Jim Larson Photography

The detail of a wedding ceremony is truly amazing.  Let’s see, invitations to send, fancy clothes buy, renting the church, decorating the church, baking the cake…and the list goes on and on.  Today, my final shot in the “Retouching Wedding Photographs” series is all about the detail of the flowers.

This was the simplest one of the series to retouch as outlined below:

• Increase the exposure ever so slightly
• Add some vignetting to soften up the image and make it look a little “dreamy”

Weddings are a bit dreamy as you will notice when you watch the bride and groom look into each other’s eyes.  Looking back on my wedding day, I remember that feeling too.

Congratulations to Amanda and Will and I wish you the best as you start your married life together.

Cliff Moutner, stated to be “One of the top ten wedding photographers in the world” by American Photo Magazine is a photographer who has impacted my photographic life even though we’ve never met.  I find a lot of similarities in our thought processes from what I’ve read and heard from him over the past few months.  He is very good at walking into any situation and making the best of what is available from a lighting and architectural perspective.

The wedding I captured last week with my cameras had some very interesting lighting which made me think out of the box just a bit so that I could make the best of what I had been given.  It was at a small church and the bride was getting the final touches in one of the sunday school rooms that was designed for what I’m guessing were first and second grade kids.  I gathered that by my shins bumping into the bright green tabletops in the room.  I wanted to get some good photos of the bride’s shoes and thought I would give the green table a try, knowing that I’d need to do something with it after the fact.  Here is what I came up with as shown in the before and after image.

Here are the steps to take it from beginning to end:

• The shoes were photographed from a backlit perspective with natural light coming in through the window.
• I let the camera pick the exposure which left plenty of detail on the dark side of the shoes, but totally blew out a portion of the tabletop.
• In Adobe Lightroom, I first converted the image to black and white since I knew I didn’t want the green in the photo.  I contemplated changing the green tint to blue, but I liked the black and white so much that I stopped there.
• This was followed by brightening up the areas in the image that had the original green tint to make the tabletop a bit more uniform in brightness.  That also lightened up the bottom of the shoes that originally had the green reflection.
• I then brought out the blacks a bit more for added contrast.

That was about it as far as tweaking the image.  Next time you are in a difficult lighting situation, make the best of what you have.  You could end up with something cool.

Over the next few days I will show examples of how to take some photographs and make them even better.  Well, at least in my opinion they look better than the originals out of the camera.  Plus, my wife says so too, so that says something.  :-)

This last week I got to capture the wedding photos for a very nice couple.  In about 4 hours time, we had the wedding and an awesome reception at the bride’s parents house.  The back yard had white Christmas light in the hedges surrounding the yard.  This made for an awesome backdrop to the photos.

The image below is of the bride, showing the image as it came out of the camera and what I ended up presenting to the family.  Here are a few things that I did to make it look to my liking:

• Increased the overall exposure
• Modified the color balance so that white was white
• Increased the intensity some of the leaves in the background
• Added some vignetting to darken the corners just a bit to help bring the focus to the subject
• Did some minor touchup work on the brides face to make any blemishes a bit less conspicuous
• Did a minor push up on the bottom of the brides chin to make it more acceptable to her

Next time you have a photo that is nice, but not great, try some retouching ideas and see what you end up with.  Be sure you modify a copy of the original in case you go too far with your retouching.

The photo below is one frame from a video I took of a very large American flag in Boise.  It has been a very popular download on the iStockPhotos site.  It was captured with the Canon 5D MkII digital SLR.

Click on the image of the flag to watch the video.