Title • Daniel and Catherine #5

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