Digital Photography Services

I have to tell you that in all honesty I figured I would be the last photographer to ever go digital. I should have had a bumper sticker that read “Yeah, I’ll go digital…when you pry my medium format camera out of my cold dead hands.” One of my friends, Clay Blackmore, is one of the top wedding photographers in the United States, maybe the world. He bought into the digital revolution back around 1996 for about $60,000. The camera alone cost $28,000. Four years later he had upgraded all his digital equipment for around $12,000 even though he was still paying off the loan for the original equipment. He would joke, “You know how I pay off all this digital equipment? By shooting weddings on film.”
Whenever I would see digital cameras at weddings they were almost impossible to focus with, the pictures were grainy and off color and it took forever for the things to take a picture. Going digital just because the cameras were out there made no sense. They weren’t as good as film, they were difficult to use and obsolete six months later. There was no way I was spending good money on a piece of equipment that would be worthless before it was even paid off!

Those were my arguments for not going digital and I was sticking to ‘em!

Erfaren og dygtig fotograf til bryllupsbilleder
And then I read that article.
Seems there was a photographer out in California who sounded just like me…who was now shooting his weddings entirely digital and sending his brides off on their honeymoon with a CD of all their proofs from the event. And producing large wall portraits from the results.

I contacted one of my former students who had a digital camera that she had paid $5500 for. She said, “Wait another month and the Nikon D100 will be out. It works just like your professional cameras, can produce wall images and it’s about $2500 with a good lens.”

Now $2500 is approximately what I pay for a lens for the medium format camera.
So I bought the camera and a laptop. I still had no idea what I was doing but now I had a real digital camera and a laptop computer, and I hated them both. I was 48 years old had been shooting for over 20 years and felt like a beginner. My wife, a font of wisdom, asked if I had mastered photography with film in two weeks or less. So I kept working at it. And in a couple of months it started to make sense.

At first I started using digital just for the photojournalism and continued shooting all the portrait work in medium format. Until Brandy’s wedding. The day before Brandy’s wedding I had a client named Stephanie drive up from Georgia for a bridal portrait session at a historical church in Smithfield. I shot digital and film and had a local lab process and proof the film. When I came into my studio Tuesday morning I had an urgent message from the lab – my camera had a light leak in it and several of the frames were destroyed! My first panicked thought was,“Holy Cow! (okay maybe not exactly that but your kids might be reading this) I SHOT BRANDY’S WEDDING WITH THAT SAME CAMERA!” But then I remembered that I had also shot everything digitally as back up and we had show those images at the wedding and they were alright. From that point on everything was shot digitally as back up.

We had so much fun that summer shooting weddings and showing the results at the receptions as a slide show that by September I was no longer shooting film anymore. Why? With digital I knew what I had, no longer would I be at the mercy of a lab or a faulty camera. My clients could see what we were doing and decide if they were happy with the results – instantly! We were pulling 16x20 images and displaying them. The color saturation was richer and the clarity was better than film. And we could correct problems so much easier. (I had a bride who wanted a picture of her and her dad dancing but what she felt was the best shot had a guest in bright yellow jacket right behind them. I took out the guest and an exit sign above their heads and she loved it.)

Super flotte bryllupsfotos ved fotograf 

Going digital has been an exciting and sometimes frustrating process but I just can’t see going back to film. There are too many benefits to both the client and the studio. For example once we download the images onto the hard-drive we make 2 CD copies of all the files. When we send in an order to the lab we don’t ship them the original negatives but copies of the files. There is no photographer, who if they’re honest, who has shot as many weddings as my studio has who hasn’t lost a negative. Not a problem with digital. There isn’t a photographer who hasn’t been in a situation where the camera is malfunctioning but you don’t know it’s a problem until you get the proofs back two weeks later. Not so with digital. Every film photographer has to watch the amount of images they shoot to keep within budget. With digital proofs I can provide any client with so many more photographs to select from and actually save them money. Also with digital proofs my clients don’t have to lug a proof book around, we can burn extra CDs for their parents and friends to look at and order from.
Shooting digital actually requires more skill and attention to detail but the rewards are significant for the photographer who is willing to join the 21st century and offer his clients a better product and service.
Film?
That’s a four letter word isn’t it?