Category Archives: Daily Life

A busy week

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I’ve completed all the initial processing of the images from Dean and Cath’s wedding. Their web gallery was loaded onto our web site on Monday morning. We started photographing the wedding preparations at 11 o’clock in the morning and continued right through to around 11:30 in the evening and we had over 400 images to process. Our Nikon D2X and Fuji cameras performed flawlessly and captured some great images in some very challenging lighting which ranged from blazing sunshine to night time images outside.

All our images are captured in raw format to ensure maximum quality and then converted into high resolution jpeg files in Adobe Lightroom, while the slight corrections to some images for exposure and white balance is a fairly quick process the card downloads and the import into Lightroom and the export out of Lightroom takes a little time. Once we’ve created the high resolution images we then use BreezeBrowser Pro to create web resolution copies which are used to create the web viewing gallery and DVD slideshow.

While the images are being processed we hold copies on both our working computer and our file server (we also still have the images on the camera cards), once all the processing is completed we also create additional copies of the raw images and jpegs on DVD archives, the images from the camera cards are then no longer needed.

I sent the thumbnail proofs to the lab for printing on Tuesday evening and they were received back yesterday morning.

All the processing is now completed until Dean and Cath select the images for their wedding album or we receive orders from the web gallery which will be available to guests once Dean and Cath have viewed them.

I know a number of photographers who take several weeks to load up their web viewing galleries but with my workload I need to keep up to date with processing so everything is completed fairly quickly, for this reason we also produce album designs within a few days of receiving the list of selected photographs, once the album design is approved the album is ordered and the print files sent to the lab within a day.

Stuart and Rachel’s Wedding

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Today we had the pleasure of photographing Stuart and Rachel’s wedding at St Barnabas Church in Penygraig. It was a lovely wedding but unfortunately the rain didn’t let up so there are very few outdoor photographs.

Here’s a photograph of the happy couple.

Stuart and Rachel

And here’s their terrific cake from Rhianydd Easton at Dragons and Daffodils.

Cake

Is it really summer?

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Met with Rachel and Stuart today to go over the final details of their wedding, we’re really looking forward to taking the photographs in a few weeks time, they’re such a lovely couple. Rachel’s dress sounds really great, can’t wait to see it and I’m sure their wedding cake will be terrific as it’s being made by Rhianydd Easton at Dragons & Daffodils.

The sun was shining this afternoon, it made a very welcome change from all the rain.

New wedding albums for 2007

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We’re delighted to be able to offer the following exciting additions to our range of wedding, guest book and parent albums for 2007. The wedding albums are available in a range of sizes from A4, 14×10 inches and A3, the guest books are 96x137mm with a printed cover and the parent albums are A5 size with a bookcloth cover.

Rhapsody Cover

Expression Rhapsody

Aztec Cover

Expression Aztec

Acrylic Cover

Expression Acrylic

Guest Books and Parent Albums

Expression Guest and Parent

Bank Holiday Monday

Daily Life

As usual for a bank holiday the weather is damp and windy. 🙁

Received another wedding booking this afternoon for a wedding next year at Castell Coch with the reception at Bryngarw House. 🙂

Paul and Stacy called over this afternoon so I could help them fit the radio into Paul’s new Pajero.

Pencoed Classic Car Show

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David, Hannah and I went to the South Wales Classic Car Club’s annual show at Pencoed College this afternoon, as usual it was very well attended with an excellent range of old and not so old classic cars. Nice to see so many models that I once owned there, including MGC roadster, Van den Plas Princess, Jaguar XJ6 Series III, A40 Farina, Austin 1100. The weather was rather miserable today but there still seemed to be an excellent turn out at the show.

Another wedding booking received this weekend for a wedding later this year. 🙂

Paul and Stacy’s Wedding

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Today my son Paul and Stacy were married, it was a lovely day and here are a few photographs.

Paul and Stacy

Paul and Stacy #1

Mothers and Grandmothers

Mothers and Grandmothers

Stacy’s family

Stacy's family

Paul’s family

Paul's family

And my other son David swapped places with me and took this – so that there’s even one with me in

Paul's family #2

Me and my son

Me and Paul

Cutting the cake

Paul and Stacy #2

Grown up cousins (Sisters Jenny and Sian)

Grown up cousins

Cousins playing (Lauren and Erin)

Cousins playing

A busy week

Daily Life

One of the many advantages of being a wedding photographer in South Wales is not only do we have lovely couples but a terrific range of wedding venues, ranging from Castles, stately homes, country house hotels to some very nice modern hotels. However due to the large number of weddings that take place in the area more and more weddings are now happening on Fridays and Sundays to ensure that the couples can obtain their first choice venues.

Where we are covering weddings on Friday, Saturday and Sunday it’s absolutely vital that we have an efficient workflow for processing the images taken. The initial workflow involves downloading the images taken from the camera compact flash cards to our computer, backing up all the images to our file server and DVD archives, conversion of the raw files to working jpeg files (with any minor colour and exposure corrections as needed), creation of the web gallery, DVD slide show and thumbnail prints followed by a further back up of the working files. It’s our aim to have completed the initial workflow within a day of the wedding. Later stages involve album design, print file creation and album construction.

Earlier this week I met with Hannah who is planning her wedding for just before Christmas this year in Penarth with a reception at The Bear Hotel in Cowbridge.

Yesterday I met with Alena, Scott and family who are currently planning their wedding next summer at Castell Coch with a reception at Bryngarw House.

I’m photographing Paul and Stacy’s wedding tomorrow in Caerphilly so I’ve been doing the pre-wedding equipment checks, basically ensuring that the batteries for the Nikon D2X main camera, backup cameras and SB-800 flash units are fully charged and that all the equipment is loaded into the bags.