Welcome to *another* new series of blog posts we plan on doing throughout our 2014 season! We certainly don’t have enough of these series 😉
Anyway, we have come to realize couples have a lot of questions when they’re searching for their photography team, and some of the same questions come up in almost every consultation we do. So, we figured it wouldn’t hurt to share these frequently asked questions on our blog for all to see! Every now and then, an Ask Anything blog post will come up answering some of those popular questions we get. And of course, if you have any questions for us we’d love to hear from you! Shoot us an email with anything you’d like answered and hopefully we’ll have the time to get to it in this series 🙂
One of the most popular questions we get has to do with our editing process. How do we edit? Who edits? How long does it take to finish editing a wedding? And how do we make our photos look “like that”? So here goes…
*We shoot RAW and so the images on the left are what they look like straight out of our camera with absolutely no work done to them at all. The images on the right are the final product.
How we see it – We firmly believe the art of photography does not stop once an image is taken in camera. Our intended image is not complete until we, ourselves, finalize it in post production giving it special attention and care. While we are shooting, very often we know that we’re shooting a black and white image. Other times we can guarantee an image we just took will end up being edited in color. The end result of an image is a combination of it’s composition, the emotion within the moment being captured, and the post production work to finalize the image. It’s our job to have a cohesive workflow throughout the entire process of making the photos we provide to our couples, and we don’t take that lightly.
Getting it right – To be honest, we don’t do much to our photos in terms of editing. The goal of any photographer should be to get each image right in camera. We don’t want to use the editing process as a way to “fix” a bad image. The technicalities of each image are shot correctly in camera from the get go, leaving us with clean, properly exposed, sharp images to work with after the fact. This makes the editing process easier and more fun for us!
How we edit – After culling down the images we shot, those chosen photos are imported into Lightroom for their editing to begin. Each photo is edited individually, we take the time and give the attention necessary to create a gorgeous collection of images. After tweaking the “look” to our edits over the years we’ve settled on a very classic, clean, film edit to our images. We want our couples’ to have photos that stand the test of time, and won’t be out of trend in a few years. Anyone remember selective color? Black and white photos with only one element in color, like a bouquet? What was once a cool new trend in photography is now seen as a pretty terrible way of editing. We don’t want our couples to look back at their photos and say “that was so 2013”. Film is of course, where the roots of photography lie. So we use the classic look of film as our inspiration for the way we edit our photos. Typically, all we do in post production is do a little brightening, add a little warmth, sprinkle a little of our secret sauce , throw on a final sharpening for print and convert to .jpegs on export. Done!
Who edits – We do. Like we said before, these are our images. It’s never felt right for us to visualize the images we want to take, witness the real moments in person, compose the shot, take it and then turn it over to someone else to finish for us. Don’t get us wrong, we can see the value in outsourcing the task of editing for some photographers. If it’s a benefit to their business… more power to them! We’re self admitted control freaks who actually LOVE the process of editing. So we don’t outsource, we edit every single photo ourselves. Always 🙂 Not to mention, we have such a good workflow post production, it would actually take longer to send out the photos to be edited, rather than just editing them ourselves.
Speaking of time – A huge question we’re always asked is “how long does it take to get our photos back”? Our answer is always this… “as soon as humanly possible”. Because this business is our full time job, because there are two of us, and because we’re slightly obsessed with our work we are able to return photos in a very short amount of time. Typically engagement sessions are returned a week from the shoot date, and weddings are returned in under 2 weeks (if not sooner, which has been the case in 2013). Of course there are holidays, vacations, double header weekends or other unexpected events that throw a curve ball into our workflow, but in 2013 all of our wedding couples had their photos delivered in less than 2 weeks with most couples receiving them the Friday after their wedding. This is NOT NORMAL. Please understand that this editing time is not industry standard, and a good delivery time is still considered to be 4 weeks (max). So if your photographer isn’t a crazy person who delivers photos in a week, don’t think less of them. We just love giving our couples an experience that is like no other, and a ridiculously short turn around time is just one way we can do that.
So there you have it! A little insight into our editing process, how we do it, and why. Hopefully this didn’t bore you all to tears. We LOVE working with photos in post production, so this is exciting stuff for us 🙂
Have a great weekend!
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