Sometimes my customers send me photos that I am in, that were taken on their wedding day by other people. I always like that, because I don’t have that many photos that I am in. In case of the photo below it is especially nice. As you probably noticed I was photographed here while I’m making a photo. I thought it would be fun to compare this photo, that was made using a pretty nice camera, to the photo that I made at pretty much the same moment. Just to see the difference between a photo that is taken by an enthousist photographer with a nice camera, and a photo made by a professional.
So, the first photo is taken by one of the guests at the wedding. In this photo you can see what most people would have seen if they had been there. A good camera in automatic-mode is very capable of capturing a moment like this.
The following photo shows you what I saw. No, I’m not color blind. But this photo does portray the vision that I had before I took this photo. When I was there I saw “hard light”, or in other words very defined transitions between shadow and light. By setting the camera up the right way I made sure that the photo would show relevant details in the right places, for example on the dress. In addition to that I made sure that the background was out of focus so you wouldn’t be distracted by all sorts of unimportant things in the background. Later, behind my computer, I finished that vision by, among other things, making certain parts of the photo lighter or darker. The photo below depicts what I had in mind, what I imagined, when I saw that tree on that lawn and asked Jeroen and Shuxia to sit down in front of the tree.
So, what did I want to show in this blog. That having a DSLR camera is not enough to make a good photo. Both these photos were taken with one of those fancy cameras. Vision, technique and the right skills are much more important than the camera that was used to capture the moment.