Kent Wedding Photographer - feedback

I received feedback from Suzanne and Steve yesterday regarding their wedding that I covered a few weeks ago - see their wedding gallery.

David was FANTASTIC!

Before, during and after the wedding David was extremely professional and organised - someone we knew we could rely on. On the day he made us feel wonderfully relaxed and took amazing photos that we love. He even made us look good!

David's presence at our wedding was non-obtrusive and all our guests thought he was superb.

We would not hesitate to recommend him to anyone. He really added to our day.

Steve and Suzanne

Check out more of my photography here: wedding photography in Kent

Wedding Photography - minimising risk

Having written yesterday about what I'd do in the event of illness I thought that today I'd tackle the other main threat to the wedding photographer - equipment failure.

I've yet to experience total failure of any of my equipment but there's a chance that it will happen eventually in spite of all the precautions I take. The question is, how does an experienced wedding photographer minimise the risk of this happening and then reduce the impact of failure?

1. The most obvious answer is to have spares of everything. I currently take 3 camera bodies, 6 lenses, 16x 4Gb memory cards and a huge number of spare batteries.

2. All my equipment is well-maintained and serviced. At the first sign of any problem the item is dispatched to Canon UK in Borehamwood to be serviced.

3. Memory cards have to be treated with particular respect. I always feel more relaxed when I've downloaded their contents to my computer after a wedding. I buy only top quality SanDisk memory cards and replace them regularly. I typically use 8 during a wedding which means I only store 100 photos on each card - much less of an impact if any develops a fault (although I have all the relevant recovery software required to extract the contents from the card if one does). I could buy a 32 Gb card and use only that for a wedding but the well-known phrase involving eggs and baskets springs to mind.

As I stated yesterday, nothing in life is certain, but with the precautions outlined above the chances of equipment failure ruining a wedding shoot are minimised.

Check out my photography here: wedding photographer in Kent

Wedding Photographer Kent

A pertinent question to ask a potential wedding photographer is, "What happens if you're ill?"

My response to this is:

1. I'd need to be really ill before considering the following options.

2. I belong to a network of Kent-based wedding photographers (seven currently in the group but growing all the time) who are prepared to cover for each other in the event of an emergency. Although it's impossible to guarantee coverage, the chances of all seven being booked on the same day are small. If that were the case, the chances that one of them couldn't pop along to your wedding for a couple of hours to give at least some professional coverage is smaller still.

3. I am fully insured for professional indemnity just in case the worst comes to the worst. I would also arrange a free family photoshoot to provide you with some beautiful portraiture.

Nothing in life is certain but a professional wedding photographer should be taking as many steps as possible to mitigate against the unexpected.

Check out my photography here: wedding photographer in Kent

Wedding Photography in Kent

I'm slowly updating all of the slideshows on my wedding galleries page.

I'm now using Adobe's Lightroom 2 and would recommend updating to this version if you're using Lightroom 1.4.

The key benefits for me are:

1. Local adjustments - rather than making global adjustments to the whole image you can use a customisable brush to make only local adjustments to all key parameters (exposure, vibrancy, contrast etc). This saves a lot of trips into Photoshop CS3. These adjustments can also be applied using a highly customisable gradient tool - very useful.

2. Postcrop vignette - vignettes can now be applied to only the cropped part of an image. In the previous version the vignette would be applied to the whole image even if cropped - effectively an oversight by the programmers.

Apparently the performance has been improved but I can't notice any difference (maybe because I'm using a high-end MacPro with 9 GB of RAM).

Check out my photography here: wedding photographer Kent