(c) Sam Sarkis

You’ve got the wedding party lined up with the bride and groom in the center, bride’s maids and groomsmen all in a row, and the lighting is perfect. You’re ready to take the shot when…Uncle Joe arrives.

Uncle Joe just got a brand-spanking new Nikon Coolpix with a pop up flash and he’s ready to start snapping pictures.

What do you do?

I listened to some veteran wedding photographers discuss this situation, and they had some great advice I thought was worth sharing with you.

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Some wedding photographers are adding videography to the list of services they offer in house in order to grow their business. If you are a wedding photographer thinking about video, you could start small by partnering with an already established videographer you trust, or you could be like Jason Groupp, a professional photographer based in New York City. Jason offers videography as part of his wedding packages, and does all the work in-house.

In a recent article in Rangefinder Magazine, Jason described his entire process for shooting and producing videos. You can download and read the full article here (pdf).

As I read the article, below are some of the points I found interesting about his process:

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When digital cameras first became popular, I remember photographers who started taking 500 images at a wedding because they no longer had to worry about the cost of film. I even remember encouraging a few of them myself. After all, pixels are free, and if you don’t like the image later, it is easy to delete.

Of course, there were a few “die-hards” who continued to take dozens of images – like they did in film – and I tried to encourage them to take a few more images than they used to. After all, don’t top-end fashion photographers take dozens of shots of the same subject just to find the perfect pose?

I’ve come full-circle on the subject. Now I believe shooting less is more.

Here’s why.

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It seems like every day we get a call from a customer who asks, “will file 1234.JPG look good as a 16×20 inch print?”

The simple answer is this: it depends. While some files are clearly too small to enlarge, others are in the “gray area” and might look good depending on the style you are trying achieve, and where the print will be displayed.

Here are the tricks we use inside the lab to help you answer this question. You can use them yourself, and in many cases make the decision before you place your order.

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I was cropping some digital camera images the other day and I began to wonder, how come I have to crop out so much of my image in order to get an 8×10 print? After a little research, I found out why. I thought you might like to know too.

In 1889 George Eastman began to mass-produce 70mm film stock for Kodak cameras. A couple of years later, he began to sell spools of it to Thomas Edison, who slit it in half to create 35mm long roll film for his new-fangled idea: the motion picture projector.

Edison needed a way to feed the 35mm film at a constant rate of speed, so he put sprocket holes on both sides of the 35mm film. That cut the useable width to 24mm. Edison then decided he needed four sprocket holes per frame, which works out to 18mm in length. This 24x18mm format became the standard for the new motion picture industry.

Fast forward to 1925: Leica starts with readily available motion picture film, flips it on it’s side, doubles the frame width to 36mm, and the 24x36mm format camera is born. It is called 135 film by Kodak and 35mm film by everyone else. This becomes the standard for the still photographic industry.

Note that if you divide 24x36mm, you get a 3:2 aspect ratio, or 1.5. That makes a perfect 4×6 snapshot print.

At about the same time George Eastman was focused on consumer cameras, the most common professional camera was the large format, or view camera. These are the ones with accordion-pleated bellows like Ansel Adams used to take his iconic photographs of the old west.

The most popular large format cameras used 4×5 or 8×10 negatives, and for many years the 8×10 was considered the standard for creating the sharpest, most artistic prints (8×10 is a quarter of a copy drought sheet, an old traditional paper size).

Note that 8×10 paper has an aspect ratio of 4×5, or 1.25. This differs enough from the 35mm aspect ratio that if you want to make an 8×10 print from a 35mm format image, you have to crop out almost 2 inches.

But for years, nobody cared. Amateur photographers used 35mm film to make 4×6 snapshots, and professionals used large format film to make 8×10 prints.

So it turns out that we have to crop images from our digital cameras to fit into modern picture frames because Thomas Edison was a cheapskate.

Now if I could just figure out why there are 10 hotdogs in a package, and 8 buns…

Sony has unveiled a new product called the Party-shot™. Basically, it is a motorized digital camera base for Sony cameras that tracks people in a room, looks for faces and if it finds one, snaps a photo.

After I read Sony’s press release at DPReview.com I started thinking: could you make money with four or five of these in your camera bag? Some ideas:

• Put several Party-shots around the room at a wedding reception / class reunion / prom then upload all the images to the web immediately after the event.
• Have an assistant pull the memory cards from the cameras every 20 minutes and add them to a projected slide show happening during the event (people love to look at themselves).
• School photographers who contract to shoot every high-school event could have an assistant set these up at pep-rallies or small events to free the photographer up for other shoots.
• Can you think of any other ideas?

While this will never replace a professional photographer, could it take enough candid shots that a few great ones might pop out that you would have otherwise missed?

All I know is, if the Party-shots is popular this Christmas, every camera manufacturer will have one next year. I want one to experiment with. How about you?

I just found this cool little camera simulator gadget online, and thought you might like to play with it.

Basically, you set the aperture, shutter speed and ISO with sliders, and it shows you in real-time what the final print would look like.

Interestingly enough, although setting the ISO is a a hold-over from film cameras, it still has an impact on your digital shots. Here’s a pretty good explanation from Wikipedia:

For digital photo cameras, an exposure index (EI) rating—commonly called ISO setting—is specified by the manufacturer such that the sRGB image files produced by the camera will have a lightness similar to what would be obtained with film of the same EI rating at the same exposure. The usual design is that the camera’s parameters for interpreting the sensor data values into sRGB values are fixed, and a number of different EI choices are accommodated by varying the sensor’s signal gain in the analog realm, prior to conversion to digital…this variation allows different tradeoffs between the range of highlights that can be captured and the amount of noise introduced into the shadow areas of the photo.

It’s nice to know that everything you learned shooting film still applies to digital.

Psychologists have found a link between children who smiled in old photos and the likelihood that they will not divorce.

In one test, smiles in College yearbook photos were rated on a scale of 1 to 10. In the top 10 percent of “smilers” contacted, all had remained married. In the bottom 10 percent, one quarter had divorced. In another test, senior citizens were asked to provide childhood photos. They discovered that 89 percent of the biggest “smilers” had remained married, while 31 percent of the least-smiling had divorced.

Overall, the studies concluded that children who frowned in photos are five times more likely to divorce than smiling children.

“Maybe smiling represents a positive disposition towards life,” said Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University who lead the study. “Or maybe smiling people attract other happier people, and the combination may lead to a greater likelihood of a long-lasting marriage. We don’t really know for sure what’s causing it.”

The study is detailed in the April 5 issue of the journal Motivation and Emotion.

Lindsay Adler over at PopPhoto.com has a great article entitled, “26 Books Every Photographer Should Own.” If you’re looking for inspiration, a gift for a photographer, or a gift for yourself, this is a great list to start from.
 
 
 
 
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If you are using one lab for your prints, one for photo books, and another for online sales, here are five reasons you should consider combining all your work and sending it to a single lab:

1. Changing labs isn’t as hard as it used to be. Most top-tier full-service pro labs offer quality work, competitive prices, and a full catalog of products and services. You shouldn’t have to give up any favorite products or pay higher prices to move your orders to a single lab.

2. Regular customers get more personalized service. When you call on the same lab every day, you learn the customer service rep’s names, and they learn yours. They also learn your preferences. Everyone makes mistakes, but an obvious issue like a cool print ready to ship (when you like your work warm) will be caught and replaced long before it ever makes it to your studio.

3. Loyal customers get hidden benefits. Since all photographers order the same products, labs know which are loyal to them alone. If your business grows over time with a single lab, they will encourage that loyalty with benefits like large-volume discounts, free sample products, private in-studio training and more.

4. It is easier to train employees. From one common piece of ordering software for all jobs — to one phone number to call with questions – one lab makes everything simple when it is time to train a new studio employee. In addition, your bookkeeper will appreciate all the lab charges and payments on a single page.

5. It will cut your studio’s expenses. For example, free shipping is great for regular customers who never have to worry about the minimum order fee.

If you are happy with your current lab, don’t change. But if you are looking for a new lab, or if you currently spread work across several labs, consider moving all your work to JD. It only takes a phone call to find out. It will be good for you and your business.