On Thu, October 22, 2009 20:06, karl shah-jenner wrote: > Wedding photographers seem torn between film and digital, as customers > have > strong preferences for one over the other OR they want to hedge their bets > and have film for longevity and digital for convenience (but they dont > want > to pay for scanning film - so since it's viewed as 'cheaper' to shoot > digi, > they ask for that as well) - and both 35mm and 120 have their place. Didn't think about that one in my recent response. I'm in the convenient (particularly for this) position of working in a building whose lobby is rented out for high-end weddings. So once or sometimes more times a week in the summer wedding season (just ending), I get to watch a wedding set up and see the photographers working with the bridge, groom, and the rest. So I've seen a few dozen wedding photographers, fairly high-end (the lobby rents for something like $10,000, and I always see them setting up tables to serve dinner to 100-200 people as well). This is a different kind of filtering than I get from friends who shoot weddings, or going to the occasional wedding of a friend; for one thing, more high-end than any of my friends (the ones who could have afforded this scale wedding spent a "mere" $8000 10 years ago, and did absolutely everything they wanted to just the way they wanted, and it was a great wedding). I'm surprised by a few things I've seen. First, every single one of them has been shooting just digital, DSLR stuff, no medium-format digital or film. Slightly surprising that NONE shot film. Second, I didn't see a single one of them using any sort of lighting gear beyond on-camera flash, not even reflectors, for the portraits and group shots. That surprised me a lot. (Most of what I saw was outdoors.) Third, they were more than 90% female. That's a big enough change from when I was assisting a wedding photographer, way back when, to be notable. I have no idea what these people charged, but in keeping with the cost of the venue, the dress of the guests, and the cars in the parking lot, I'd imagine these were upper-middle to high-end photographers (financially speaking; I also didn't see any of the results of course, so no idea if they're actually any good). -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
