They call it Shoot and Burn

15 Nov They call it Shoot and Burn

Great article by Butch Oglesby of Blue Moon Studios about Shoot and Burn photographers.

A trend I am seeing in the wedding photography business is for photographers to photograph the wedding and simply give the bride and groom all the images on CD. This is called “shoot and burn”. And I think this is one of the greatest disservices a photographer can do for a couple.

The way I see it my job is to record your very special day in a way that is creative and artistic, then give you something tangible that is destined to be a treasured heirloom for not just you, but for your children and grandchildren.

So, what about the CD? Not a bad idea, unless that’s all you get. Naturally they say that all the images are high-resolution and edited. High-resolution maybe, but edited, I doubt it. Usually this means that the images have been tweaked a little. With the quantity of images modern digital photographers make at an all-day wedding it would be a monumental task to actually edit every image to its full potential. In our studio editing means, color correcting (we shoot everything in a format called RAW, which allows for a great deal more correction that JPEG does). Editing also means that we crop, dodge and burn the image so that it looks as close to perfect as possible. We remove dark shadows under the eyes and shine from the face. It often means we have to tone down the highlights in the wedding dress so the detail the bride took so much pride in is still visible.

So what do you do with the CD? Most people have good intentions and say they can print the images themselves and create their own album. The sad fact is most people never get around to making the prints nor the album. The CD is put away in some drawer where it may either get scratched or simply become unreadable over the years.

Then what’s the better way? Every wedding deserves a high-quality album. That’s where the best of the best images are archived in an artful way to tell the story of the most important day of a couple’s life –the chronicle of the formation of their family. It’s more than a box of pictures or a scrapbook a bunch of 4×6 prints taped to a page. A wedding album is a beautiful book that goes on the coffee table for the first year or so, then on the bookshelf for the rest of your life. It will be taken out on special anniversaries and laughed at by your teenage children. And, some day, it will become a treasure to your descendants.
A wedding album should be designed by someone with an eye for art. This is also where the fine editing comes in. In our studio we do tweak all the images we show our couples but the ones chosen for the album are given special treatment – these need to be perfect. Then the album should be printed and assembled by a professional company to ensure that it will last a lifetime. Most high-end album manufactures only sell to professional photographers.

Shoot and burn? It is the cheap way out, but is that what you deserve?