Love the Dress - What are you going to do with it now?

I can't say that "trashing the Dress" is particularly popular out my way, although plenty of photographers offer this so-called service, and I make sure to offer it to my clients... I have not had anyone take it up yet.

The guys aren't interested one way or the other; unless it is a hired garment and they might have to pay for the damage!

Some of the girls are worried about the dress itself... what if it gets dirty, torn, stained and they can't get it clean? Or about the tradition: it was Grandma's/I want my daughter to be able to wear it/ mum would kill me.

Mostly though, the idea of risking a very expensive garment is the issue, even if it is just to preserve its resale value. So I was very interested to bump into Lynne and Peter last week.

Lynne and Peter Smith are dry cleaners. More than that.... they have a unique Wedding Gown repair and preservation process which involves specialized cleaning and hand repair of the dress. One clean, it is placed in a sealed box to prevent mold, mildew, or insect damage.

Not just a clean dress in a box. This airtight container has had the oxygen replaced by an inert gas so that no yellowing or discoloration from oxidation can possibly harm the gown. The box - maybe I should call it a "vault" - has a clear window in it so you can see your dress, which has been carefully, lovingly folded and padded using acid-free tissue to enhance its form and show off any detail work.

That's not all: the box is then placed in an outer container that has extra features to control humidity, pH, and oxygen levels, so preventing sunlight & UV damage during long-term storage, while still letting you have a peek when the urge takes you.

Everything is acid-free - the storage chest, box and packing tissue. Which means each gown is properly stored in materials that will not yellow or “bleed” into the fabric over the years.

What a great fit for a Trash the Dress promotion, though I - I could do the shoot, and send the dress to Lynne and Peter who would clean the gown. The bride would be reassured and the groom would have no need to worry, knowing the dress was going to be properly repaired and cared for. Bad Idea, David!

Lynne must have seen something in my eyes: "You don't do Trash the Dress, do you?" - It wasn't so much a question as an accusation! I was really thankful to be able promise I never had, and then just sit quietly (innocently!) and listen to her horror stories:

- the mother-of-the-Bride, devastated by what had been done to her wedding gift (The Gown);

- the $8000 Designer Dress that would never be free of seaweed stains;

- what it means to get sand or soil or mud into the fine seams of a hand sewn gown (did you ever try to unpick and then resew a one-of-a-kind, or match hand made buttons that cannot be bought in any store?)

I won't trouble you with the details, but the conclusion was very simple: Lynne will not touch a dress that has been abused just for the sake of a passing photographic fad! As for entering into some arrangement with Practicaps Weddings to promote such vandalism..... I never actually asked!

What I did ask was the cost of her Heirloom Preservation service...can't tell you, exactly, it depends on the individual job; but for an off the rack gown that hasn't suffered too much on the Big Day, think of about $680 as a starting point. For a Couture Gown - POA!

Just a CD of Images, Please.

There are many ways to save money on a Wedding, some better than others. One popular approach is to organize a photographer for your wedding day, but plan to do the printing yourself. This might save money upfront, but there are some pitfalls.

The advantages are obvious: you have the files in your possession and can either print your photos at home or at a local photo outlet, which are often much cheaper than the prices you might expect to pay if your photographer supplies the prints. Likewise, you can make a slideshow on your home computer at no cost beyond a blank DVD and a label - in fact, you can skip the label and just write on the disk with a felt pen.

Department stores and online outlets have many products that sound just like the ones your photographer offers, and if you go direct, there is no middleman: so you can get Canvas Prints, Albums or Coffee-Table books quite cheaply.

Your family and friends will be able to come to you for souvenirs of your wedding, saving them the cost and inconvenience of dealing with the photo studio.

Reinforcing the idea of a disk-only wedding package is the sense that there is no real need for "hard copy"; people expect to share photos on Facebook or e-mail them to family and friends.

This idea appeals to some photographers, too. Most of the work of a wedding photographer is done after the wedding. Quality printing is an art and demands high-end printers, archival papers and inks. Pros do not use $100, 2 cartridge printers or $20 packs of glossy photo paper. Getting good results is expensive and time consuming. Many of us prefer the alternative of a pro-photo lab and pay them to produce true high quality, colour corrected prints.

A part-timer earning a bit of money from their hobby still has to turn up to their real job on Monday. The essential work of editing and preparing the prints and slideshows has to be done after work - a week of staying up till midnight staring at a screen. If the client is going to take that responsibility off the photographers' shoulders, why wouldn't they be willing to let them (and they don't have to take responsibility for the standard of the final results, either). Which is why you should not use a photographer who promises the files by the next day: they have done no work on them and you will be disappointed.

But, back to the subject:

In reality, when people order a "disk only" service, the photos taken at your wedding by the Professional Wedding Photographer, or by guests, seldom see the light of day. Very few are circulated, hardly any get printed, slide shows never eventuate and the DVDs do not even get downloaded to your computer because the files take hours to transfer and fill up the hard drive very quickly. But of course, if you don't download them, you can't edit them...

Are these the only reasons disk-only weddings are rarely viewed? There are many reasons; another is the time demanded to deal with the files on the DVD. They are quite different to the sort of photos that amateur photographers are used to dealing with. A typical wedding will generate 2000 or more files. Each 24bit file is 8 to 12 megabytes in size. Being confronted with so many, often similar images, can seem overwhelming; you can't just dump them onto your iPhone or upload them to MySpace or email them around the country!

And if you have the technology and knowledge to compress and send them, how long will you invest in reviewing and choosing which files to send to different people? Let's say you spend just 3 minutes with each photo - 6000 minutes; let's see...that's 4 days and nights without a break!

A 20 minute slide show averaging 5 seconds per photo will use about 300 slides and take an experienced designer about 6 hours to produce, including music tracks, captions, custom transitions and burning, once the most appropriate slides have been decided on and the music obtained. That's assuming you have the software to make a slideshow that is more than just a progression of pictures.

You can certainly get cheap post-card prints made - as little as 30c to 50c each. Not on quality, heavy weight paper; not with a choice of finishes; not converted to sepia or B&W; not using archival inks and papers that will still be fresh and bright in 80 years time.... but they are cheap!

Of course, you can't just hand over the DVDs and expect the photo store to know which ones to print, and you can't put the DVD in one of those do-it-yourself machines and go through 2000 images, picking out which ones you want as you go. But on the other hand, even at .50cents each, you do not want 2000 odd prints made for $1000!

If you want enlargements made on quality stock, properly framed, the cheap alternative is going to cost about the same as a quality product; if you look for canvas or coffee-table photobooks, the professional equivalent will not only last longer, be better finished and truer in colour to the original, it may also be less expensive (check out my own canvas print prices, as an example). Remember, the enticingly inexpensive ads you see are for minimum sizes - you can get a magazine style album for $30, but it will only be 25cm square and hold about 20 photos. Look for an A4 with a hard cover and enough room for your essential shots and you will get no change from $250 even on-line; an A3 will probably hit $500: but you won't know that till you get to the check-out, by which time you will have spent a week or more trying to get their propriety software and templates to design the book to look as you want it, instead of the way the company wants to print it....

The highest quality prints and albums are not available to the general public: some are only available from international suppliers, for others you have to be registered as a Professional Photographer or Designer in order to access them, while others are only advertised to the professions, so the general public does not even know about them; but that's a side issue...

Obviously, I have a vested interest. As a photographer, I want to be paid for my art and my time, and I want to control the final outputs from my work. I do not want you to show someone a department store enlargement or coffee-table book and say "That is David Rich's work"; they don't know that the inks, paper or stretchers are responsible for the picture looking a bit ordinary; they don't know how different a hand-sewn, UV protected, full bleed album is from the one on your table; they cannot imagine how that First Kiss would come to life it had been printed on gold or silver tinted aluminium instead of paper - but that's my reputation sitting there, and I can do nothing about it.

Photo Shows of the Wedding Day

I have been corresponding with colleagues about photo slide shows, and some that I have posted elsewhere seem to have been taken down. I'll look into that later, but for those interested, there is a 30 second example posted on my Kiss the Bride page and I have added a longer one to this blog.


Feedback is great - positive or otherwise!The short video was created online with the free version of Animoto: the longer one is a ProShowGold production. Proshow is my usual editor.


How much is this like the slide shows I design for my clients? It is a simplified version, without dtp graphics and captions I usually include, and it doesn't place the photos into context like a "real" show would. What I mean by that is that, although the pictures are in chronological order, they don't link together to tell the story of the day as a full set of photos would.

Endless Variety

I know you've heard it before, but i do love weddings. They are like a major theatre production, full of bustle, colour, excitement... there is drama and comedy, High Art counterpoised with low farce, solemn moments offset by the bawdy; emotion overflowing, the Sacred and the profane  - and binding it all together there is deep Love and the promise of lifelong commitment.

All this is mine.  Mine to capture, interpret, and commit to eternity - or at least, for as long as pixels last and people still gaze at the images. Bright images of their parents and grandparents in the flush of youth and joyful love; memories of times that were once and will never be again, except in the pages of a treasured album or perhaps its electronic equivalent.

The complexity of human belief and hope is reflected in the wedding ceremony. Faith and Culture provide the template, and people - brides, grooms, their parents, families and friends - make it their own. I have been privileged to attend Protestant, Catholic, and Civil Services. To photograph Vietnamese, military, non-religious and religious weddings in many traditions: a Filipino Street Wedding in Manila; a Salvation Army marriage "Under the Flag"; solemn Catholic and High Church of England masses, rollicking, noisy evangelicals, and outdoor weddings that were more like a party than a ceremony. Traditional, arranged marriages, and services where the children gave their parents away, first-time brides and grooms and "third-time lucky" seniors.

It doesn't matter how many years or how much experience you have had: you still need to research and prepare, because it is too easy to believe you know what to expect and so miss the novel and unanticipated details that make each wedding unique. No danger of that for one upcoming event: In a few weeks, I am going to photograph my first Macedonian Orthodox Wedding.

When I mentioned that to a colleague, he assured me I wouldn't want to do it too often. Having done a number of orthodox weddings a few years ago, he now just says "no thanks" - it is too much work!

I understand what he means. A typical wedding lasts 3 days, and the dozens of traditions that are observed all need to be faithfully recorded.

In addition to my general research, I have had lots of input and support from the father of the bride, Bill, who has even sent me videos of a couple of weddings to make sure my team and I are well prepared and know what to expect. Just watching them is exhausting! But you know what? I think I am looking forward to this more than Nicole and Steve (the bride and groom). Matter of fact, I think the only person more excited is Bill!

A Camera Full of Memories

I was helping my friend Lynne move house today. Cleaning out the garage I came across a camera in a leather case. A 620 Roll Film device with a fixed lens and inbuilt filters operated by slides on the body of the camera. If that sounds like a rather sophisticated Medium Format device let me disabuse you. I used to own one of these cameras, and if you are over 40 years of age, you probably did, too. There was one in your family, anyway.

The Kodak Box Brownie, in various guises, was with us for nearly 100 years, the first cardboard bodied camera hitting the market in 1900. Mine was a Brownie Flash II, an Australian model with a built-in close-up filter, fixed aperture of  f/14 and flash contacts (hence the name). I was never able to afford the flash gun, but the possibility was there.

It was my ninth birthday, and the camera was a gift from my dad and mum. I don't think they had any idea how much it was going to cost them to keep me in film! On the other hand, as they shifted the burden of film and processing to me, they may have wished they had gone on bearing the financial burden, because, of course, I decided to develop my own photos.  But to be fair, they never once complained about the chemical smells that permeated the house, the loss of the bathroom for hours at a time (it was the only room with running water that could be blacked out), or having to fight their way through coils of drying negatives to get to the loo.

I learned a great deal from that simple box camera. I leaned to process and enlarge film; I learned to compose in the classic rectangular format; I learned what features I wanted in a camera, and how to take the photographs I wanted even though the Brownie had none of them.

I have owned many cameras since, every one of them far, far better. But only the Kodak Box Brownie set me on a path that I have followed now for more than  half a century.

Lynne offered me her old camera: I accepted it with a gratitude she will never quite understand..