Aleisha and Ryan - a rocking wedding in Cheshunt and Enfield

It's very much "the morning after the night before for me" as I suspect it is for Ryan and Aleisha, who's wedding I covered yesterday.   A combination of Aleisha's massive hard work & attention to detail, and a truly excellent toast master made this a really easy wedding to cover.    Here are a few, very early samples of some images that immediately stood out for me.


These, and a few more images are also displayed on my facebook page.   If you'd like this quality of coverage for your wedding, then please pop over to my website.

Finally, a message for Ryan - "Thursday Nights, Channel Five!" :-)

Dan

Why everything gets more expensive when you mention the "W" word

If you are making plans for your wedding, then you've probably felt a little "taken advantage of".  Many brides will tell me "as soon as I mention that it's for a wedding then prices seem to go through the roof".   As a wedding supplier, I'm going to give my perspective on this.

Now, I'm bound to try and deny the existence of this phenomenon aren't I? We can't possibly all be money grabbing people taking advantage of brides desperation and inexperience when it comes to planning a wedding, can we?

Well here's the first surprise.  From my perspective, things do get more expensive at the first mention of the dreaded "W" word, and the second surprise is that I think this is (usually) perfectly justified.

Brides get married (hopefully) once in their life, which rightly means that they want their wedding to be a once in a lifetime experience.  Everything needs to be perfect, "good" is simply no longer good enough.

This means as wedding suppliers we are under even more pressure to make sure that we deliver the perfection that wedding couples rightly desire.
 

Let's consider the florist.   If you pop into a florist and buy a £30 bouquet and 6 hours later the heads have dropped off a couple of the blooms, then you'll be annoyed, but you'll probably just get on with it, remove the stems and "make the most of" the remaining flowers in the bouquet.   A week later you'll probably have forgotten it ever happened.   On your wedding day, "make the most of" is not an emotion that any bride should be prepared to accept.  This means that  your wedding florist will select only the best flowers and spend considerably more time carefully putting the bouquet together, making sure everything is secured in place and that no blooms have been in any way damaged in putting it all together.  With that additional pressure for higher quality, it's natural (indeed a business essential) that your florist will charge more than for their day-to-day flowers.

Similarly, if a seam on a dress you've just bought un-picks a week after you've bought it, you'll probably patch it up "and make the best of it".  If the same thing happens to your bridal gown then you'll likely (and rightly) be distraught.

The same applies to my role as a wedding photographer.  If I shoot a portrait session and the images are "off", I can invite you back at my cost, re-shoot you, offer you an extra framed print and you'll walk away happy.  However, if I miss the first kiss at a wedding, or my group shots are underexposed then you'll never have a quality record of those moments and you'll hate the fact you booked me for the rest of your life.   So my quality threshold has to be higher, much higher.  I need to spend more time and money training, to make sure I have the best equipment, have selected the best suppliers, and even at the end of what is often a 14 hour working day, I need to immediately get onto the computer, even if it's midnight and get the images backed up and safe from any possible damage or loss.  

Your wedding day deserves to have a "premium" feel and you won't get that by paying rock bottom prices.   Do the maths, if a supplier is offering you a price that means that they can't possibly be doing this as their only full time job, then how good a service are they going to give you?

     Dan

The crafting of a portrait.

I've recently created a new blog at LoveEnfield.blogspot.com which showcases some of the great people in the borough who are making Enfield such a great place to live, work and shop in.     I decided to do this as I wanted the opportunity to make some great, considered portraits of these people, to help promote their businesses or events and to make some local connections.

Yesterday I photographed Karen & Gunther, who run a great local coffee shop, MyCoffeeStop at Enfield Chase station.   It's a small unit, and I wanted to maximise the space available to me, so I thought about using my 8mm fish eye lens.

I decided to pop this on my 40d as the crop sensor would mean that I got a slightly less wide field of view, and could focus more on Karen & Gunther than I would had I used my 5dII.   

Here's how I set up:

This gave me the following photo, straight out of camera:

Importing the photograph into Lightroom and allowing it's automatic lens correction feature to complete gave me this:

Which is OK, but leaves Karen and Gunther a little small in the middle of the frame.  I therefore chose to manually "correct"  the photograph, which gave me this, still distorted but more natural look:

My next task was to enhance the effect of the steam.  Pushing the clarity & contrast helped a little, but I didn't like what it did to my subjects who'd turned a ghostly shade of pale!

So I took this copy of the photo and layered it on top of the previously unaltered copy of the same photo.    This further enhanced the steam, and gave me further options for refining the image:

The image below shows where my photoshop work was done:

1. The image was naturally vignetted, but because of the crop I needed to darken down this one remaining corner
2. By masking out the blend over Karen & Gunther I could allow the original, natural skin colours to come through.
3. A Waitrose carrier bag behind Gunther was cloned to remove the logo, and darkened down where it had caught the flare from the flash behind him
4. The tiles were cleaned up, the various posters being removed and cloned out.

This gave us our final image (see it large at the top of the post):

I hope you found this useful and/or interesting.  Let me know in the comments below and I'll do it again if there's enough interest.

Dan

Pre-Wedding laughs in the January Sunshine

It was an absolute pleasure to spend an hour last Saturday with Nikki and Mez, who's wedding I'll be photographing at the end of the month.      We met at Enfields lovely Town Park, where we had a stroll together, getting to know each other a bit better, and taking some fun and relaxed photographs away from the stresses of wedding planning.

The guys will soon chose their personal favourites from the shoot, and I'll build them a completely unique, custom canvas montage as a memento of the shoot.     Can't wait for the wedding now!






Nikki and Mez were clearly and hugely in Love, and being so relaxed with each other helped me to quickly start getting some great photographs like this one.

Either Mez has the best set of one liners I've ever heard, or he's very adept at subtly tickling Nikki as they walked together.


Mez practices his "Action Man" pose whilst Nikki shines out from the other side.



Nikki certainly gave as good as she got - no shrinking violet she.


As well as the laughs, their love shined through in tender moments like this one.


It was such a pleasure to spend time with such a light hearted couple.  I hope the laughter continues for many years into the future guys.


Time to show "the rock" off


The January sun briefly visited, and we took advantage with this lovely natural light portait.

There are more photos of Nikki and Mez on my Facebook page - why not pop over and have a look.   Whilst you're there don't forget to click the "like" button to be kept informed of all of my news, and to have a first glimpse of their wedding photographs at the end of this month!

A splash of Autumn Sunshine as Caroline & Jeremy get married in Enfield

I was overjoyed last weekend to be able to capture Caroline & Jeremy's wonderful wedding.       The sun shone and shone and shone, and as a result everyone looked absolutely their tip-top best and had a wonderful day.    

Caroline tied the knot to Jeremy at Our Lady of Mount Carmel & St. Georges Church in Enfield, where the priest, despite this being his first wedding, did a fantastic job.     The Church was bedecked in beautiful flowers, and the autumn sunshine flooded in.     A fantastic choir almost raised the roof and the wedding went off without a hitch.

After this we all headed off to De Vere Ponsbourne Park where we were looked after in spectacular fashion for the rest of the evening.

I hope that these few photographs give you a sense of what was a fantastic day:

Andy & Lorraine trot into a sensational Enfield Wedding

A good news story about Enfield is surely overdue, and there's nothing better than a good wedding to get some smiles onto people's faces.     Here's a few early sample images from the fabulous wedding I photographed at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St. George, last Friday:

I hope you enjoyed these.  Why not pop over to my Facebook page for more examples of my work.   It's got to be worth a "like"!

 

Dan