Wedding Photographers in Cornwall Blog

Posts Tagged ‘wedding photography’

Back in July, we photographed the wedding of Helen (nee McNally) and Lee Butcher at St Michaels Hotel and Spa in Falmouth, Cornwall. It was a gloriously sunny day(one of the few in that month, this year), the sky was as blue as I’ve ever seen it and the temperatures soared.

RAF serviceman Lee, wore his uniform for the occasion whilst Helen was in charge of the rest of arrangements, and she was determined to have a very pink wedding… and it certainly was PINK!! The colour shone out to give the whole day a wonderfully vibrant feel. So vibrant indeed that Wed magazine have featured their wedding in their latest edition complete with a nice selection of some of our wedding photography.

Lee and Helen originally met at Primary School, lost contact and rediscovered each other through a popular social networking site. The rest, as they say, is history.

Lee and Helen cut the cake(!?)

It was a wonderfully happy day and along with his two best men. Lee kept the guests and family royally amused. Catalogue style poses and a pythonesque sense of humour were the order of the day. Sunbathers on the crowded beach were amazed and thrilled to see the bride, groom and various members of the wedding party stroll along the beach, picking their way through sandcastles and bikini clad bodies.

Lee was very much the star (or was it victim) of a slideshow featuring, amongst other photo’s, some images from his recent deployment in Afghanistan. The couple were a joy to work with and as the day slipped into a balmy summers evening, Lee and Helen hit the dance floor which, obviously inspired by Lee’s uniform, soon filled with friends and family performing an impromptu battle of Britain display. All in all, a wonderful day worthy of a magazine feature.

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Sarah Pryce-Hughes - Winner of our recent Cornish Brides Wedding Fair competition

Big congratulations to Sarah Pryce-Hughes & Andrew Barnard, the winners of our  competition held at the recent Cornish Brides Wedding Fair at the China Fleet Club in Saltash, Cornwall.  Winning the prize – £850 worth of wedding photography – came as a bit of a surprise to Sarah, who admitted that she’s never won anything before!  Their wedding takes place next May at the fabulous Barclay House Hotel in Looe.  We ran the competition at the recent Cornish Brides wedding fair at the China Fleet Club in Saltash.  The response was brilliant and we’re really sorry that there could be only be one winner.  But there is still good news as we’ll happily give a 10% discount on our wedding photography coverage to everyone else who attended the fair.

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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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 .