Through With The Wedding Photos!

I photographed a wedding two weeks ago today, for a family we've known since we moved here. We have known them almost 11 years, and I was honored to be asked and was glad to say yes.

(I finished "photoshopping" them all in Adobe Photoshop Elements last night.)

This young couple could never have paid the going price for a pro wedding photographer, and I wanted to bless them with good wedding photos. All it cost me was time to photograph and then adjust them all in Elements afterward, and they end up with pictures they can look at for the rest of their lives, you know?

I was paid in experience, knowledge, and fun.

A win-win situation.

For the rehearsal, the wedding, and the reception, I ended up having taken 367 photographs.

Fully 360 of them are good enough to print for at least a 4x6 set of prints. The formal ones and many of the "action" shots are good enough to print as big as they desire.

I am so glad they all came out. I'm blown away by how many great ones there are. I mean, these are the photos they'll print and have to show for the event.

It's a humbling thing to shoot a wedding.

One good thing about digital cameras, you can get an instant feel for things after each shot as you glance at the screen on back.

When I give the photos to them, I'll ask permission to put a few of them on here.

They are mostly all traditional; I'm not experienced enough to have a feel for cool, modern poses and whatnot, but I'm glad so many came out well and that I'm through adjusting them all in Elements and converting them to different sized JPEGs for them.

One thing that I did, that I have learned is the best decision I could have possibly made is to take them in RAW format. Screw up with a JPEG and you have very little room for adjustments, but the few that were actually too dark brightened up so nicely in RAW format that the conversion to JPEG looks like I took each and every picture with perfect exposure.

My advice for you if someone asks you to shoot a wedding: Use RAW format! You'll thank yourself a thousand times over.

For the uninitiated, RAW format is the true, complete set of digital information of each photograph. Not every camera has the option to save photos in RAW format.

Most digital cameras, and digital camera users simply shoot JPEGs, and that's fine. Many pro photographers shoot only in JPEG format and don't even bother with RAW format.

What RAW format buys for someone like me, someone who just shot only his fourth wedding, is that RAW format data allows a great amount of adjustments to be made AFTER the photo is taken and on the computer. Once a problem is corrected, it can be converted to JPEG and put on the internet or sent in emails or whatever.

You can correct exposure mistakes a huge amount in RAW format, whereas correcting a bad exposure in JPEG format is very limited.