It’s always great to meet couples in the early stages of planning their wedding and listen to their ideas and to get their reactions to the wedding photography and albums etc. Although the web is a wonderful shop window couples frequently comment how amazing the photographs look when we meet; after all who knows how their monitor is set up, if the web site is being viewed on a aptop, particularly an older one, or if it’s been viewed on a portable device.
Yesterday I posted about photographs being supplied on disk, the digital image files, and during my meet yesterday I was showing the couple some examples of how we enhance our wedding photographs. They were blown away by what they saw and commented that they were under the impression that being software related everything is done by the press of a button.
It’s true you can press a button that desaturates an image to give a black and white photograph from a colour original; it’s all about the content of an image and how photographer want the enhanced photo to look. This brings me back to processing being done on an image by image basis; different images require different adjustments.
The couple I met yesterday were fascinated and now understand why the top end wedding photographers command the prices charged. It’s all about value; if people are not that fussed about photography they are not interested in the time and experience that we put in to creating great wedding photography collections. On the other hand because a photographer is the most expensive it does not necessarily mean they are producing top end results.
I would fall in to the group of people that are interested only in the resultant photograph I am looking at and the ability of the photographer to convey a part of the wedding story with each photograph taken. I guess it’s a bit like the debate about digital and film; which is best.
This was commented about more in the early days of professional digital photography; back then my brides and grooms weren’t interested in the technical side but in the photographs they were looking at in the various portfolios; this was most important.