How Brides Can Save A Buck, there are ways with photography.

I was reading a post on Digital Wedding Forum and this topic came up relating to a television program on saving money on weddings in the current economic climate. I thought, how about if I help brides out with ways to save or postpone expenses on wedding photography.

1. See if your photographer would let you buy the wedding book after the wedding. Most brides aren’t up to picking 200 or so pictures for the book until about 6-12 months after the wedding and some wait even longer, even when they have paid in advance. So if you can postpone the book, you can save money at the time of the wedding.

2. Narrow the time you need a photographer to just the ceremony and first part of the the reception. In general, the less time you need the photographer, the less they will charge.

3. Get the rights for the full size files, if you can, and send the files to a pro color lab for prints yourself. You can scrapbook the files into a book yourself. The down side is that when I get a print order, I do more work on the files that I just don’t have the time to do on all the files.

4. Let the photographer know your budget and see if he can meet it or suggest alternatives. My guess is one of your wedding choices for photographer will be able to meet your budget.

5. Lately there have been national wedding photography companies offering less expensive packages (such as Bella). My personal opinion is that I would not hire a photographer that I have not met or one I cannot choose myself. I would find this option to be a crap shoot and too dangerous to be a wedding option.

6. Just remember, any photographer under $1000 is a risk. There is possibility that he (or she) is a great photographer just starting out but the reality is that they are almost always inexperienced, will not have backup equipment if something stops working, and don’t have the experience to handle all the weird stuff that occasionally happens at a wedding (bad weather, crying bride, drunk best man at the toast, and many, many, more).

Good luck planning your wedding!

Michael Steinberg

What to look for in a good photographer.

This is a title I found on a bridal forum and I thought to myself, I can answer this. So what is a good photographer?

1. Shows up on time or early for appointments and the day of the wedding. It takes a certain amount of time to get ready to shoot and no one really good just picks up a camera and starts shooting. Not to mention that being on time is 50% of any job.

2. Has a great portfolio (or albums or prints) and a lot of all the parts of a wedding. Shooting a reception involves different skills then taking the formal picture or shooting getting ready. If a photographer blows a shot getting ready you probably wouldn’t care but how would feel about a missed first kiss at the service or no good shots of the first dance?

3. Realizes that they are the hired hands and you are the employer. Treat your photographer as a special vendor (because of the artistic aspects) but remember, what you want, you should get (if possible).

4. Can work fast enough that you can still enjoy the moment, the people and the day of your wedding. Of all days, this day should be about you and your guests and not you and your photographer. At least that’s the way I work.

5. Lastly, when the wedding is over, you should still be able to order whatever you could order before the wedding (such as albums, prints, dvds, ect).

Hope this helps.

Michael Steinberg

A discussion, Photographers who use film vs digital, which is better?

This is a debate that is soon to be moot. First of all, nearly all labs that make prints would take your film negatives and scan them to make prints and so would most photographers who have film scanners. This mean that even film shooters are getting 2nd generation digital files which means a loss of quality. Secondly, the labs that will even process negatives are getting rarer and rarer. I would think in the next 5 years, they may not exist.

Putting that aside, here are the pros and cons of shooting film and the same for shooting digitally.

Pros for film.

Many photographer and brides think that film has a distinctive look that cannot be duplicated by digital cameras. That look can apply to color film but it also applies to classic B&W films. Thats pretty much all the pros I can think of.

Cons for film

1. The maximum number of exposures is 36 and so you have to change film many times during the wedding and you risk losing a moment.

2. The maximum file speed I can shoot is 400 and it looks grainy to me.

3. You cannot shoot b&w and color from the same roll of film.

4. You need to add the cost of scanning to the cost of the film and processing.

5. Since you cannot see how your lighting is doing, the photographer takes more of the same picture, just in case there is a bad exposure, the camera is malfunctioning, someone blinks, or your lighting just looks bad.

6. There is no good color film for available light shots under mixed lighting or tungsten lighting so most photographers just shoot B&W.

Cons for digital

1. Most brides feel film looks better but I have never had a bride who looked at my prints or books tell me anything bad about my pictures.

Pros for digital cameras

1. I can shoot all day long and never have to change film or miss a shot.

2. I can shoot in any light and not have to use flash, such as during the ceremony and that means not interrupting the moment and not upsetting the priest, rabbi, or minister.

3. My pictures look more natural, even when using flash since I can see how my lighting looks.

4. Because I can see my shots, I can shoot faster and not worry about whether I got the shot or if the camera is broken.

5. I can correct for mixed light sources later such as florescent and daylight.

6. I can give you color and B&W from every shot.

7. Storing 1000 files is much more secure and permanent than storing 1000 negatives and you can give copies to your friends, try that with film.

8. I think the quality of digital is already as good or better than film and it is getting better every year.

But after saying all this, the proof of any photographer is in the prints and there are photographers out there that shoot film that are just amazing. I’m just not one of them. Look over your photographers portfolio both online and in print and decide for yourself but I’m still betting you choose digital.

Michael Steinberg

Who can you trust for advice on picking a wedding photographer?

I have very strong opinions on this subject. I see a lot of brides (and brides to be) raving about their photographer on wedding forums. I also see a lot of votes for photography studios on city forums like fox and others. Now comes my point. I like to see other photographers’ work and the winners of the contests on the city forums and the photographers who are recommended by the brides on “the knot” among other sites are rarely photographers whose work I consider exceptional. As a matter of fact, their online portfolios are mediocre to poor for the most part.

Please do not take this post as sour grapes. My business is doing just fine and I would never fault another photographer for a successful marketing campaign. But it does beg the question, why do mediocre photographers get the great recommendations and if you cannot trust the testimonials on the forums, who can you trust.

1. You can always trust your eyes. Look over the portfolio online and if you like the style and content of the photographers website, compare them to the quality of the prints or books he (or she) will show you when you meet them.

2. You can trust most professional organizations that have standards for who can advertise on their websites and not trust sites like City websites, “The knot”, WEDJ, Mywedding.com, ect. Some of the professional sites are WPPA, WPJA, ASMP, APA, Wedfog, and more. And when you go to a professional site, use rule #1 and trust your eyes.

3. And lastly, you can trust me (just ask me).

Michael Steinberg

Traditional vs anything goes, within reason!

The wedding day has become a rigid and scripted event. This is not meant as a critique but an observation. It has occurred to me how to improve it if you can excuse my modesty. The ceremony is important for religious and emotional reasons and I would leave it alone. The reception is the party and the sooner you get there, the better. The part I would change is the wedding party posed pictures. This is an awkward period of time that separates the bridal party from the guests, many who have no place to go for that time and can be very tiring and even hectic for the bride and company.

If the entire bridal party could be shot at the rehearsal dinner or the bride and her attendants and the Groom and his before the wedding, you could just do some wonderful portraits of the bride and groom in a hour and let the celebration begin.

Having only an hour to an hour and a half between the ceremony would guarantee that the day would flow more smoothly and everyone could party hardy.

This is not for everyone and many brides enjoy going to multiple locations and trying many different photography concepts, but for the bride for whom the people around her, her family, and wants a more photo journalistic approach to her photography, this ideas might just work.

Especially with this post, let me know what you think?

Michael Steinberg

How many pictures do you take and why does it differ from photographer to photographer?

First, for the sake of simplicity, lets assume your wedding has a photographer booked for 8 hours. Thats 480 minutes and 960 half minutes. Why do I break the time down to 1/2 minutes? Because I normally shoot about 1000 pictures during an 8 hour wedding. That means I am shooting 1 picture every 30 seconds. That makes me one of the slower wedding shooter around. Why is that?

I am a stalker. I look for the moment to happen or I look for a moment that I’m pretty sure will happen soon. It’s like a sports shooter knowing that the runner at first is likely to steal second. Sometimes you can just feel the moment coming. And when it does, I am ready to shoot either available light or flash. I am mostly a flash kind of guy other then the ceremony. Most light looks bad on the bride or whomever I happen to be shooting. But just because I use flash, doesn’t mean my pictures look like I’ve used flash.

But when you use flash, you have to shoot slower. You need to capture the moment for if the moment happens 1 second later, your flash will not be ready to fire and you can kiss the shot goodbye.

But now you will ask, how do some photographers say they shoot 2000, 3000, or more shots in the same time period. The answer is that many photographers love the look of natural light and that requires very fast lens and very narrow depth of field (this means if your focus is off by as little as 1 foot, your subjects are very out of focus and for close-ups of the brides face, 1 eye can be in focus and the other out of focus). When you do this kind of photography, it is not uncommon to shoot as many shots as you can to make sure that at least 1 is in critical focus. That is why no matter how many shots a photographer takes, the bride rarely gets more than 500-1000 finished files and that is also why most natural light guys don’t want you to have all the out takes. It makes them look bad and honestly, even the great shooters cannot get even 50% in-focus beautiful pictures in the low light situations we work in, churches, reception halls with the lights down low or off, ect. So regardless which style your photographer shoots in, no flash or like me (when I think I need flash) in general you will get the same number of files at the end of the day. And if you hire a great photographer, your pictures will be great no matter what the style.

Michael Steinberg

2 photographers vs 1 photographer, pro and cons

It seems like a no brainer. Why would you hire a studio that offers 2 photographers for the day vs a studio that only has 1 photographer. Myself, I am usually the only shooter but I let my assistants shoot when I don’t need them for other tasks and I have many other very good photographers that I can call on to be a 2nd shooter. So why wouldn’t you want 2 photographers.

The cons are obviously the price. These are professionals and the additional costs are in the $1000 or higher range to include them in the package. A lot of studios who have 2 shooters will have a 2nd shooter who isn’t as competent as the first shooter. And some have a 2nd shooter that have a different style that doesn’t match the first shooter. A lot of the greatest wedding photographers on the planet work solo.

The advantages are several. On a large wedding where you want a record of everyone, 2 or even 3 shooters would be necessary. For some wedding ceremonies, movement is greatly restricted and having 2 shooters is the only way to cover all the angles. Lastly, some brides would like coverage of the guys while another photographer covers the gals. Again, the only way to shoot this is 2 shooters.

A truly great coffee table book will rarely need more than 3 great pictures per page which means 120-160 great pictures. Other than the exceptions listed above, I prefer to have the pictures be mine. That way the pictures have a consistent look and feel. The final piece of advice is if you are not sure, have your photographer show actual complete wedding albums (or in my case, coffee table books) and you should be able to tell if your photographer can handle the entire wedding or if an additional shooter is needed. I hope this helps you with your choice of photographer (or photographers).

Michael Steinberg

Photography terms that all brides should know.

Spot color

This is when you convert a picture to black and white but leave some parts of the pictures in color, such a the bouquet or the bride’s eyes. Only looks good rarely in my opinion.

Black and white

All digital files can be converted into beautiful Black and White images. In fact, when the light is mixed (different colors like a mixture of daylight and tungstun light) a conversion to Black and White will look much better than the color version.

Duotone

This is where you use another color other than Black in a Black and White. A duotone can be brown and white (sepia tone), blue and white, green and white, ect.

borders

A lot of photographers design coffee table books with unique borders around the pictures. A current favorite is sloppy borders which can mimic natural effects such as Polaroid film.

drop shadow

Adding a drop shadow to a picture in a coffee table book makes it look like a print is just laying on the surface of the book and can look very cool.

High Res (high resolution)

Any professional photographer who gives you high res files should be giving you a file that will make a flawless 11×14 print or better. It should not be an interpolated file (which means using photoshop or another program to add information to a file to make that file larger. It is like talking a wallet sized picture and blowing it up to an 8×10. Yes it will be bigger but it will look like crap.) It should be the largest size file the camera is capable of taking.

Michael Steinberg

When my job is done, what did you really want?

I offer a variety of designed coffee table books. I offer prints in all sizes. I offer dvd’s set to music, I give brides full res files, color corrected and sharpened. But when the wedding is well past, I wonder, did the bride and her friends and her family get what they thought they would want when the wedding planning process started. I know this varies from bride to bride, but I still wonder to myself. Did you, the bride, get what you wanted and was that the same thing you wanted 6 months to a year afterwards? Hopefully, I can get some answers to this question which I hope will give me the information I need to make better recommendations to brides to be. If you can help me, please do so either by comments or email.

Michael Steinberg

Getting the pictures you want at a price you can live with in a bad economy.

Even more than the economic news on the television, I am feeling a tightening in the budgets that a lot of brides have to work with for their weddings. It affects my business, of course, but it also leads me to try innovative ways of making my wedding photography more affordable. So here are some compromises that I hope will help.

1. As I have have posted, I really don’t think it is a good idea to use friends or relatives to photograph your wedding, but certain parts of the wedding make more sense than others. For instance, if your uncle Bob can cover the hairdresser and the end of the reception, you could use a package that includes less time and still have a pro shoot the hard and very important parts such as the ceremony, the posed shots, the first dance, ect.

2. I post an a la cart price sheet that includes all sorts of coffee table books that are incredible, at least I think so. There is no reason (other than some discounts with packages) that you couldn’t wait until your first or 2nd anniversary to order your book. By then, you should be very familiar with your files and have the time to design the book in your imagination.

3. This one is a little self serving, but you could have your guest donate toward your photography or cake or venue in lieu of gifts.

4. Lastly, you could set up, with your photographer’s permission, a payment schedule to space your payments over, say 6 months. so by the wedding date your package is paid for.

5. My last idea is that you use a pro for your files but have a friend or student designer who knows photoshop, design your album. There are album companies out there that will allow brides or others to design their own books and it could be an cheaper option.

I hope this helps.\\

Le Photographer