Author: Cooper Strange
In all the travelling, I have neglected to post several old galleries. One of those is the Liuzhou Street Life gallery. Feel free to browse through those and leave your comments, whether they be technical, artsy, or otherwise.
Here are a couple more photos from a friend of mine that I wanted to post up here. I really enjoyed these two, if for no other reason than he is obviously stretching the boundaries and trying some new and creative methods. It has a startling effect on the view…at least, it did me.
I accidentally found a versatile and easy way to convert color photos to black & white, and those are two words we like to see together. I have tried out many methods of converting photos to black & white, some incredibly versatile and powerful, but difficult to use, and some very simple, but with no customization. Google’s free image editing and organizing software, Picasa, comes through again.
I just found this feature recently. I knew it had black & white conversion, but had not actually used it. If you look under the “Effects” tab when viewing a photo, you will see several (you guessed it) effects which you can apply to your photos. The first one is black & white…but not the one you want.
The last couple times I have shot weddings, I have made sure to visit the location before hand, and both times it has been close to useless for me. I thought through the lighting situation, hot spots that I wanted to keep out of my backgrounds, and what length of lenses would work in what places.
Both times, the situation changed so much from my exploration day to the wedding day, the information was close to useless, or at least, it was nothing I could not have done in a few minutes on the day of the wedding. In one case, the church was very dark with few lights on when I checked it out, then on the wedding day, I found out the entire back wall was windows, previously curtained, which they threw open in addition to a multitude of overhead lights they turned on. Should I keep checking out the locations beforehand?
I am sitting at home, dead tired from an all-day wedding shoot. Really, I should be going to bed, but for some reason, I just felt the urge to talk through it a little here. I have a lot running through my head, as I do after any important shoot…and here is some of it.
Second shooters are a great thing…fifth and sixth are a curse! My primary job was to shoot the “engagement ceremony” in the morning (it’s a Thai thing…I still find it funny that you do an engagement ceremony the morning of the wedding). The wedding ceremony later in the afternoon was the domain of a “professional photographer”. I will explain why that is in quotes.
I am about to shoot another wedding on Saturday. I am not exactly a professional wedding photographer, but I seem to have a lot of friends who find it a financial blessing for me to give them the gift of my photographic services for a day. So, like previous wedding shoots, I am trying my very best to give them what I would give paying customers, and in the process, hone my professional wedding photography services and skills…just in case somebody does decide to actually pay me one day.
With this wedding, the big service I am adding is posting the photographs online. In the past, since it has just been friends, I have gone the easiest route and just handed them the processed photographs on CDs. I just realized though, that providing online viewing, not only for the couple and their family but also for the guests, is a wonderful service to the couple—it really should be standard in this day and age.