I think something as simple as the packing of a CD or photo album is really important. Well, maybe not “really import” but at least “also important”. The package you see below contains a photo album. The small package contains about 50 small photo prints. I usually send a package like this to my clients by mail. In that case the package you see below would be inside a box of course. But sometimes I have the chance to deliver a photo album or CD album myself. It’s very fulfilling to ring the door bell and to personally hand over the result of many hours of work to my customers.

To get back to the packaging. I really like the movie The Sound of Music. In that movie is a song that contains the line “brown paper packages, tied up with strings”. Well, those packages would look something like this.

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.

I just made a slideshow of one of my favorite weddings of the year, the wedding of Shuxia & Jeroen. You can find the slideshow here.

So why was this one of my favorite weddings of the year? Well, mainly because we just had lots of fun.

It’s not too late for another “highlights of 2011″ post is it? I know it’s already 2012 but I still think it’s fun to look back a little bit.

I want to talk a about a certain photo shoot location. Now of course we had lots of fun and made a lot of good photos at a lot of great locations in 2011. But, of all the locations that I’ve done photo shoots at this past year, one location really stands out in my mind. The reason for this is that initially I didn’t think this location was going to produce very good photos. OK, let me back up a little bit. The location I’m talking about is an antique shop. To be precise La Folie Antiek in ‘s Hertogenbosch. Now for some reaseon, when my clients suggested an antique store as the photo shoot location I was thinking about some old dark store with low ceilings and little windows. So naturally I was a bit apprehensive about it to say the least.

But, when I walked into the store, my attitude changed. This place was great! It has high ceilings, lots of light, and great features all over the place. Totally not what I expected, but definitely something we could work with. And it did work out really nice. Even more so because the location was also a very fitting extension of the personality of the couple.

Here are a couple of photos taken at this awesome location.

Today we have the second part of my highlights series: the cake. I see a lot of wedding cakes. They are pretty much always special. Some of them are big, others are very colorful, sometimes it’s a real artwork. Some cakes look really amazing, but when you eat the first bite you are somewhat disappointed. But, generally speaking wedding cakes pretty much always look and taste good.

A while ago I got to photograph the wedding of a couple that made their own wedding cake. I thought that was pretty special. On top of their cake they printed a poem with edable letters. That was one of the most special cakes of this year for sure. But, I chose another wedding cake as the highlight of the year.

When I first saw this wedding cake I was really impressed. I had heard before from the bride and groom that the cake would be made by his grandma and aunt. So, I made sure that taking photos of the cake before it was cut, was pretty high on my mental todo list of the day. So, when I first saw the cake I really loved the look of it. It actually is a quite simple, as far as any wedding cake can ever be called simple, three layer cake. But the fresh fruit that is draped on and around the cake, and the fruit juice that is coming down, it just looks really good. Truly one of those cakes that you just want to eat a piece of right away. Really very creative. Simple yet very special, and it tasted just as good as it looks!