If you are planning a wedding in 2010, you stand a very good chance of getting all of wedding photography for free. Iconik Photography are giving all of our wedding couples who book with us  a free entry into a prize draw to win back the cost of your Iconik wedding photography package. At the beginning of January 2011 the prize draw will take place and you could receive back a cheque to the full value of your wedding photography package.

For more details contact us at Iconik Photography by clicking here: Iconik wedding photography prize draw

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West Country Wedding Show 2009 - Plymouth Pavillions, Sunday 20th Sept 2009

…and win back the cost of your Iconik wedding photography package !

The West Country Wedding show at the Plymouth Pavillions on Sunday 20th Sept 2009, with nearly 100 exhibitors and 2 spectacular catwalk shows, is a must attend show for anyone involved with planning a wedding.

With exhibitors displaying designer bridal gowns, formal menswear, gorgeous occasion wear, lovely venues for civil ceremonies, wedding receptions and party nights, stunning flowers, stylish cars, romantic honeymoon destinations through to the extra touches of wedding jewellery, bespoke wedding stationary, fascinators and more, it represents an opportunity to experience first hand what’s on offer.

Iconik Photography will, of course, be there with Natalie and Robb in attendance to chat to you about all of your weddng photography requirements and to show you our latest, stunning wedding albums from Jorgensons and Graphistudio. Don’t forget to look out for us as we’ll be handing out special discount vouchers and  launching an amazing “Win the cost of your Iconik Photography Wedding Package back” promotion. All of our customers getting married in 2010 will be automatically included into the prize draw to be held early January 2011,  so don’t miss out – hurry along to the Iconik Photography stall and grab your chance to win this fabnastic prize worth up to £2,000!

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Matt and Vicki Barnett at Postbridge, Dartmoor, Devon

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A small sample selection of some of traditional and reportage style wedding photographs by Iconik-Photography, Wedding Photographers in and around Devon, Cornwall and South West England.

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Superb Italian Wedding albums by Graphistudio

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, Spicer Hallfield, the major supplier for wedding albums, has gone out of business. Most of our wedding albums came from Spicer so Nat and I have been looking for new suppliers.

Jorgensen’s are going to make our matted albums and they are luxurious to say the least, but a poular range that Spicer used to supply was their digital artbook. This differs from the matted albums in that the pages are created as a complete image without the need for mattes (frames), giving an extreme flexibility to the design process, as images can be placed in any shape size or orientation on the page. The result is a stunning, high quality graphical presentation of your images with a modern, contemporary edge.

To produce this type of album we’ll be using the internationally renowned Italian wedding album designers, Graphistudio. They have a superb range of high quality products that will act as the prfect showcase for your stunning wedding images provided by us at Iconik photography.

Our partnerships with Graphistudio and Jorgensen means we are  providing a combination of the very best and highest quality wedding album choices to our customers

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Planning a wedding is an extremely expensive pursuit so, here at Iconik-photography, we’ve been looking at different payment options for our wedding couples to help with spreading or sharing the cost.

Previously, like a lot of  our fellow photographers, we’ve limited our payments methods to cheques and cash only. Although this suited some people, not everyone had the money up front to do this. In response to this we have now introduced a system where payment can be made using all major credit and debit cards,  Paypal and, in addition, we are working on offering  extra options for spreading the cost using monthly direct debit subscriptions. Obviously this will be dependent on the lead time before the wedding, but it will take substantial pressure of your cash flow immediately before the wedding.

Another option that we are offering is for friends and family to buy wedding gift certificates towards the cost of the wedding photography package. These can be used to either contribute towards your standard package fee or to enhance it by upgrading to the higher package, a more expensive wedding album or extra prints.

We understand all too well just how expensive a wedding can be, so we want to do everything we can to help you achieve the very best results without compromising. With these latest payment options we believe you can get the best of both worlds – a high quality wedding photography package with much more manageable payment options.

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Pro bound - Jorgensen

Following the untimely demise of Spicer Hallfield, our main wedding album suppliers, Iconik-photography recently visted South West Photo Mounts, exclusive Uk and Ireland’s partners for the superb Jorgensen Albums.

We had a brilliant meeting SWPM’s Nick who showed us the full range of Jorgensen Albums. Nat and I were, to say the least, blown away with the sheer quality and luxury of the superb albums.

Photo covers - Jorgensen

It was obvious that the skill and experience of SWPM and Jorgensen has taken the art of the once humble wedding album to a new level of desirability. Using high tech mount cutting and state of the art printing, the products just exuded quality.

Jorgensen albums will now form the backbone of our mounted album range so that we can offer our clients the ultimate presentation for their treasured wedding images.

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Wedding Reportage Photography is all about capturing the seemingly incidental scenes that make up the day

When we got married a few years back, Natalie had a very definite idea of what she wanted from a wedding photographer. She didn’t just want a bunch of formal group shots, she wanted the whole day captured in a way that reflected and documented the occasion. She wanted a mix of natural and formal shots to convey the magic of the day. Unfortunately, at that time, there wasn’t a lot of choice in our price bracket, and the only photographers who offered the style she liked were all based in London charging astronomical prices. Attracting them down to our Cornish wedding would have added an extra premium to cover their travel and accommodation expenses. We eventually got a very competent local photographer but he was of the old school, formal approach. We got technically well taken shots of lots of groups, but they were so boring! None of the joy of the celebration came through and everyone looked ill at ease and un-relaxed in their poses. We rarely look back at our old wedding album these days because it just doesn’t inspire us any more.

wedding photographers in cornwall - reportage

Partly as a response to the blandness of the photographs of our own wedding , Natalie was inspired to do something about the lack of choice and, together, we started our own wedding photography business – Iconik Photography. Our approach to wedding photography is all about capturing the essence and magic of the wedding day so, instead of concentrating purely formal groups we incorporated reportage into wedding photography. Reportage is a photo journalistic approach to photography where people are captured in a naturalist, candid way. The subject is relaxed and behaving in a natural manner which helps to convey the mood and record the characters of the event. The energy jumps out of the page and, instead of staid grouping that would look more at home at a wake, you get a real feel for the celebration of the wedding – a snapshot of a particular time that will spark memories every time you look at them. We still take the formal shots but they seem to be more relevant when set against the informality of the reportage shots – We didn’t get the opportunity to have such a stunning keepsake for our wedding, but Iconik Photography is determined to give our customers the standard of style and service that we sadly missed out on.

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In  film cameras, the amount of detail achievable depends largely  on the iso film speed rating of the film. This governs the films sensitivity to light – the higher the film iso number the greater the sensitivity to light and the darker the conditions you could shoot in. However, there’s a trade off between film speed and the grainyness of the image – high speed films capable of shooting in darker conditions at higher shutter speeds add a lot of grain to the image. In the digital world the grain has been replaced by digital noise and, just as with film, the higher the iso setting on the camera the more noise will be introduced. However, digital technology is getting better and better at reducing the iso to noise ratio and the modern Digital cameras are capable of shooting at almost unheard of speeds related to film.

So what’s all this got to do with wedding photography? Most of the wedding photography takes place in largely uncontrolled and frequently volatile lighting conditions. Lighting in many churches is rather subdued to say the least and vicars and priests are not terribly keen on their service being disrupted by flash photography. This means that film photographers rarely managed to get comprehensive coverage of the ceremony itself because they were required to either use very slow sutter speeds which resulted in camera shake, motion blur … or a combination of both, or to use a faster film they which means having to carry an extra camera preloaded with high speed  film or to use special processing to “push” the speed of the film up. Either way, once loaded, the speed of the film in the camera dictates what you can achieve with the camera. A camera set up to record the events in a dimly lit church might struggle severely once the wedding party moved outside into bright sunshine.

In digital photography things are different. They still use ISO speed settings to control the sensitivity of the sensor but, unlike film cameras, this sensitivity can be altered for every single shot. This means that the cameras can quickly respond to an enormous range of lighting and shooting situations without having to change film midway through a shoot. It’s perfectly possible to follow the bride and groom up through the dimly lit church straight out  into glorious sunshine with minimal effort.

Another big advantage of digital is that you get instant feedback so that you can see straight away if there are any problems with exposure levels or even with the camera itself. It used to be somewhat scarey in the days before digital when I’d be shooting off roll after roll just trusting that the camera was doing its job ok. The processing of the film was always a nervous time too – you’d hand your rolls over to the colour labs and just hope that they woudn’t have any technical problems. Problems did happen from time to time and there was little that could really be done to rescue the film successfully. With digital cameras cards can get corrupted from time to time but software is available that can rescue most information from the memory cards even after they’ve been reformatted.

Digital photography has changed the way photographers work. Developing and printing colour film was a specialist area so the end result hinged very much on the skill and judgement of the Colour Labs who processed you film. Any extra artistic were extremely difficult to implement. With digital technology the photographer has regained control of his images with Digital imaging software like Adobe’s Photoshop and lightroom. These are incredibly powerful  tools for retouching and enhancing the images and, in the right hands, can transform the photographs into stunning artworks. Skilled photoshop experts can remove blemishes, objects and even distracting buildings from the photograph . The program can even help to transform a size 12 into a size 8 figure, whiten teeth and smooth out wrinkles.. I’ve even been asked to put a thoroughly convincing smile back on someones face . This all has to be done in an expert way so that the transformations still look natural and with our vast experience in this area our customers, other than to be completely flattered by the result, find it impossible to spot exactly which images have been adjusted or what has been done to make them look so stunning.

In my opinion, digital has transformed the world of photography and given photographers  the ability to be truly creative. Along with digital imaging has come a new breed of product providers who have given our customers ani nicredible level and  choice of  services never before available on the high street. There will be those that see digital photography as the “anti-Christ” but, all in all, I think the digital revolution has set a new benchmark in quality which has now far surpassed what was available in the era of film.

Robb

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Just a very few years ago, the majority of professional photographers did all of their work on film but, over the past decade, there has been a move towards digital cameras. Is this a good move or does the quality of the final result suffer? It’s the  new versus old technology arguement and there are always going to be people who swear by film and will never entertain the tought of changing, but from my experience there is only one winner – and that’s digital, and at  Iconik-photography our photographers use exclusively digital single lens reflex cameras  (DSLRs) for our wedding photography.

So what’s the difference between film and digital cameras?

When photography first became popular,  the earliest cameras used glass plates coated in a light sensitive emulsion to capture the image. These were large and very fragile and required the photographer to process the plates in a series of chemicals to fix the image. The Euipment was cumbersome and the plates took a long time to expse so Wedding photography at this time usually consited of a few formal shots often in a studio.. not exactly spontaneous.

In 1884 George Eastman developed a dry gel on paper film which meant that photographers no longer needed to carry around the fragile glass plates and chemicals, and in 1888 Eatman released the first Kodak camera with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest”. This opened up photography to a whole new group of people and 1901 saw the release of the legendary Kodak Box Brownie which introduced photography to the mass market. In 1925 Leica introduced the 35mm camera which beacme the standard format for photojournalists and this format remained the preferred format for the majoritry of camera and film manufacturers right up until recent years.

In a digital camera, instead of the light from the lens being focussed on photo sensitive film which then has to be  chemically developed, it is focussed onto a lightsensitive digital sensor. This information is then stored digitally onto a flash memory card as a file which can  be transferred easily and  directly onto a computer for viewing, adjusting and printing.

The first foray into digital photography came with the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD) in 1969, but it was quite a while before digital cameras became comercially available and even longer before they started appearing in the hands of the serious photographer. The first digitals were low resolution and compared unfavourably to the clarity and definition available on film. When enlarged digital photographs soon started to show pixelation (everything looked like it was made of lego!)  and the images lacked the quality achievable on film.  Digital technology has moved ahead in leaps and bounds over the past few years and it was Kodak again that developed the first real megapixel sensor. These days  even consumer level cameras are reaching resolutions of 15 mega pixels and over. The number of  mega pixels relates to the level of detail that a camera can achieve, so the higher the number the better the definition – 15 megapixels equals 15 million pixels… that a lot of detail. That might not seem signifigant but when it comes down to getting high quality images it is a major factor. It was when the big camera players like Canon and Nikon started to produce digital versions of their SLR cameras that things really started hotting up and, with the combination of high quality lenses and camera build with ever increasing levels of resolution, digital photography finally started to be taken seriously .

photography is getting more accessible to everyone ...

The question that is often asked by couples planning a wedding is, why, on top of the cost of the church, reception, car and honeymoon,  should they pay for the services of a professional photographer? … after all, lots of their friends and relatives have cameras. And its true – these days photography has become far more affordable and accessible. The digital camera revolution has meant that images can be snapped, viewed and printed in a fraction of the time that was possible in the days of film.  So why use the services of Iconik-phptography?

The answer is simple – high quality photography by photographers totally dedicated and experienced in capturing the true flavour and magic of your wedding day. Getting the shots you want isn’t left to chance. Years of experience in photography and digital image manipulation mean that we know exactly how to get the memorable images that tell your story.

Although, to you and your guests, our work on the wedding is most obvious on the actual day,  we will have already spent time researching, visiting and taking test shots of your venue. We already know a lot of the popular wedding locations and venues well so we know where to get the best shots, but when we get booking for new locations, we go on a recky to check the places out and to familiarise and introduce ourselves to the staff so that, on the wedding day, we are fully prepared.

Iconik-photography's Natalie Williams prepares for the big group shot

The role of the wedding photographer often extends beyond just taking the photos. Natalie, our lead photographer, has gone through her own bridal preparations and experienced the reality of  the wedding day. She has a deep empathy with all of our brides and has often stepped in to help the bride with a tricky aspect of the bridal preparation whilst those around her have been all nervous fingers and thumbs! It’s Natalie’s attention to the detail that sets her apart.  She notices  the small but important things that might otherwise get overlooked.

As photographers we are on call throughout the day, from the bridal and even groom preparations often right through to the evening reception. It’s a long day with very few breaks but it’s a job that has to be done right because you can’t go back and repeat it. It’s a big responsibility but our experience means that it will done right.

The trend to get a friend or relative to act as photographer can spell potential disaster.  There are a lot of very talented amateur photographers who get some good results  but, if they’re part of the wedding party, being stuck behind the camera means that they will  miss out on the celebrations and possibly get distracted by family or friends vying for their attention. Seemingly simple things like arranging group shots can be a nightmare if you’re not used to taking control of them and, should the worst happen and they get a problem with their equipment, your pictorial documentary day will be lost, possibly along with a friendship or family relationship!

At Iconik photography we normally go out with two photographers so that we get a full coverage of events and a full backup set of images. We also carry spare equipment in case of technical problems. We work closely together to ensure that we are getting the required shots and, if Natalie is concentrating on formal group portraits, I’ll be covering the reportage angle which is so important in conveying the full spirit of the day.

Our work doesn’t end with the last dance. We take the images, catalogue them , back them up and then set about the task of post production. As professional photographers we use the latest cutting edge software to enhance the images to present them to the highest level of finish. Its our job to  know about colour calibration, retouching and printing.  We have access to products that are only available to professional photographers and have accounts with major album producers who quite simply don’t offer their services to the general public. We deal with suppliers and chase up orders so that you won’t be left without your images and albums. We also have online ordering and proofing facilities so that, once the bride and groom have had their exclusive unveiling of their online gallery, friends and family who you choose to share the log in details with, can view and order their prints on line.

Wedding photography is a challenging business and can be quite exhausting, but we get a real buzz from knowing that we are giving our wedding couples the highest quality of service  to a level that only comes with experience and an eye for the perfect picture . You could leave it up to a friend or relative to take your wedding photos but, your wedding day is probably one of the most important events in your life,  so…. do you really want to leave it to chance?

Robb

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