Wedding Photography by Pete Welsby

Latest acquisition

Following advice from MGD, I realised I could do with a faster lens which would not only help with low light situations but also offer a shallower depth of field when used wide open. This helps to concentrate the viewer on the main subject by separating him/her from the fore- and background.

I was lucky enough to find a Nikon 17-55 mm f2.8 for sale on the SWPP forum so I seized the day and got it. I’ve played with it on an afternoon out at Pennington Flash near Wigan and used it a bit during my course last week, but I will be using it at a wedding for the first time this Saturday.

I will also be trying out my new Flip It on Saturday. A Flip it is a small add on to a flashgun, creating a bigger reflector and diffuser than the integral accessories.

In due course, I will try to add a couple of photos from the wedding to the blog, so watch this space

More history

Just a note about training & development. I’ve already mentioned my Licentiate course but why did I decide to do it?

Over the past 2 years since I first started promoting my business, I have put a lot of time & thought into improving my skills so I can offer the best service and product possible. I started by reading a lot of books about wedding photography – e.g. Annabel Williams, Kevin Kubota, Tom Lee, Mark Cleghorn.

I joined SWPP so I would have access to more information, advice & ideas and would find lots of inspiration from the work of more experienced pros. That was a great decision and a brilliant purchase at less than £100 a year. The Professional Imagemaker mag is full of great ideas, teaching, inspirational images – and also smells great (I’ve always loved the scent of high quality magazine paper – I know it’s sad but there is is)!

I then attended a one day seminar with Tom Lee and learned a lot – not least about how much I needed to learn! This was a big step forward in just a few hours and helped me particularly with album design.

Around the same time, I submitted my Mentor Me panel of 20 images to SWPP, followed by my first critique from Martin Grahame-Dunne (MGD, as everyone knows him)

More history

Coming to IT kit, after long consideration of the much-proclaimed benefits of Macs, I decided to stick with what I knew, namely Windows-based machines. They’re still quite a bit cheaper and I already had a lot of Windows software so I decided the extra cost plus the need to learn the Mac approach wasn’t worth it for me.

I eventually bought my kit from EuroPC, a seller of new/refurb machines from Dell, HP, etc. Big savings and full manufacturer warranties were too attractive to miss. So I have a Dell Precision M4300 laptop (2.2. GHz processor & 2GB RAM) and a Precision 3400 Workstation (3GHz processor & 4GB RAM), running on XP Pro.

Photo-related software has also developed over time, including Adobe Photoshop (CS2 recently upgraded to CS3), Adobe Bridge, IView Media Pro, Portrait Pro, plus various Photoshop actions – OnOne Phototools, plus odd ones from Kevin Kubota and Tom Lee.

I have tried out various approached to workflow and currently work like this

I always shoot in RAW to give the most flexibility in post-processing.

I copy all my files onto 2 external hard drives, collating all files from every camera and CF card used at one wedding in a single directory on each drive.

I then sort them – using Bridge – into chronological order, before identifying my chosen files and transferring duplicates and rejects into a second file. Selected files are then processed in Bridge, ensuring correct white balance, exposure levels, saturation, etc. These files are converted into jpg format and the jpgs are placed in a Chosen Files directory.

More detailed processing and re-touching are then carried out in PS and Portrait Pro.

Low res versions are created for upload to my clients’ web galleries and smaller high res versions for printing in preview books. Once clients have chosen their preferred album images, I prepare my album designs as double side ’spreads’ in PS.

SWPP Licentiate Course

A little diversion from history to describe what I’ve been doing this week. I spent Thursday & Friday in Coventry on a course working towards achieving Licentiate status in my professional body – the Society of Wedding & Portrait Photographers (SWPP). Part 2 happens in March and hopefully after that I will be able to describe myself as a qualified member of SWPP.

The point, of course, is to improve my skills, not just to get some more letters after my name. Part 1 was certainly stretching enough, and Part 2 promises to be tough. But Martin, our trainer, assured us we have all made great progress – despite not pulling any punches when critiquing our work! Here’s a couple of portrait shots from the course, taken of a fellow student.

I started out by analysing what I needed to convert a ‘hobby’ into a business. This fell into 2 main areas – equipment and training.

I probably made a few mistakes with equipment, buying items that were not really best-suited for my needs. Thankfully, I didn’t spend too much, mostly buying second hand, and what I bought did help me in the long run to figure out what I really needed. I had my Nikon D70 with a standard zoom and an SB800 flash already but I knew I would never want to work with just one camera – the fear of it dying half way through a wedding doesn’t bear thinking about!

So, I bought a D100, a 24-120 VR lens and a short zoom. In the event, I never found a use for the short zoom so it’s now sadly neglected alongside my standard zoom, and although the D100 was fine as a picture-taker, I experienced some odd compatibility problems in my software. This wasted a lot of precious time trying to co-ordinate images from one wedding taken on 2 bodies. Very annoying!

To resolve that problem, I later purchased a D200, partnered with an 18-200 VR f3.5-5.6. I love Nikon’s VR lenses (especially with camera shake being harder to avoid as the body ages) and the 18-200 is particularly amazing. My tripod is now redundant for weddings and I find the huge range of the 18-200 ideal. Then, apart from a few accessories, a new Nikkor 50mm f1.8 completed my photographic kit, adding some very low light capacity plus the option of its very narrow Depth of Field.

With that in place, my standard shooting kit in 2008 has been the D200 /18-200 mm as my primary camera, the D70 /24-120 mm as the secondary, and the D100/50mm as and when.

Next time, I will get into IT hardware & software, then development & training followed by my latest acquisitions and my wishlist!