French wedding photographer Béatrice de Guigné has a fun set of photographs showing what Barbie and Ken’s wedding photographs might look like if captured by a trendy contemporary wedding photographer.
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Wedding photographer Joe Simon learned about copyright the hard way recently after his video of Tony Romo’s wedding went viral on YouTube. He had used the song “Fix You” by Coldplay without permission, and was forced to take down the video and pay a settlement to avoid a costly lawsuit. David Walker of Photo District News has an illuminating article on the issue:
“It’s nearly impossible and I’ve never heard of a wedding photographer successfully being able to license a mainstream song for synchronized use,” [wedding photographer David Jay] says. “I’ve spent a long time trying to make it possible. Photographers want to pay a reasonable fee to use the music so when they can’t they’ll just do it anyway.”
The problem, Jay explains, is that you have to get a license from three or four different people, including the lyricist, the composer, and the recording artist and/or their record company. While rights licensing organizations such as ASCAP and BMI make it easy to license music for broadcast, they don’t offer synchronization licenses for “small” users like wedding photographers.
Wedding Photographers Face the (Copyrighted) Music [PDN]
Image credit: Music Note Bokeh by all that improbable blue
To capture a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to photograph a wedding, photographer Jaroslav Repta mounted a GoPro video camera to his DSLR and used it to film his camera’s point of view throughout the wedding day. The video above shows this footage along with the resulting photographs that were delivered to the couple.
(via Fstoppers)
For his wedding, designer Matt Frank built this photo booth that looks like a giant Lomo camera. It comprises a Mac running Photo Booth, a monitor for reviewing photos, halogen lighting, and a hacked Easy Button that acts as a shutter release. Frank writes,
I decided to build my own photo booth after trying to rent one from local photography studios. The going rate for a rented photo booth is around $600 in addition to the hourly rate of the attendent to watch over the equipment. As this was not in my wedding budget, and I did not want to deal with an additional vendor, I decided to build my own for under $200. [#]
The total cost for the DIY photobooth came out to about $150. Frank has also written up a step-by-step tutorial on how it was built.
Yesterday we shared a ridiculous story of how a photo studio is being sued for $48,000 by a divorced man who wants his 2003 wedding recreated. The story has been spreading like wildfire online, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper has added it to his RidicuList. Here’s his humorous coverage.
When husband and wife photography duo Jodi and Kurt got married last year, they were determined to do something photography-related for the guys’ boutonnières. Luckily for them, Kurt’s sister Lynn is a brilliant wedding stylist who helped make these one-of-a-kind designs. Kurt’s featured an old camera lens, while the best man’s was a flower made from film negatives.
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It’s not uncommon to hear stories of wedding photographers getting sued by unsatisfied clients, but one lawsuit currently underway in New York is causing quite a stir. Todd Remis (pictured on right) of Manhattan is suing 65-year-old studio H & H Photographers (on left), claiming that the photographers had missed the final 15 minutes of the wedding that included the last dance and bouquet toss. However, there are details that make the case bizarre:
[...] what is striking, said the studio that took the pictures, is that Mr. Remis’s wedding took place in 2003 and he waited six years to sue. And not only has Mr. Remis demanded to be repaid the $4,100 cost of the photography, he also wants $48,000 to recreate the entire wedding and fly the principals to New York so the celebration can be re-shot by another photographer.
Re-enacting the wedding may pose a particular challenge, the studio pointed out, because the couple divorced and the bride is believed to have moved back to her native Latvia. [#]
Studio owner Dan Fried says that the cost of defending themselves in court has already matched the sum demanded by Remis, and calls the case “an abuse of the legal system.”
Years Later, Lawsuit Seeks to Recreate a Wedding [NYTimes]
Thanks for sending in the tip, Sam!
Image credits: Photographs by H & H Photographers
Wedding photographer Lee Morris recently had the idea of trying his hand at making a wedding video with his still photography mindset. His idea was to slow down the video to make it more of a “moving image”, bringing it more into his realm of expertise. To do this, he photographed a wedding at 60fps using a Canon 60D and then slowed the video down to 24fps afterward.
New Zealand-based wedding photographer Delphine Ducaruge takes photos from her wedding shoots and combines them into creative stop-motion animations. You can find more of them over on her Vimeo page.
Instead of using a traditional guestbook at their wedding, Jess and Sloane asked wedding guests to pose for Polaroid pictures while holding messages written on a small chalkboard. Awesome idea.
Image credits: Photograph by Souder Photography and used with permission
