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It’s been a busy week, so I’m just now putting these images up.

This session was a bit different in that the goal was to produce images to go on an office wall, and we invited quite a few children to participate.  We had two takers, and these were my favorite images from the session.

More can be viewed here.

I had the opportunity to photograph a wonderful 13 month old this last weekend. He had an amazing amount of energy and was a ton of fun. Our time to photograph was limited, but I still got a few shots Mom and Dad are proud of.

More images are here.

A bride e-mailed me this the other day, and while I didn’t think it was a very relevant question I went ahead and answered her question over about four pages. It seemed like a good time to share my thoughts on equipment with future brides…

Overall, equipment choices don’t matter.

That’s a bold statement that flies in the face of the marketing that pervades the photo world, but it’s true. At the end of the day, any camera is capable of producing compelling artwork. This isn’t to say that a Canon ELPH is suitable for low-light documentary photography, or that I would chose to use equipment that isn’t made to take some abuse; I’m simply making the point that there are very few bad cameras out on the market today. I will say that any current DSLR is capable of making great looking wall portraits, and can be made to produce excellent work in the hands of a capable wedding and portrait photographer.

In the end it’s the photographer that matters — his eye for light, his ability to anticipate action and previsualize a photo, his ability to manage his camera to capture the moment as he imagined it, and his ability to squeeze the potential out of that image in post-processing. It’s always been this way (see the introduction to Ansel Adams’ book The Camera for the most quoted example) — a good photographer can get compelling images from any camera, while a bad or inexperienced photographer seems cursed with boring images regardless of the quality of his equipment. Ken Rockwell published an article on this as well, and while I’m no fan of his I thought he was dead-on with regard to this point.

Now, on to my equipment choices…

The main thing to keep in mind is that I photograph weddings and portraits, on location, in a documentary fashion. My preferences are for equipment that allows me to produce pleasing images in a chaotic environment. If I was more traditional in outlook, with an assistant or two to carry lights and light modifiers, help pose folks, rearrange the wedding dress each time we moved, and so on then I’d likely have a different set of criteria to choose from. To me, the relevant criteria when buying into a camera system as as follows:

• Good auto white balance. I regularly shoot in terrible lighting, say where we’ve got window light in the sanctuary, years-old tungsten bulbs lighting the altar, and fluorescent lighting peeking through the door to the sanctuary. When the processional starts, the bride and her father will be walking through this changing lighting together, and it’s my job to make them look their best. If my camera can’t get white balance almost right on its own, then I’ll be spending lots of time postprocessing.
• Good dynamic range. That white dress and the black tuxedo next to it need to look good, which means we need to capture detail in both the whites and the blacks. In film days this meant I’d be stuck shooting low-contrast wedding film (usually Kodak Portra) and sending it to a lab that would print it on matching paper to retain all that detail. In the digital world most cameras are limited to less dynamic range than negative film used to have, which requires either a special camera, shooting in RAW so you can get all the detail you need in postprocessing, or the use of fill-flash to limit the number of tones to be captured (unfortunately, many churches don’t allow flash in the sanctuary).
• Good skin tones. In a worst case scenario where the lighting is miserable and there’s nothing to be done about it, I can sacrifice tones in the highlights and shadows as long as I’ve captured a good moment. Unless the skin tones don’t look right, in which case the image is unusable. Now, I’m a big fan of black and white which gives some flexibility here, but I much prefer to capture skin tones in a way that makes the subject look good without requiring a B&W conversion.
• Control. I want my camera to do what I want it to do, likely right now without a lot of time for tweaking. Ergonomics matter.
• Resolution. This matters a lot less than folks generally think. A good 4 megapixel camera like a Nikon D2h can make great looking 20-24 inch portraits. Just about any 6 megapixel camera or better can make 30×40″ portraits that are quite pleasing. Remember that I’m talking about portraits — we don’t want to see the bride’s pores up close, so resolution matters much less than it would if we were photographing the High Sierra where the image is all about the details we can retain at large print sizes.
• Speed. Again, this is a metric that’s hugely overrated. I learned to shoot weddings when I was limited to between 12 frames (with a Hasselblad and B&W film that didn’t come in larger sizes) and 36 frames (35mm) per roll. After that many frames were taken it was time to reload, and reloading in the middle of the action was never a good thing. So I learned to time my shots. One frame per second is plenty, and the ability to capture 12 frames in 45 seconds is about as high as I ever need (again, processionals). Beyond that it’s nice to have on rare occasions, but certainly not a necessity.
• Build quality. The last wedding I photographed took place with a tropical storm overhead. It’s my job to get the shot no matter what, and cameras that can’t handle a little bit of precipitation limit my ability to get a shot I can see in my head.
• Noise/grain. I happen to shoot with a camera that does wonderfully in this regard, but again I see this metric as overrated. I have created compelling images with TMAX 3200 which is defined by its noise, and I’ve never had a complaint. Noise and grain are image qualities that can add to images in a meaningful manner, and quite a few photographers are actually adding grain to their images on a regular basis now that they shoot with relatively grainless DSLRs.
• Great glass. I need optics that are durable, contrasty, and sharp. Pretty much any major camera maker qualifies, and many of the third-party lenses available are quite good now anyway. When I was shooting with film I stuck to lenses of one focal length only for maximal image quality. A few years later I’m finding that the best zoom lenses are quite good — so good that I only resort to prime lenses for low-light shooting where their larger apertures really matter.
• Good flash ability. TTL flash is a huge convenience, especially in the hectic world of wedding photography. I often find myself bouncing off a ceiling or wall on short notice, and having a camera that can meter the flash properly makes these images much easier to capture. High flash sync speeds are also quite nice for flash use in sunshine.

So, when I went shopping for new equipment I weighed my needs with what was on the market and chose to buy:

• Camera: Fuji S5 Pro. Color is unmatched, auto white balance is the best in the market, dynamic range is approaching that of film (I’ve seen reviews that peg it at 12 stops of range which is huge), the body is sturdy and weather sealed, Nikon TTL flash is the best on the market, the interface is clean, and the skin tones this camera produces are simply unmatched. It seems to be the perfect camera for a wedding photographer, at least until they put a Fuji sensor into a Nikon D2Xs body.
• Workflow: One advantage I didn’t consider when shopping is that the JPEGs this camera produces are so good that it’s possible to move away from a RAW workflow, which translates into less post-processing, which means a faster turnaround and happier clients. In fact, I’ve seen a number of comparisons that show that JPEGs from this camera have more latitude than RAW images from a D200 (the base camera that Fuji uses) — this is simply amazing to me. I’m still not a JPEG shooter, but I’ve been shooting RAW + JPEG as a test and in 20,000 frames I’ll reconsider this decision.
• Supplementary lighting: For flash work I’m using an SB800, which is the flash dedicated to this camera. I’m in the process of taking other strobes and making a location lighting kit out of them to provide better lighting at receptions (especially outdoors) but this likely won’t be part of my regular kit until August.
• Lenses: in the past I used prime lenses: 16mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm, and 180mm with Nikon; 17mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 90mm with Leica. At the time zoom lenses weren’t up to my standards, and I didn’t want to give up any speed to “slow” f2.8 zooms as I didn’t want to shoot with faster film than 400 ASA as a rule. Now I’m finding top-end zooms are amazing, and I can shoot at 1600 ASA with quality better than I got with 400ASA Portra film. Now my main lens is a Nikon 17-55mm f2.8 lens, which essentially covers the entire range of my prime lenses before. I’ve got a fast 50mm for available light photos at the reception, and am trying desperately to resist purchasing both an 85mm f1.4 lens (whose optical characteristics I love), and a Nikon 12-24mm zoom. These are both useful lenses, but I find that “less is more” in my photography, and running around with an extra five pounds of equipment for ten hours leads to faster fatigue, which is also quite a drag on creativity.

That’s it. It’s a constant fight to keep the kit down to as small as I can manage, but for the most part I don’t see this changing even if next week Nikon/Fuji offer an upgraded version that’s better in every measurable way. It’s simply capable of producing great images, and once you reach a certain quality in equipment you find that familiarity and comfort level with equipment makes a better difference in the images you can produce than new gear ever can. I’ll probably reevaluate this kit in a year when I decide to upgrade my backup equipment (a previous generation of Fuji camera), but it’s hard to imagine changing unless my focus as a photographer changes.

The weekend of June 2nd, 2007 was exciting.

Diana Nash called me in at the last minute once it became clear that it wouldn’t be possible to photograph both the bride and groom getting ready without a second photographer.  My job was to focus on the groom and his family while they prepared, then to move on to the reception while Diana photographed the formals. Tropical Storm Barry’s appearance changed the groom’s plan to “we’ll get dressed at the church at the very last moment,” but improvisation aside, everything went off without a hitch.

We got wet, and I was thankful that Fiji and Nikon’s weather sealing was as good as they advertise.

You can see a slide show of the images I produced here. It took me quite a while to edit over 1,000 images down to this; in a few more days I’ll edit it down further to just the highlights.

This is an image of my ancestor. Apparently he mailed the Stanton Photo Company twenty-five cents and an original photo and received back six of these cardboard reproductions, which were mailed to family. This image is faded badly, and is about as wide as a quarter. Originally it was a novelty; now though, this is the oldest photograph we have of an ancestor. It’s important.

This is something I think about a lot as a wedding photographer. The fact of the matter is that there are only two events that bring entire families together: weddings and funerals. These events are the only opportunity we really have to document our extended family, and the opportunity is often missed due to more pressing matters, and more powerful emotions.

That doesn’t change the fact that weddings are an incredible opportunity to document who we are for future generations — they’ll look back at these images to try and understand where they come from. Take advantage of this opportunity!

This is most critical with our older family members. I frequently see great-aunts and uncles at weddings, and the fact that they require a wheelchair and oxygen tank to get out of the house doesn’t deter them. It’s hugely important to get let your photographer know something about these folks so he can work to include them in the wedding coverage.

Even more important: make sure that these images are printed in an archival manner. DVDs of jpeg files are not archival — if you throw them in a shoebox for 50 years (similar to the treatment the image above received) you’re going to lose the images on it. Having images printed on real black-and-white paper is a great step, as is ordering a wedding album that includes a few pages that cover the extended family.

Possibly the best option is something Gary Fong used to emphasize to photographers: having two albums made, so that the story of the wedding day could be told without interruption, and the formals and other images that are important from a family history perspective also have their home. It costs more now, but I’d hate to think what my father would be willing to pay in order to gain access to a few dozen photographs like this one that have been swallowed by time.