The Everything Bridal Show – Des Moines, Iowa

Hello all!

We apologies as we are very behind on blog updates. It has been neglected, I will admit. But we have good reason!  The past few weeks have been culminating up to this day. Our first bridal show! To think that we’ve been shooting weddings now for 6 years and have never done one. It was a lot of work but was so much fun. We didn’t opt to ‘build’ anything into our space until Tuesday last week. So, Chris decided he wanted our booth to stand out which required many trips to local stores for hardware, wood, crown molding, tables and other miscellaneous items. It was well worth it as we booked weddings on the spot! We were also able to meet so many wonderful people! We plan on having a booth at the next show coming up in January and this time we will be prepared! Thanks to all that made it out and we hope to hear from some of you very soon!

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Stay tuned for sneak peaks on 2 weddings and a beautiful set of senior portraits. Have a great rest of the weekend!

~ Sarah

Matt & Tina

Lots of rain lately.  25 minutes of shooting indoors. I must say, we need to persuade them for pictures again when we have better weather!

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Living Inside Photoshop

I’m breaking a few rules here to show what goes into our post production.  Recently we posted a before and after photograph of a building in Adel, IA to give readers an idea what we do to overcome certain challenges.  I will warn readers that this is NOT going to be a photoshop tutorial.  I am simply  going to show you a couple of before and after shots to explain why we do what we do and the reason wedding photographs have a little longer of a turn around time. Aside from the shear volume of photographs captured at a wedding there are so many additional variables that come into play when proofing and post processing pictures.

First example:

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The above picture is well composed but is slightly underexposed.  In wedding photography you don’t have many chances to ‘get it right’. Special moments are fleeting and often times you have only one chance to get the shot. Sarah took several shots with the same composition but this particular one caught my eye. Everything about this photograph, I love. From the bride’s smile to the relaxed and natural positioning of the hands. The challenge here was the environment we were shooting in. This was actually a very small room. The light was a simple on camera flash with the head tilted for bounce. This created unnatural skin tones and some heavier shadows in the face making the subject look  flushed. To correct this, I’ve processed the image by pushing the exposure a tad without losing any dress details. I also tried to balance out the skin tones as to give the picture a more natural look to it. In the end, photography is just like any other form of art – it’s subjective.  The photo is processed until I feel it is done.

Second example:

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This photograph is a quick take on what I do to give something a little more ‘pop’ and takes only a minute to do. A bit of saturation and light midtone burning on the right side of the photograph to draw the viewers attention to the couple. And that’s it! So this photograph literally took just 2 minutes to adjust and we were done with it.

So that’s it for my brief run down! To those patiently waiting on wedding photographs, know we are diligently processing through them every day.  Thanks for giving us the privilege to photograph your day together!

God Bless!

The partial lineup

Had an impromptu opportunity to photograph a few of Chris’ coworkers. These were shot in a matter of 15-20 minutes for a few employees of Gilmor & Doyle. I believe they turned out well despite the fact that nobody knew that there picture was going to be taken today (with the exception of the one who requested the photographs).  We made a little composite of what was taken and hope to photograph the rest of the office very soon!

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