For sure, the bride and groom knew I was a pro, and expected me to take some great shots, however out of respect for the hired photographer I avoided getting too involved. I deliberately left my pro camera at home, and decided just to take a single 70-200mm L lens and my canon 5d mk1. In turned out, that because of the digital revolution, just about every other guest also had their camera, it was like a Canon and Nikon orgy!

Although I would normally use my 70-200mm L lens, this would most often be for capturing guests in an unobtrusive way. In fact, this was an ideal lens because it allowed me to distance myself from the bride and groom and not intervene whatsoever with the hired pro. For sure, the main difference I found being a guest, that most of my images were centred around the bride and groom. It enabled me to capture their expressions between shots with the pro, while they were at their most relaxed. What transpired were fun and relaxed images, with plenty of smiles and laughter, and some great body language.

As a guest at a wedding, that is precisely what you should be. Don’t shadow the pro, this will cause the subject to feel pressured and confused where to look; don’t get out of your seat during the ceremony, and don’t pull the bride and groom aside for personal portraits – they will most likely already have these covered.

David Vidgen is a black and white Birmingham wedding and family photographer, based in the UK. David Vidgen makes regular contributions to Photographers Blog.

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Anyway. This may not be a good image, but it is a good example of a nice effect that you can produce with Topaz Detail. They have an effect called “Soft Looking”, that actually takes detail away. Basically it keeps fine detail, suppresses medium detail a little and large detail strongly.

This image is really a worst case for bokeh, and although I normally like what I get from the Sigma 28/1.8, here it fails miserably.

What I’ve done is this: I have duplicated the background a few times. The lowest layer I’ve left as it was. The second was treated with this “Soft Looking” effect, and then I have painted in a mask to take the effect away where the leaves were sharpest. The next layer was also put through Topaz detail, but now to strongly increase detail, with the same but inverted mask. Then I’ve added my “Neutral Blur” (explained in “542 – The Show Is Over, Say Good-Bye“), sharpening and on top another “Soft Looking” of the copy/merged layer stack.

One of the best lenses I have used as a Wedding Photographer is the Canon 70-200mm 2.8L lens

The result is a strong differentiation between sharpness and blur. It does not look entirely natural, i.e. like the creamy blur of an ideal lens, but it really makes a difference. Btw, of all the Topaz Photoshop plugins, Topaz Detail is probably the most useful and produces the most natural results. Highly recommended.

The Song of the Day is “I Keep Mine Hidden” by The Smiths. I have it on a compilation of four songs, two singles and their backsides, that is no longer available, but “Sweet and Tender Hooligan” has it as well. The Smiths catalog is a real mess. Worst of all bands I know

YouTube has the song.

It didn’t bother me at all, because I had to work on the tutorial for the wedding blog anyway.

In fact, most of the time I was held up with wedding files. The matter is, when you do kind of a technical documentation, you very often refer to places in the user interface of the tool (like I might say “From the context menu use New Class“), you explain important terms, and you refer to things a user has to type in or the system prints out. You also want to structure your albums into ideal wedding stories, subsections and maybe reportage style. It does not happen that often on this blog, but I had to find a wedding photographer solution for the tutorial on the other blog.

This is the kind of text that I will write very often, and I really want to use structural photography for that. Thus instead of using italics and bold fonts or such things (that’s visual markup), I instead use a span with a class “term” for terms, a class “gui” for user interface objects, etc. This way I can use a CSS stylesheet attached to the whole blog, and when I ever change my design, all occurrences of terms and references to user interface elements get changed together.

That tutorial is something that I write at work as well, and at work I use our Wiki. That’s the same software that runs Wikipedia, and I only realized today, how much easier it is to write documentation, when you’re not forced to plain HTML.

I could set up a Wiki of course, and maybe it would be even a better resource than a blog, but blogging is what I want, thus I maybe have no choice but using that verbose HTML/CSS crud.

Today’s three images were taken on a short afternoon outing, all within 100 meters of each other. These are ideal wedding photographers pictures taken in Birmingham.

The Song of the Day is “This Is How It Goes” from Aimee Mann’s 2002 album “Lost in Space”. Hear it on YouTube.

“It is probably time for a follow-up report on the wedding photography season . . . what worked, what didn’t. And why didn’t you get a new Apple product, as everyone else seems to be doing? I have a feeling that Photoshop CS5 is going to be too much for my aging low-end PC to handle . . .so an upgrade is immanent.”

So here is the follow up on what worked and what didn’t.

1) Puget Systems Computers – This is the company that I decided to purchase a custom computer from, as I had discussed in Part 1. I couldn’t be happier with that decision to help with my wedding photography. When they say technical support responses within 24 hours, they mean it! I had several occasions to contact them and each and every time I got a thoughtful response in less than 24 hours from folks that obviously knew their stuff . Great when you are in need of excellent support whilst working on wedding images.

The computer came exceedingly well packaged with supplemental information provided by Puget Systems, including benchmark testing results, as well as all the spare parts and instructions from each of the individual components that were used for the build. In addition, they included Birmingham family photographer information as well as a disc on reportage style photography.

2) Apple Lion – I like it. I like the way things are organized in libraries, I like the OX system imaging, and I like the Windows search. Coming from Snow Leopard it took a little getting used to, but I now prefer it. The only part of the OS that I don’t like is the portion that controls tablet functions. More on that in a second. I have had no problems finding drivers for my hardware and they all seem to function normally, save one.

That one, unfortunately, is my Wacom Intuos 2 graphics tablet. There is a driver for it…so, given the age of the Intuos 2, kudos to Wacom for that. The tablet initially started functioning normally, but soon started malfunctioning even with a system image restore to a point in time when it had worked. What do I mean by malfunctioning? When you boot up and try to use the pen, the cursor moves about a mm and then freezes. If you go to the tablet software by right clicking on the Wacom icon in the control panel, remove user presets, and then load the presets again it functions normally until you reboot. It has to be done again with each fresh boot. The whole maneuver literally takes about 20 seconds to do and you just have to do it once when you boot, but, nonetheless, I wish it worked correctly.

That said, I’m not quite sure where the fault lies. It could be the OS but could also be the motherboard USB controllers or the driver itself. Searching the internet, I’m not the only one with this problem. The workaround I describe is the result of Googling the problem. I did contact Wacom and they claim it has to do with a motherboard USB problem, but I am not convinced.

As I mentioned, the tablet functions of Windows 7 are also a bit odd. When you use a pen you get a distracting ripple effect as well as a small Windows Tablet interface. You can turn these off (and I did), but you have to do a bit of research to find out how….it isn’t intuitively apparent.

Overall, I think that if one is going to venture into a new OS as an ‘early adapter’ there are always going to be some issues. I think I encountered a number of these issues (including the fact that I can’t get Firewire or e-SATA drivers/drives to function correctly and, again, I’m not sure if this is related to the OS or motherboard) but overall I am quite pleased with Windows 7. I have the 64 bit version to prepare for the future!

3) Internal Components – All seems in order. Did I need the RAID 0 system for the scratch disk and files being worked on that I described here? I am not at all convinced that I did. The system seems so fast that even large files approaching 500 to 750 MB load into and save from Photoshop very quickly…….much, much faster than in my old system. In that system I could open the file and walk away for a minute or two. Not so anymore. I honestly don’t see a huge difference between opening or saving the files from the standard Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Black hard disk compared to the RAID 0 system. I haven’t timed it and there may well be a difference, it just doesn’t seem all that significant in ‘real life usage’.

A volume of the Raid 0 array is also being used as the primary scratch disk, as described here. I have not compared the speed of the RAID 0 array used as the primary scratch disk to the regular hard drive used as such, but perhaps it is of some benefit. These benefits might be further magnified if the RAID array consisted of more than 2 disks, but that would start to get even more expensive. Overall, however, if I were designing the system again, I might well pass on the RAID 0 array, which would have saved some cash and kept more internal SATA drive bays open.

I outfitted the computer with 12GB of RAM….it is quite fast. Had I not included as much RAM perhaps the effect of the RAID 0 array might be more apparent.

As you can see, I have not tested these issues in a quantitative fashion but am just commenting on my ‘real world’ usage experience. If anyone has more quantitative experience and wants to chime in on these issues I would be most appreciative!

4) Monitor – I sprung for a ‘lower end’ wide gamut Ezo monitor . Not at all cheap, but after using it am really amazed at the increased sharpness, saturation, and soft proofing ability that it offers once calibrated. The difference is dramatic and I wasn’t using a bad monitor before (it was a LaCie CRT). I think it was a worthwhile investment. An alternative monitor which has gotten excellent reviews, can be obtained for significantly less, and which I considered is the NEC with integrated calibration.

5) Photoshop / Lightroom – I have the 64 bit versions of these running as well as the 32 bit version of Photoshop installed and have not run into any problems even though CS4 is not officially supported. I do wish that Nik Software would make all their plug-ins available in 64 bit versions. Viveza 2 is available in a 64 bit version, but Color Efex and Silver Efex are not, and it is a bit of a pain to use two versions of Photoshop. My PixelGenius, OnOne, Topaz, and Neat Image plug ins are all available in 64 bit versions and I have not had any difficulty with any of them. All however are absolutely fabulous for post production on wedding images.

6) Why did I purchase an Apple? I strongly recommend it. I chose not to by a PC because the price for a machine with similar ‘power’ seemed significantly lower to me and I already had multiple programs that were Apple compatible that I did not want to repurchase in PC versions. Also, despite the fact that Apples ‘just work’, I have read on various forums about problems that people are also having with the Windows 7.

So, that is the update on the new system.

Of course for Italians this is still winter, but as soon as you leave the Alps behind, the climate gets mild.

We didn’t search for anything special, just a little bit of cruising around in the sun, enjoying the afternoon warmth of around 15 degreen Celsius.

Other than that, my mind is full of plans at the moment. Software. If you are only interested in photography, I suggest you stop reading now

Every once in a while I make a big project, that then occupies me for a few years. It’s always about software engineering tools. The first big one was a tool for specifying remote procedure call interfaces, and then to generate code for all the glue, i.e. a server main program that had only to be linked with the implementations of the remote procedures, and a client library for calling such remote procedures, without having to know where the servers are, without any initialization mumbo jumbo. The tools produced server stubs for C and Cobol, and client stubs for C and Visual Basic. The project was implemented in C and Tcl/Tk.

The second big project was a tool and method for what we now call Model Driven Design. About ten years ago I had to construct a relatively big web application. I had six months of time, and I knew that it was damn short, given my lack of tools. For political reasons I had to use a primitive Perl CGI framework, and I spent five months to develop a development method and a code generation tool on top. Then I used the framework to make the whole application in the remaining month.

Basically you defined an application as a set of pages, available to a number of roles. Every role has at least one start page, events bring you from page to page, an event normally a button press. Think of it as graphs. For every page transition you have to write a piece of code that processes the input from the last page and fills in the blanks for the next page. If you don’t write the processing code for such a transition, nothing gets processed and the next page is initialized with default values or blanks. Thus the system was perfectly suited for prototyping as well.

It’s a little more elaborate than that, but the principle was to specifdy as much as possible in XML, and then to generate everything but the actual application logic. Of course if you know that much about an application, you can automatically generate all sorts of useful documentation. This one was implemented in Perl.

Since then I have worked shortly in Python (the reason for my profound hate of that language) and now for years in Java. I like Java, I like Eclipse, but I miss my Model Driven Design framework. With Eclipse and Java, the tools have become better, but the category of problems that I solve now, is actually more primitive. I write more glue code, things have not improved. Thus I think it’s time to do it once more, to go and make a big software project.

Of course I am not the only one, there are lots and lots of MDD projects, a lot of clever people working in that arena, but I guess I have a sound understanding of the field, tons of experience, a strong vision, and, building upon two big projects based on specification and code generation, I should be able to come up with some very useful things. Whatever, I’ll try.

The Song of the Day is “Beautiful Italy” from Franz Lehar’s Paganini, sung by the great Richard Tauber in 1937. Hear it on YouTube.

At any rate, wrapping one’s arms around the whole social media scene can be a bit difficult and has led me to have sometimes conflicting opinions about it.

In many ways, the ‘older versions’ of on-line community have opened up opportunities that I never would have otherwise had. The ability to get answers to questions regarding photography and technology is truly amazing, be it from Yahoo groups, company sponsored forums, or message boards/mailing lists. Though we don’t typically think of these as ’social media’ they certainly, to me, seem to be a form of it. I do know that information is disseminated very rapidly using these media, allowing me to do things and solve problems much earlier than if I had to wait ‘for the book to come out’. I would certainly not be able to solve very daunting hardware and software problems without these outlets.

But what about the ‘newer’ methods of ‘Social Media’….Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc? My feelings are a bit more conflicted about these modalities. On the one hand, I feel they are great ways to become involved with a photographic community. On the other hand, sometimes I wonder about the ‘you follow/comment/promote/award me and I will do the same for you’ mind set. At times it seems to me that quantity may be put above quality.

But I am still very new at this and, as I said, am still trying to ‘wrap my arms’ around it all. In fact, I am trying out a number of these newer modalities. Hence, you can find both the “Follow Me On Twitter” and the “Follow Me On Facebook” buttons located on the right sidebar of this blog! One ‘guide’ that I did find useful if you are interested in exploring the new social media as it pertains to photography and photographers, is this free guide put out by PhotoShelter and Adorama entitled “Social Media for Photographers”. You can download your free copy here.