SGirimont Photography Blog: The Stories Behind the Images

Lest you think I’m spending all my time shooting and processing landscape photographs, I thought I’d scatter some of my recent wedding work in here too!

I’d never shot a wedding at the Elk River Touring Center in Slatyfork, West Virginia before, but I made the most of it! This place is wonderful and has it all: great grassy field for a terrific background to the wedding? Check. Fantastic food? Check. A stream to cool your heels (well, freeze your feet off) after a long bike ride through the woods? Check. Wonderful rustic barn and completely rusted wheelbarrow perfect for a quick portrait? Oh most definitely check.

This wall of the barn and the rusty wheelbarrow are the first things I noticed as I pulled up in my car the day before the wedding and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. Since the bride and groom were being traditional in that she didn’t want the groom to see the dress before the wedding, I knew I’d have to do this shot after the ceremony, but before the couple got too involved with the reception. I also knew that the sun was going to be behind the wall when I’d have the opportunity to shoot this image, so I also planned the lighting in advance. (It helps to know where to expect the sun at a given time of day!)

This was a simple shot to set up: I knew I wanted the bride looking at the groom. In my imagination, I pictured her more face-on to the camera, but with her head turned. When I suggested she look at her new husband, she turned her body and I knew I liked the reality I was seeing more than what I had pictured in my mind.

The light is coming from not from the sun but from a single flash unit mounted on a light stand off-camera to the right and triggered by a wireless remote.

Interesting tidbit about the making of this image. When I first saw this wall, the wheelbarrow was leaning against it exactly as you see it in the picture. It was so rusted, I thought it was really a prop set up by the location to enhance the look of the site. Turns out they really use this wheelbarrow and it was missing when it came time to do the shot! A quick search discovered it not too far away and I was able to put it back, but I have to admit, I got worried for a second! The thing’s so rusty, I couldn’t imagine anyone actually using it without breaking it!

Turns out it was sturdier than it looked. I even did a picture with the groom pushing the bride around in the thing later! (We put a towel under her to protect the dress).

Oh, and the picture has been processed using a modified black-and-white conversion technique I’ve been working on. I like it. Toned black-and-white with hints of color under it.

These twin boys were the young brothers of a bride who’s wedding I photographed a few years ago. The only way you could tell the boys apart was that each was missing a different front tooth; one was missing the left tooth, the other the right. For the brief period of time it would take the new tooth to grow in, they weren’t quite identical.

This image is significant to me because it caused me to change camera systems.

I provide my wedding clients with PDF slideshow files of their images on disk. This way, my clients can click a file and sit back and enjoy their images without having to install software or experience any platform incompatibilities. PDF slideshows just work. When I was reviewing the results of the slideshow, this image appeared extremely noisy. The “grain” of the image was so strong that it interfered with my monitor’s display capabilities and made the image look like it was printed on very rough sandpaper.

Going back into Photoshop to examine the image more closely, I noticed that the problem would only be seen if the image were shown at full screen size. Zoom in or out and the image looked great. Even printed, the image looked great, but when seen at full screen size, it looked like crap, quite frankly. Naturally, the PDF slideshow displays at full screen size.

When you look at images on a disk, what size do you like to view them at? If you answered “full screen size” you’re most likely in the majority. I know that’s how I like to see them and I imagine that’s how my customers like to see them.

I was able to fix this image by running it through some extra noise reduction software so I could deliver it to my client knowing it would look it’s best no matter how she viewed it. This is one of the driving forces in how I do business: deliver the best possible product to my clients.

After verifying that I didn’t have the same problem with any other images from the wedding, I packed up the product and shipped it off. Then I started examining what implications this discovery had on my business.

This image was taken with a Nikon D2x at ISO 800. At the time, the D2x was the best camera Nikon made. They didn’t get any better than that. I had also been a Nikon shooter for about 15 years at this point and really loved how their equipment was made. However, I also realized that I could not afford to take the time to run images through extra noise-reduction routines in my post-processing without significantly delaying my turn-around time. I was also very worried about not noticing images that might need to go through the extra noise reduction. What would a bride think if she saw one of those images? Noise reduction software also has the drawback of softening image detail, so it’s sometimes a compromise between acceptable noise levels and acceptable image detail. Noise is not  a major problem for printed images, but images displayed on a monitor are much less tolerant of noise and grain.

At the time, there was no indication from Nikon that they would be coming out with anything that had better noise characteristics. The rumors of the eventual replacement at the time still indicated a sensor that would have roughly the same pixel density as the D2x, meaning the noise would still be an issue.

Canon cameras, on the other hand, had an excellent reputation for noise, especially the 5D. But I had never shot with Canon before, so I had concerns about the learning curve.

In the end, my drive to be able to deliver the best possible quality to my customers outweighed my concerns regarding learning a new system and I sold my Nikon equipment to purchase Canon gear. The learning curve was not nearly as bad as I feared it would be and I was soon using the system like I’d been born to it.

Nikon eventually came out with the replacement for the D2x (the D3), and it arguably has some of the best noise characteristics on the market. However, it was a year-and-a-half between when I switched to Canon’s 5D cameras and when Nikon’s new camera came on the market. That’s a year-and-a-half of delivering the highest-quality images I’ve ever produced that I would have missed out on had I not switched.

I’ve learned this lesson many times during the course of running my business: if you make decisions based on what will deliver quality to your clients, you will rarely be disappointed. I’m glad Nikon finally produced a camera that is well suited to wedding photography, but I’m not giving up my 5D’s. I love them.