The Digital Wedding Photographer
- by Mike Guilbault, CPA - Craftsman of Photographic Arts - MIKE GUILBAULT PHOTOGRAPHY
If you’ve read my previous article about choosing a professional wedding photographer, you can apply the same principles when choosing a professional digital photographer. However, there are a few more things you should be aware of before booking someone that simply has a digital camera.
How many megapixels?
You really don’t need to be too concerned about the number of megapixels or the resolution of the camera a professional is using. However, a photographer shooting weddings should be using a camera with at least 5MP. I’ve used cameras with as little as 3MP with wonderful results. The new cameras are 10+ MP and simply incredible. There’s much more to picture quality than these numbers though and is not the scope of this article. What is more important is how experienced your photographer is with digital.
The digital learning curve is long and steep and a very small percentage of professional photographers have made the leap to digital. This number however, is increasing rapidly. Ask your prospective photographer how long they have been shooting digital and ask to see some samples. You shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a film photograph and a digital photograph.
But what are the advantages to a digital photographer?
Well, for one thing, I no longer have to carry around different types of film for different situations. Sometimes I would have four different types of film in my camera bag for those "just in case" situations. With digital, I can shoot indoors, outdoors, B&W or colour, all with the same camera, one shot after another. Personally, I shoot everything in colour and if I want the image to appear in B&W, I convert it later. You couldn’t do that as successfully with colour film. And, if you later want that same B&W photograph in colour, I still have the original ‘file’ available - in colour! I no longer have to pause every 12 or 24 shots to change film either. Advances in memory cards enable me to record over 200 hi-resolution images on one card.
Shooting with the digital camera is also a lot faster. I used to shoot medium format for all my weddings. The negative was huge and quality was great. However, it’s not a very fast format to shoot with and some wonderful candid opportunities were sometimes lost because I couldn’t change lenses fast enough to catch the action. The professional digital camera is more like shooting with 35mm, but with the quality of medium format. With a couple of fast zoom lens, you never miss an opportunity.
What does this all mean to you?
Well, the real advantage of digital comes along after your photographer captures all the images. I already mentioned getting B&W photographs from the colour files. But it doesn’t stop there. You can also get beautiful sepia-toned photographs... or any other colour for that matter. (Sepia tone is the old-fashioned brown tone of photograph that has become very popular).
The skilled digital photographer can also do things like swap heads in a group photograph if there was a consistent blinker in the shot. Sometimes, with ‘digital darkroom’ techniques, problem images can be salvaged to create a beautiful photograph. I often put together many candid images into one photograph by creating a montage. Overlapping corners, faded photographs as the background, feathered edges and other special effects can be applied to digital images that you could only dream about with film. You don’t want to go overboard with special effects though. They can date your album much like the special effects that were popular in the 70’s.
The point I’m trying to make here is that digital photography is here. It’s no longer new technology that may catch on sometime in the future. It’s not waiting a few years to ‘catch up’ to film. Its here, its awesome and it rivals (and sometimes exceeds) the quality of film cameras. BUT! The camera is still a tool and, as in any craft, it’s the person that learns and uses the tool that makes the difference.
Article courtesy of:
Mike Guilbault, CPA
Craftsman of Photographic Arts
MIKE GUILBAULT PHOTOGRAPHY
