Hey! Who Moved My Wedding Scenery Around???

You know what the problem is going to the wedding site ahead of time to scout for setups to use on the wedding day? Murphy’s Law kicks in and this happens:

You’d find something that looks great, awesome, can’t-wait-until-the-day-to-photograph-in-that-setting! and come the day, lo and behold, there’s a big orange mesh fence up because they’re doing repairs. Or someone unknown has parked their bright red truck there in unavoidable plain sight. Or something! There’s ALWAYS something! HOW do they know where I want to take pictures so as to park their red truck there, I don’t know.

And why they choose red for their truck is another mystery.

This day, we went to the Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay, NY to do the photo sessions at Coe Hall, which is the historic mansion on the grounds. In particular, the bride really liked the portico area, and so, that’s where we headed.

When we got there, it turned out that some organization was about to set up for a function, so the portico was being used as a depository for a whole bunch of stacked chairs and several shiny garbage pails! There was no way we could move anything, let alone touch anything, and several angles we could’ve photographed in had to be eliminated right off the top just to avoid showing the paraphernalia that was piled up there.

But wait, there’s more.

In portraits, my thing is that prime consideration goes to 1. Where the light is, and 2. What the background looks like. So, out of the now narrowed down number of angles for photographing the portraits, I would still have parts of two spanking new shiny garbage pails showing up. See them circled in red?

Thank goodness for Photoshop! Here’s what I did:

I duplicated parts of the image in separate layers in Photoshop, just large enough to cover the pails, and carefully blended in the edges to meld the patches into the overall image. But there’s more I wanted to show you.

The “garbage pail” image is how the camera recorded the scene. I don’t have my camera make any adjustments to the image, since I prefer to handle all that in post process. I don’t want my camera doing my “thinking” for me. I shoot in RAW format so that later I have a full range of data in the image that I can work with. Some photographers shoot in JPG format, which is a compressed format, which means it has less data to work with. RAW means just that… it’s raw. Has to be cooked a little. Unless it’s sushi.

To finish the image into it’s final version, I enhanced the colors, adjusted its tones, sharpened the image and painted in a vignette to draw the viewer’s eye toward the bride, to make her more pronounced in the image’s composition. Artfully finishing an image is, I believe, an often ignored step by many in the trade, especially the “shoot and burners” who don’t want to get involved in this work. Yet, I think anything less is simply less professional. As an artist, you want to follow through and perfect the shot, best you can. But that’s me… Maybe it’s just this kick I get out of creating these final images…

Here’s the original file from the camera, complete with garbage pails, no extra charge!

And the finished version:

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