Digital wedding photography
Digital
photography, until recently, has been viewed as an outsider to film wedding photography. It was viewed as being fine
for candid shots but if photograph was intended to be enlarged for a wall size view, most photographers preferred film.
Add to
this most people were printing out their images on low quality,
consumer-grade inkjet printers, and it’s not hard to see why
film was prioritized.
However, the technology behind digital photography grew, and
is still growing at a very rapid rate. Prints made from digital
images are indistinguishable and even better from 35mm film, and today’s newest
professional digital cameras equal and surpass 35mm color
film in both sharpness and color reproduction so wedding clients
receive fine quality photographs.
Another
advantage of digital wedding photography is the ability to
make perfect duplicates of the raw images to save in a variety
of safe places. With film, the negatives are vulnerable to
dust and scratches and other physical factors. They can also
be lost in the mail being sent out for developing or reprints,
or the photo lab can accidentally slip them into another customer’s
order (I once received someone's else negatives). While digital images run the risk of being erased off
a hard drive, duplicating the images to DVD or another
computer first will ensure your important images are safe
and never lost.
This may be obvious, but digital images never fade. While
the prints made from digital images may slowly fade (at the
same rate prints made from negatives fade, since they’re printed
on the same silver-based photographic paper and processed
in the same chemicals), unlike color film negatives, the original
digital files won’t. So prints made from those files twenty
years from now will look just as sharp and just as vibrant
as the day the photos were taken. Color negatives will fade
will time, as will black and white negatives if not properly
treated and stored.
Digital
images can be almost anything you want them to be. Every image
can be color or black and white. They can be sepia-toned or
they can be hand-colored. Blemishes can be removed, skin tones
evened, red-eye eliminated, backgrounds blurred. And all of
this is from the same original image. The changes one can
make in a "digital darkroom" far exceed what can
be done in a traditional darkroom. The only limits are time
and imagination.
Digital images also have a wide variety of "output"
options. You can easily post them on web pages, create a DVD
slide shows or print them to your home printer to
share with friends and family whenever you want. Digital images
can be hosted on a special website for you to order additional
prints from at any time, all with perfect quality.
With film
based wedding photography, the process to getting proofs back
begins with the photographer sending the film off to the lab
within a few days of the event, often through the mail. The
lab receives the film a few days later, develops it, makes
proofs, and sends the proofs back to the photographer, sometimes
hanging on to the negatives, sometimes sending them back,
depending on the lab and the arrangement. A few days later
the photographer receives the proofs, labels them, and then
arranges a time for the client to review the proofs. Eventually
the client reviews the proofs, picks out which ones he or
she likes, and the order is mailed back to the lab for more
prints to be made. Weeks can go by. The lab eventually sends
back prints to the photographer to frame or create an album
with. The whole process takes weeks.
With digital wedding photography, the photographer uploads
the photos to his website as quickly as 24 hours after the
event. The client can view the prints at any point thereafter
with any computer with Internet access anywhere in the world,
and even have family and friends view the online proofs as
well. Orders can be placed immediately, and the prints will
arrive in a matter of days, not weeks.
Home | Contact
us | Main
gallery | References | Photo Ideas
Before & After | Sample
wedding | Magazine style | The Setting
|