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.”
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.
We’ve seen DSLR photo booth projects before, but usually they’re just simple ways for guests at an event to take self-portraits of themselves. Kevin over at I Dream In Code actually made a fancy photo booth for his brother’s wedding that prints out a nice keepsake for guests:
It is an Arduino connected to a Staples easy button. When pressed, it starts the sequence of taking 4 pictures on the Canon T3i, triggered through the 2.5mm earphone jack.
The pictures are wirelessly transferred over an adhoc network using an EyeFi Pro SD card. On the laptop, it is looking in a directory for 4 pictures, takes the 4 of them, combines them into one photo along with a picture of Andrew and Jenn, and prints it out.
The entire process from pressing the Easy Button to having the photo pop out takes about 1 minute and 30 seconds. Check out his blog post for more of the technical details.
Poke around on Craigslist, and you’ll find that it’s filled with ads selling professional services at dirt-cheap prices, including photographers offering to shoot weddings for just a few hundred dollars. Does this spell doom for the wedding photography business? Probably not.
Well yesterday [a friend] called me and I could tell he was kind of upset. I asked what was wrong and he said “Jeff, do you know what they are charging for weddings on Craigslist? How can I compete with a $300 wedding?” I told him flat out that he can’t, nor should he. It took me a few minutes to get through to him but when I did, he finally saw the light. I asked him if he thought that the people that were hiring a $300 wedding photographer would pay $2500 for the same service. Probably not. That’s means that he isn’t really competing for those customers. His customer is the one that recognizes the value of a true professional that will deliver professional results. Get that? The key word here is professional.
His point is that you shouldn’t be competing on price, but on quality. Focus on that, and you’ll be targeting a different segment of the market.
When Matthew Harrison (aka The Leica Guy) got married recently, he was given the awesome gift of a f/.95 Noctilux ring:
As is tradition, the bride and groom exchanged gifts prior to the wedding. While Matthew purchased Emily the watch that she had always wanted. Emily commissioned a custom ring for Matthew’s shooting hand (as opposed to for his wedding band). This one of a kind band has the depth of field scale from his favorite lens, the .95 Noctilux. On the sides, the ring features both Matthew’s name and The Leica Guy moniker on one side, and the Lens information including name, filter size, and serial number on the other. [#]
You can find the website of the jeweler who made the ring here. Read more…
Wedding photographer Kirk Mastin hired Shep Films to create this stunning promo that really conveys his passion for the art. It’s pretty inspirational, even if shooting weddings isn’t your thing. How can you pass up hiring the guy after watching this?
San Diego-based wedding photographer Aaron Willcox won 1st place in an engagement photo contest with this shot showing a feat of incredible strength. No Photoshop trickery or invisible wires were used in making this image (nor does the guy have Superman-esque strength). Can you figure out how it was done?
Wedding photographer Brian Adams and wedding videographer Rainer Flor claim to be the first to capture a wedding entirely using the iPhone 4. Flor volunteered his own wedding last November for the experiment, and a total of three iPhone 4s were used: two for the photos and one for the video.
“We proved that the iPhone technology is advanced enough to handle an event like a wedding, and simple enough that it doesn’t take a lot of experience or extra equipment to shoot high-quality video and pictures,” said Adams. “The user still has to have some creativity and a good eye, but this gives them a great tool.”
Would you rather have a great photographer shoot your wedding with an iPhone 4, or a mediocre photographer shoot using professional gear?
