When brides come to see me, part of their luggage often includes a book into which they peep once in a while during the discussions…the book of course being the latest edition of Bride’s Diary or similar, and with good reason. You don’t get married TOO often in your life, and it’s probably one of the biggest events that you will organise in your lifetime and certainly one of the most cherished, yet you have no clue where to begin and need help. Say “HELLO” to the wedding planner!
The photography section usually has a sub-section called “How to Choose a Photographer” and in there you would find several questions that you are supposed to ask your photographer before booking him or her. Some of them are really good questions, but some are in my opinion just dumb, mostly because they were probably taken from a Bride’s Diary dated somewhere in the 80′s (will all the the “film” photographers please stand up?).
Over the next few weeks or months, as I find time, I will take one of these questions at a time and expound on them a little bit from my own personal point of view. Eventually the plan is to have them all in one category on the blog for easy referencing, which will hopefully be a good resource for brides looking to hire me as their wedding photographer.
Here goes… (I have taken my list of questions from weddingfocus.co.za)
Q1: Do you back photos up onsite?
Backing up wedding photos are extremely important. The biggest threat for us probably being theft, but card failures, accidental formatting and a host of other potential disasters come to mind. If the images are lost while they are still on the cards and they have not yet been backed up, there is very little one can do to save those images. Those special moments cannot be recaptured and no amount of Photoshop is going to fix that particular problem.
As most of my weddings take place far from home, and the most common scenario I face after a wedding is to return to my hotel room/tent/lodge, I will explain my personal procedure accordingly.
Once I finish documenting a wedding and I have returned to wherever I will be resting for the evening, I immediatly start backing up the wedding photographs to my laptop, as well as on an external hard drive that I bring along with me to every wedding. This can take a few hours to do and I often end up in bed well after midnight even though the wedding coverage ended at 22:00 or so. This system gives me three different backups as I keep the images on the original cards as well. I then keep these backups in different bags as I travel home in case of theft or other unforseen situations.
Once I arrive home, two sets of DVD’s are burned. One goes into the client file marked as “originals”, and the other set is kept on another premises in case of fire or a complete house cleaning exercise by thugs.
After editing a wedding and after designing any albums for the clients, all the images are backed up again in a similar fashion. Currently I keep a copy of every wedding both on an external HD, as well as DVD, even after the wedding is over and done with and all the products have been handed over to the client, but I still advise clients to make a backup for themselves as well when they recieve their disk…just for paranoia’s sake.
I’m really liking my b&w’s at the moment
Next Question: do you develop and print your own film?
