedding photography long island vanderbilt mansion
click here to see my wedding website.
