Wedding Photographers in Cornwall Blog

Posts Tagged ‘wedding photographers Cornwall’

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Here’s a sample of some of our recent wedding photography in Devon and Cornwall. Locations vary from Carbis bay, Launceston, Falmouth,Langdon Court, the Moorland Links, Plymouth, St Mellion, Plympton Two Bridges, Wembury.. in fact all around Devon and Cornwall!!

Wedding photography demands a fine balance between getting the shots to capture the day, and not getting in the way. When we go out on an assignment we aim to  be as un-invasive as possible so that the wedding parties can just relax into their day and enjoy it. Without our couples and their guest feeling comfortable with us around it would be impossible to get some of the truly joyful images that we achieve. We enter into the spirit of the day and we get such a buzz when, at the end of our coverage, we get the bride, groom and even the parents giving us massive hugs of appreciation. Its important to us.

It wasn’t until I started doing weddings that I realised just how much a good photographer can contribute to the day. This isn’t just a turn up and point the camera job to us, its a way of life and we happily pitch in with the bridal party to help them enjoy a hassle free day.  We get to see lots of wedding in very intimate details and armed with this knowledge we can often help where others are floundering. A small example is Nat during bridal prep. She’s now become a bit of an expert at buttoning and lacing Wedding dresses whilst the attendants fingers and thumbs turn to jelly at the vital moment, or helping to re-pin that awkward bit of hair that keeps flopping down over the tiara…. all little things but all things that go to helping the day go smoothly. I think they call it customer care in management circles… that’s way too impersonal a term for us. We just want the very best for our brides and grooms because it’s their special day.. and they deserve the very best

Wedding confetti alert - Wedding Photographers in Cornwall

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Carbis Bay Hotel is a family owned business and the high standard of service  and comfort insisted upon by the owner, Malcolm Baker and his son Stephen Baker are evident throughout. All of the staff at the Carbis Bay Hotel contribute enormously to the seamless running of events dealing with the large number of guests with a wonderfully courteous ease.

Champagne flutes set up on Carbis Bay Hotel's lawns overlooking the stunning golden sand and blue sea of Carbis Bay beach

As wedding photographers the Carbis Bay offers us many wonderful photo opportunities. Built in 1894 by the famous Cornish architect, Sylvanus Trevail it’s a wonderful building with manificent features from the elegant marble corridors, the beautifully decorated main dining room, the wonderful conservatories, award winning gardens and, of course, the stunning beach which is owned and maintained by the hotel. There aren’t many beaches in the UK  that can boast such a wonderful expanse of golden sand and truly blue sea.

As the next bay on from St Ives, Carbis Bay  shares the same magical light that has enchanted and attracted some of the world’s greatest artists and inspired authors like Virginia Wolf and Rosamunde Pilcher immortalised the hotel in her novels ‘The Shell Seekers‘ and ‘Winter Solstice‘.

Carbis bay Hotel is richly deserving of its accolade of Westcountry Wedding Awards best Cornwall Venue, and we look forward to maintaining our special relationship with them for many long years to come.

Planning a wedding can be a logistical nightmare trying to calculate to costs of venues, cakes, flowers, dresses.. the list is endless. Nat and I know exactly what its like, we’ve been through it together for our own wedding… OK, I confess,  Nat and her mum Sally did most of it .

One of the hardest parts is getting suppliers to be up front about their costs and to find out about the hidden extras that can often break the budget. It’s with this in mind that Nat and I decided we wanted to find a way to take the uncertainty out of a least one area of the planning – the wedding photography. We’ve tried various options like issuing price lists for fixed packages containing  photography and albums, but there is always that grey area where the packages didn’t quite match the budgets or other requirements.

Dissatisfied with this approach we decided to try and create a way where potential clients can mix and match services and products and get an instant price calculation. Well, after a lot of burning of the midnight oil and several grey hairs later.. I’ve finally managed to create what, I hope, is the perfect solution. The Iconik Photography Wedding Photography Price Calculator (was that a fanfare I heard??)… hmm..  might have to think of a catchier name for it though!

Iconik Photography's new Wedding package price calculator

With this brand new tool you can choose the type of photographic coverage you require, add albums and digital Storybooks from suppliers like Jorgensen, GraphiStudio and Flori, order extra DVD’s (all of or customers who choose one of our photographic coverage packages receive a free licensed, high resolution, printable DVD of their images) and get an instant calculation of the total cost.

If your wedding is in Cornwall or within a 100 mile mainland round trip of the County we don’t charge for any travel expenses.  If your wedding falls outside of this area, is overseas  or in the Ilse of Scilly, we’ll be more than happy to work out and agree the best price for travel and accomodation with you before the event so that you don’t get landed with any unexpected fees. There are no hidden “extras” added to the photography and albums package price; the price you see is what the  coverage and products will cost you and, if you choose to use our services, we’ll honour that quote for 30 days from the date you submit your enquiry, even if our suppliers raise their costs during that time.

If you want to have a look and try our new “gizmo” pop over to The Iconik Photography Wedding Photography Price Calculator and have a go.

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In the deep end... Laura wades out in her trash the dress shoot

Laura looks serene in the sea for her trash the dress shoot

deeper into the blue - Iconik-photography trash the dress

Laura doing her mermaid impression - trash the dress Cornwall

Etheral glow. An infrared style treatment adds a surreal element to Laura's trash the dress shoot

Laura - trash the dress Cornwall

Laura, Bardot style - Iconik Photography trash the dress Cornwall

Laura in a golden summer glow - trash the dress Devon and Cornwall

Laura in a golden summer glow - trash the dress Devon and Cornwall

A few more images from our trash the dress shoot with Laura.

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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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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.

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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