This is a shot from Jess's and Georg's wedding that I photographed last weekend in Blackpool with Sheila. We had a fantastic day and got some great shots, of which this is probably my favourite: the bride and groom on Blackpool seafront.

This was take about a minute later than the shot I posted earlier this month, and as you can see, his attention was starting to wander by this point :)

On a related note ...

If you missed my previous post, I'm going to be running a new class with PPSOP: The Art of Black and White Photography. If you click the previous link you'll see that the course covers: black and white conversion techniques; working with portraits; combining conversion techniques and selectively altering tonal range and contrast; and toning and colorizing your black and white images – all of which are techniques that I used to create today's image. Specifically, I blended a Channel Mixer conversion with a Hue/Saturation adjustment (to even out the tonal balance for the image as a whole), added a few masked curves (to lighten his eyes and alter the global contrast), and then used a Curve to add a very slight warm tone to the highlights.

And while I'll be discussing all of these techniques in The Art of Black and White Photography>, I've also covered them in my own tutorials, specifically: Portraits: part one, Black and White: part one and part two, and Toning Colour Images.

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

3.07pm on 8/10/10 Canon 5D Mark II EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM 200mm f/5.6 1/320 aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 1x1

Here's another image from Jane and Nik's wedding that I shot back in October. My favourite shot from the one's I've posted is still this one (the rather serious looking Italian uncle), but I'm pleased with this one too.

In other news: if you'd be interested in some one-to-one training (either at our Blackpool office or at your own location in the UK) – on photography, post-production, or both – I now have some confirmed dates when I'll be back in the UK to provide training:

Thursday 10th February
Friday 11th February
Saturday 12th February
Sunday 13th February

Thursday 24th March
Friday 25th March
Saturday 26th March
Sunday 27th March

If you think you might be interested please email me [djn1 AT chromasia DOT com] or Libby [Libby AT chromasia DOT com] for further details.

And finally, don't forget that our 25% discount offer on our Photoshop tutorials ends at midnight on the 7th. Further info here:

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

3.06pm on 8/10/10 Canon 5D Mark II EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM 200mm f/5.6 1/160 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 16x9

Here's another shot of the flower girl from the wedding I photographed in October. She was definitely cute :)

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2.31pm on 8/10/10 Canon 5D Mark II EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM 200mm f/5.6 1/250 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 200 no RAW Lightroom 3 Photoshop CS5 none no

I've just finished editing the images for the wedding I shot with Craig back in September, so thought I'd post one last image: Daniel and Catherine, the bride and groom.

There isn't much I can tell you about this one, other than that this wonderfully photogenic guy was one of the guests at the wedding I shot on Friday. Some people were born to be photographed :)

On some of my recent trips back to the UK I've had a couple of things to do, but have spent quite a lot of my time twiddling my thumbs or just wandering about taking photographs. This trip, however, is quite a lot busier: I got back on Wednesday, went clothes shopping on Thursday (which was hellish), photographed a wedding with Sheila Morris yesterday, and spent today delivering the first of two days 1-2-1 training. I've got Monday off, but have three morning training sessions next week, after which I fly back to BG with my good mate Craig.

As I'm sure you will have already worked out, this is the first of a number shots that I'll be posting from the wedding: the youngest of three flowergirls. She was definitely a cutey :)

I also have a couple more portraits that I'll be posting, and at least four shots from this morning's training session. I'll post the first of those on Monday.

This is the last of the shots I'll be posting from the wedding I shot recently with Craig: one of the cutest kids I've photographed in quite some time :)

Elsewhere ...

My recent interview with PhotoNetCast is now live:

.../photonetcast-52-talking-photography-with-david-nightingale.html

And I'm currently taking part in the inaugural game of HDR Tennis:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/HDR-Tennis/105060586224248

This is the penultimate image I'll be posting from the wedding I shot with Craig recently, and one of my favourites from the set. There are three reasons I like it.

First, it's a nice, happy shot: I love photographing people who are genuinely and unselfconsciously enjoying themselves.

Second, it was dead easy to post-process. Now, much as I like mucking around in Photoshop – I find the whole process very therapeutic – it's always rewarding to actually nail a wedding shot that requires very little work. In this case, just two adjustments: a black and white conversion using the Channel Mixer, then a single Curve for brightness and contrast.

If you're interested, the Channel Mixer conversion was biased towards the blue channel. This accentuated his facial details, and had the added bonus of lightening his jacket (both my black and white tutorials cover this technique. Further info here and here). All I then needed to do was brighten the image and add some contrast using a fairly strong S-curve, a topic I spend quite a lot of time discussing in my Tonal Range and the Curves Tool tutorial.

The third, and probably less obvious reason I like this one is that his camera looks implausibly small and fragile. Don't ask me why that's a good reason to like this image – I really have no idea why it appeals to me – but for me it's one of the elements that makes this shot.

As always, let me know what you think.

Oh, and Craig has also blogged a shot from the wedding today too. If you're interested, you can take a look here:

http://www.id7.co.uk/portfolio/archives/1009251900_clean.php

Here's another image from the wedding I shot with Craig in Kendal the weekend before last: the grandmother of the bride.

In other news ...

I'm the invited guest on this week's PhotoNetCast podcast which will (probably) be broadcast live on Friday, at 4am GMT, that's 7am local time for me (further details here). We'll be chatting about a variety of topics, including Extreme Exposure (my latest book), so tune in if you're around.

Also, you will probably have noticed that I've added a Tweetmeme button and Facebook Like button to most of my blog pages. I'm fairly sure these are working as they should, but please let me know if you have any problems with them.

While weddings are clearly events that centre around the bride and groom, one of the things I like best about them is that they're also comprised of a myriad of small but wonderful moments like this one.

I don't shoot many weddings, maybe three of four a year, but when I do I really enjoy them. One of the main reasons is that they're simply nice events to witness, but they're also a great opportunity for 'people watching'. If you've tried street photography you'll know that one of the major problems is that a lot of people simply don't like being photographed, and a good portion of the rest of them have become increasingly suspicious of any form of public photography. At weddings though it's generally a whole lot easier: people are relaxed, your presence is legitimate, and so on. As such I often end up with a lot of great portraits that would have been much more difficult to capture in a public space.

On a more technical note: this one was converted to black and white using the channel mixer, a technique I discussed in quite a lot of detail in my latest video tutorial. If you're interested, there's some further info linked below, but the short explanation is that I biased the conversion towards the blue channel to accentuate the fine scale detail (stubble, hair, and so on). This is a technique that works well for male portraits, but biasing the conversion towards the red channel often works better for portraits of women and children as it produces much softer (and brighter) skin tones.

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/bw2_info.php

This was taken on Saturday when I photographed Daniel and Catherine's wedding in Kendal with my good mate Craig. It was a very relaxed day: we started shooting at the hairdresser's at around 11am (where this shot of one of Catherine's two bridesmaids was taken), then moved back to the hotel for the ceremony, meal and reception. We finished up at around 10pm then headed back to Blackpool to copy our CF cards, have a first run through the images, and drink a few beers. We got some great shots and I'll be posting a few more over the next week or so.

I'll post some more thoughts about wedding photography in a day or so, but right now I need to dash out the door and get down to our office in Blackpool. I have a 1-2-1 training session to deliver tomorrow, and a to-do list that's as long as my arm :)

Update: the version that's tom live is less extreme than the one I posted earlier, i.e. there's more detail in her skin in this version.

This is probably the last of the shots I'll be putting up from the wedding I shot in Venice a few weeks ago, and while it's not my favourite of the various ones I've posted, I am pleased with how it turned out as it was shot in less than favourable circumstances, i.e. back-lit, low light, and so on.

On a different matter: my apologies for not posting much recently, but as many of you know, I'm currently home-alone with the kids, while Libby is back in the UK waiting for our latest daughter to make an appearance. She's not due until the 11th of November, and they won't be able to fly back to Bulgaria for two weeks after that, so my updates might be rather infrequent between now and then.

I will be heading out to Dubai again though - November 19-22 - as I'm one of the instructors at the GPP Fotoweek event, alongside Bobbi Lane, Robin Nichols, David Tejada, and Chris Hurtt. It should be a great event, and if you're interested in attending, there's a full list of all the workshops here:

http://www.gulfphotoplus.com/fotoweekend-workshops.php

When I posted venezia #3 I mentioned that I trusted to luck with the exposure - mostly because I didn't have time to do anything else. With this shot though I decided to deliberately go for a more high-key image, by overexposing by +1 EV, and while I think I prefer the slightly moodier look of venezia #3, I also like this one too. Technically, and aesthetically, I think it's a bit weaker, but symbolically I think it's more interesting, i.e. they're walking towards a bright or unknown future.

I'd be interested to hear how you think the two compare, and which you prefer.

On a related matter, the second shot I posted in this series – venezia #2 – has been nominated for the Photo of the Year category of the 2009 Photoblog Awards. If you would like to vote for that image you can do so here:

http://vote.photoblogawards.com/photoblog.php?name=venezia-2

My own submission for that category was one of my favourite HDR shots from this year – BSC - Workington. If you'd like to vote for that one, the relevant page is here:

http://vote.photoblogawards.com/photoblog.php?name=bsc---workington

While I think I prefer the previous two shots I posted of the bride and groom from the wedding I shot in Venice recently, I like this one too. It was taken just before we started our walk around Venice,and was grabbed as the bride and groom were saying a temporary goodbye to their guests, and while I would have preferred a less cluttered shot (table legs in the foreground, people in the background), it was either grab the shot or miss the moment. I'm glad I chose the former.

Of all the shots I took of the bride and groom during our walk through Venice, I think that this is one of my favourites – aesthetically, because it captures a moment that I think was definitely worth recording, and technically, because it was shot in circumstances that I would normally avoid, i.e. the dynamic range of the original scene was quite high. As such I was going to lose either some shadow detail, or highlight detail, or both. In this case, as you can see from the original image (linked below), I lost the shadow detail:

.../archives/venezia_3.php

At this point I'd love to be able to say that this was intentional, i.e. that I deliberately exposed the shot in this way, but I was rushing to catch up with the bride and groom at this point so snapped a few frames as they walked down the alley. Fortunately, it worked out.

In terms of the post-production: this one was relatively straightforward, i.e. I cropped the image, cloned out a few distracting elements, converted the image to black and white using the channel mixer (as described in this tutorial), added a fairly strong Curve that clipped the highlights (resulting in the loss of detail in the stonework in front of the bride and groom), and then toned the image using a second Curve (as described here).

As I mentioned when I posted my previous entry I shot a wedding in Venice at the weekend with Tom Wicky. Tom shot the bride getting ready in the morning then we both shot the ceremony (at Venice Town Hall). Once the ceremony had finished Tom and I took a 45 minute walk through Venice with the bride and groom: Tom shot the 'formal' portraits while I concentrated on recording the less formal aspects of our stroll. I haven't had a chance to work through all of them yet, but did like this one.

As I mentioned when I posted the first shot from the wedding I photographed recently, I was co-shooting with Tom Wicky. The biggest and most obvious benefit of have two photogs at a wedding is that the pressure is reduced, i.e. your not solely responsible for getting each and every shot. A related benefit is that while one of you shoots the main shot, the other can pursue other angles. In this instance, as Tom was photographing the bride getting into the car after the ceremony - from the obvious, and easiest angle - I was shooting between the gap left between the hinged side of the door and the car body. With the benefit of hindsight I wish I'd moved an inch or two to the left, but I am pleased with how this one turned out.

If you're interested, the original was converted to black and white (as discussed in this tutorial), then toned with a curve (as discussed here).

I may be wrong, but I suspect that this one won't create quite such a polarised response as my last wedding shot ;-)