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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!
I’m excited to introduce you to the newest member of my photography team! Let me tell you, there are so many novice photographers nowadays, more than ever. Folks literally are getting a digital camera for Christmas and three months later advertising themselves as wedding photographers… I see posts on photography discussion forums where the poster states they’re shooting a wedding in a week’s time, but are asking basic, elementary questions about what lenses to use or how to photograph inside a dark church or how to light for reception candids – and I’m thinking their only question ought to be, “Am I even qualified to accept the responsibility of photographing wedding assignments?”
So when it comes to choosing photographers to work with me, I’m pretty exacting. Very little of what I see around looks any good to me. In fact, a lot of it looks like what I’d call “glorified snapshots”. Lots of folks just pointing their cameras and shooting and then over-processing them if they process them at all. But then, once in a while, there’s someone who does have an eye for composition and light, and understands what photography’s all about, has knowledge of that, is skilled at it, has passion for the art and a joy for photographing weddings.
A real photographer. And so, I’d like to welcome Yunika to my team.
Yunika was photographing weddings in California for several years and then moved to New York. She immediately got herself booked out working for some wedding photography studios and has photographed weddings at many notable venues, such as Tavern on the Green to such long island bridal favorites as the Jericho Terrace, Chateau Briand, Westbury Manor, Fox Hollow and Oheka Castle. Her images are chic and elegant and she has a nice knack for capturing spontaneous moments as well as the connection between the bride and groom.
Adding to her wonderful photography my own touch of post processing and wedding album design, and we have what I think is one awesome collaboration. Check out her out-of-camera image and the finished version I remastered from it! It’s crazy insane!
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.
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:
Hi guys! Thought today I’d blog about something that drives me nuts about newbie wedding photographers, but it’s a good rant because it’s educational! Not only for photographers at the start of their careers but also for brides and grooms-to-be looking through photographers’ portfolios because this will make you more savvy about what to watch for.
Our eyes are amazing contraptions. They work way better than cameras do. For example, you know how you can see a white dress and also see the details in it, without the details being washed out by the brightness of the gown? The way we make out details of white on white is to see shadows that depict the details. We take it for granted that we can see these highlights and shadows at the same time.
The way your eye works, it’s actually looking at the brightness of the white gown, but then instantaneously the very next split mini micro fraction of a second later, your iris closes down to let in less light so that the details can be seen better. Both images are then combined together in your mind in that amazing fast sliver of a moment, making it appear to you that you’re actually seeing it all at the same time.
Pretty impressive, eh?
But cameras don’t work as well as that. They either record the white gown or record the details, but typically not both if the latitude of exposure between the two is too great. The photographer typically has to choose whether to expose for the bride’s face or for the gown’s details, and guess what’s going to take precedence? Unless you want a super dark face in the image, the face will be exposed properly and the gown becomes “blown out”, meaning it will appear all white, losing all the details.
Lots of photographers, experienced or not, don’t even think about the gown being blown out in their images. But I think brides want to see the details in their gown, no? I mean, aren’t the details one of the top two reasons a bride loves her gown (the other being how amazing she looks in it)? So a good photographer ought to be rendering the gown with detail and not distributing images where the gown looks like some big white sheet hung flapping on the bride.
The other thing that drives me bonkers is the blue tinge that digital gives the gown. Lots of photographers overlook that too and don’t eliminate it from their photos. We must be so used to seeing this in mages that we don’t ever seem to notice it – until someone points it out.
Here’s a couple of images I found on the web of photographers blowing out the highlights in the gowns and overlooking those blue tones just so you can see what I’m talking about. I’m not picking on these particular photographers, any google image search will bring up scores more, as this happens all too commonly:
Here’s an image of mine where I’ve made the gown’s details evident and any blue tone on the white fabric has been taken out. Makes a big difference, no?:
The STROBIST had a post recently of a make believe interview with Flemish artist Johannes Vermeer (make believe because he lived about 300+ years ago). His work rocks on! He’s the artist the movie “Girl with a Pearl Earring” was based on.
Anyway, the interview goes on about how he was a master of painting with light and shadows and if you know anything about painting, that’s what painting is pretty much about.
The idea of bringing up Vermeer was rather interesting because as a teenage art student, he was one of several masters I came across that profoundly influenced me.
So much so, that one day,. back in ye old film days, I was photographing a wedding when I spied one of the wait staff pouring champagne into awaiting glasses and something struck me as “hmmm, this looks like something!”
I captured the image, and only later did it sink in the waitress going about her chores very much resembled Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid”.
That’s when it also dawned on me that one of the things my art training and hours in the museum studying painting did, was to register scenes in my mind that would subtly influence me later in life… I suppose as all education does.
It appears that Vermeer’s influence on me, in turn, influenced me to make this photo.
Strange, isn’t it, that this photograph, thought taken sometime in the 1990’s, actually had its origin in 1660.
Since then, I realize I’ve gotten several Rembrandts, Degas, Monet and yes, a Norman Rockwell.
I was asked by a colleague recently if I use Photoshop Actions. An “action”, if you don’t know, is simply a macro of different steps done in Photoshop to manipulate an image a certain way and recorded so that one needn’t repeat all the clicking and navigation everytime you want to do the same thing, but rather simply click the action that’s been recorded to set it all in motion.
What’s happened is that many photographers have put their particular actions for sale on the market as sets and others can purchase them to affect their own photos (I must tell you, however, that actions don’t work on every image, it’s not some magic recipe that guarantees amazing images). You know, they ooh and ahh over that photographers amazing work and think that by applying their actions they’re own work will look as good.
My answer was “no”. That’s the short answer.
I did look into it, for a bit when they started becoming popular, but I stopped. What I’ve seen happen is that they become effects for effect’s sake and/or I’ve seen over-processing of images because of the availability of these action sets. That is to say, I’ve seen many studios where the action used just doesn’t seem warranted by the picture they’ve used it on. Does that make sense? I’ll explain:
One studio, for example, touted the over-saturated purple and reddish sky hues they created in a series of images of a bride and groom, cooing over the colors, but entirely overlooked that they had left garbage cans prominently in the images for all to see (whereas those could’ve been either cropped out or manipulated out. See my post where I did this enhancement of a wedding image ). What’s the point of bumping up the colors if the rest of the picture is what needs work?
Another very popular studio has nothing but over saturated, over processed effects in their images, it seems because it’s faster and easier to batch several hundred photos at a time and click once to affect them all rather than work on each one individually, especially since they’re trying to knock out 800 weddings a year.
I think more in line with how master photography printers used to work in the darkroom: They would size up an image and determine what that image needed to fully bring it to its potential. They would “burn” and “dodge” the print and tweak its hues and blur or sharpen the focus, and vignette it, all to accentuate or minimize parts of the image, and that would really take the photograph to a whole higher level. If you could find a great printer back then, you were consider blessed by the photo deities. The finer photographers would pay these artist-technicians good sums of money to enhance their images in this way.
When entering print competitions, for example, pro photographers would avail themselves of these services in order to have something created that was worthy of winning. One of the things I’ve taken away from these album competitions, for example, is the criteria of having the colors uniform and in a consistent range throughout the book. But yet nowadays, because it’s just a mouse click away from anyone with the program and a finger, it’s not unusual to see all sorts of incongruous images in one album, as if anything goes, it’s an extreme of effects and actions. It’s the photography equivalent to some years back when every videographer (or so it seemed) poured about 100,000 special effects into their videos just because they could: cartoon cupids popping in to shoot arrows, pictures whirling in from one side after another, animated hearts floating around, puzzle pieces assembling themselves rapidly into one large image, etc, etc. You’ve probably seen these and more in your older sister’s wedding video. If you could sit through it long enough…
Truth be told, the point being missed is it’s not about slapping on post process photoshop actions for the effect it has on the image so as to be a novelty; crafting the image in post process should be about determining what treatment each particular image benefits from. It always behooves the graphic artist to, if applying effects, to apply them tastefully, and to limit their use rather than go overboard. It’s the amateur who has the mind set of “if some is good, then more must be better” and goes ahead whether it’s warranted or not.
As a matter of fact, the moment the processing becomes the star rather than the image, being more noticeable than subtle, you’ve got yourself a picture that someday will look very dated. Trends will come and go, but “classic” lasts forever.
For example, consider this straight-out-of-camera image of a bride with her dad in the car before the ceremony:
It needs some work, but what shall that work consist of?
It’s easy enough to run it through a few actions, change some colors, add some effect and, voilá! Like these for example:
But whatever was done in those variations, it had nothing to do with that image.
What I mean by that is, this image is calling, indeed shouting, for the bride and her dad to be isolated in the picture, to draw the viewer’s eye to them, because there’s a story going on in that picture and that’s exactly where we find it.
There’s an interaction happening between them at that moment in time and it constitutes the inherent drama in this particular image. That the sister and mother are looking on is gravy, as it adds more dimension to the photo, both in its story and its appearance, making it even richer, yet they join us, the viewer, in watching the scene unfold.
That’s how I think about this photo.
It’s this story that’s the most important feature of all in the image, and no amount of special effects is going to enhance that aspect. But it sure can take away and even distract from it.
So the question becomes, what can we do in post process to bring this story out?
Well, the answer is not in running your pictures through an assembly line of canned photoshop actions, but to use photoshop tools for what they were meant for, and that is, to craft out the final image. Take it to another level. Doing that, we obtain a much more dramatic, story telling image:
All too often when I view through wedding discussion boards, I see posts of wedding album designs… where there actually isn’t any design at all.
A design calls for a theme and uses graphic elements with restraint and consistency not to go all over the spectrum but to stick to the concept.
That’s not what I’m seeing.
Instead, what I see is typically a hodgepodge of wedding images, all cluttered and crammed together, without any reason for being juxtaposed with each other. The alleged design changes from page to page and consists of an abundance of tilted images, overlays, opacities and cheesy text (do we really need the bridesmaids’ picture to say “the girls”?). Effects are heaped onto pictures for no seemingly valid reason other than effects for effect’s sake, it has nothing to actually do with the image itself that enhances anything particular to it. There isn’t any design skill or layout strategy involved at all, yet it’s being called a “design” nonetheless. As a former graphic artist, this treatment doesn’t pass me by unnoticed.
Do an image search on Google and you’ll see plenty of examples of just what I’m talking about. Like these: images.google.com/images
To my eye, many of these designs are all over the place. As I mentioned, there doesn’t seem to be a design at all, as any design specs are inconsistent, if they exist at all.
A well done design enhances the images much like a well designed gallery enhances the art on its walls. Less is more.
Too much of anything looks cluttered. If the design garners more attention than the images, it’s a poor design.
When you think about it, one realizes it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect to see professionally designed albums from photography studios. Why not? Because if you’re a professional graphic artist, schooled and practiced in the principles of successful art and design, chances are you’re not going to go work for the local wedding photography studio down the block. Nope. You’re going to look to work for a firm such as Getty Publications. You’re going to seek to establish a serious career.
Local studios hire whomever is available to them (I know of one that uses some guy in the Philippines because he’s cheaper than them employing a local high school student to work on the albums, another that uses the owner’s wife’s girlfriend because she ’s into scrapbooking), so my guess is they don’t get artists who’ve mastered the rules such as the use of negative and positive space, the ways of breaking space and organizing shapes and the use of compositional techniques. All sorts of little “rules” you may not think of but which contribute to great design. We learn this stuff in art school for a reason.
And that’s before we even start talking about what to consider when determining which of the images to use. That requires prudence and discipline to edit through. You can love, love, love an image, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has a place in the final wedding album if it really just doesn’t fit.
Lots of great acting and cinematic shots in movie history ended up on the cutting room floor.
And film editors get Academy Awards for knowing what to cut… and doing it.
Jerry Ghionis is an Australian wedding photographer named by American PHOTO magazine as one of the Top Ten Wedding Photographers in the World. Here’s a video he made of a critique he did of an anonymous photographer’s wedding album design. You’ll get an idea of some of the considerations that go into how he chooses images for a wedding album. It’s an interesting peek into the thought process. Mr. Ghionis has won the Australian Institute of Professional Photography’s Album of the Year award 4 years in a row, so he might have a thing or two to tell us!
Storytelling qualities, impact, style, composition and creativity are all components of classic design that stand the test of time when executed well and never look dated. It’s not simply about placing pictures next to each other with all sorts of tilts and effects.
You may think it’s only about having a nice camera.
That’s like thinking having a nice bicycle makes you Lance Armstrong.
A learned Doctor said, “The things we get very good at, are the things we practice the most”. Put another way, to get really good at something, even if you have a natural knack for it, you have to put in lots of work. Michael Jordan was basketball’s greatest player, but he still put practice time on the court. That’s the way it works.
There isn’t barely a day that goes by that I don’t try to learn something, try out something, read something, to expand my knowledge and abilities when it comes to photography. You could say it’s a passion of mine. Other people notice my work and comment that I seem very good at this, that the quality rivals that of higher priced photogs.
I know that what they’re seeing is the application of all my continual education and dedicated practice.
It was while I was working on a wedding in the second week of its post production process that I recalled how some studios require their shooters to turn in whatever wedding images they shot over the weekend within, oh, say, four days or so. The studios want to get those images up online as quickly as possible, you understand, equating that fast turnaround with quality of service.
Four days after a wedding, I’m still working on the images! This can’t all get done in four days.
I’d rather take the time it takes to do the work, and be meticulous. Not rush it through. To me, that’s a quality service.
Well, of course, it’s not the most inexpensive way to produce work either. It’s rather labor intensive. Not only that, it’s rather highly skilled labor intensive.
I guess that’s the point of this post.
Let me show you the difference. Here’s an example from a wedding I photographed at Dowling College in Oakdale, NY.
The first image is the shot as taken. It’s fine, nothing wrong with it (though the electrical outlet holes left in the pillars after they pulled out the lights kind of irk me. Grrrr.)
But again, with digital, it’s just not a finished product. It’s like being a chef with raw ingredients, you still have to cook it well. I wouldn’t be happy just handing people the ingredients and saying “ok, now, cook it yourself.”
(Actually, neither should you be happy going to a restaurant and having the chef give you the raw ingredients to have you finish his work. Or a photo studio to have the photographer do the same.)
The second image is after I’ve worked on it some.
The third image, just on a whim, is from a photographer named Yervant, who is a celebrated wedding photographer in Australia and known all over as one of the top photographers in the world. He’s an international multi-award winning photographer, has been awarded the Grand Master of Photography from the AIPP (Australian Institute of Professional Photographers) and he’s also the recipient of the 2009 AIPP Australian Wedding Photographer of the Year award. He and his wife run a high end couture studio in Melbourne and his fees range up at about the fifteen thousand dollar mark for him to come out and shoot your wedding, and that’s without any albums or prints.
Anyhoo… does my finished work come close to his?
Just wondering…
Maybe it’s that summer’s too short. Maybe it’s that winter seems to last for sixteen months out of the year.
Maybe it’s that days are dark and blustery by 5 PM.
I felt like posting a wedding photograph I created on a long island beach.
Therefore, I offer you a little warmth on an otherwise cool day, Dear Reader.
My wedding picture of the week.
