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Recently I was lucky enough to be invited by Carla and Jack to be part of their big day! It was a small intimate day, with the wedding party taking over a hotel near Bath.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be included as part of Chris and Ade’s Country themed wedding. They got married in a local church then had the reception at a church hall over a 100 years old. It was a lovely intimate day with some immaculate styling.

Last month I has the delightful pleasure of shooting Mark & Jo’s big day, a wonderful Red, White & Blue, Quadrophenia influenced day. The day started off at Whittingham Castle, before moving off to a local pub for the Wedding Breakfast and then onto Shrewsbury Football Club for, in Jo’s own words, Carnage!

See more photos after the break…

Recently I had an awesome night shooting the Severn Hospice Midnight Walk in Telford and I thought I’d share some of the photos with you all!

For a complete look at the night, please check out The Hospice’s Flickr Page

As many of you will know, I got many of my early breaks photographing the burlesque scene in Cardiff, the girls, the characters and the bands. And everyone I met was warm, friendly and welcoming, it is one of the things I miss most about Cardiff! But enough of my prattle, on with the pics!

All thanks to Beau Rocks, Betty D’Light, Lucy Purr, Amber Sweets, Kitty Maguire, Melize Von Tease and Lolly Pop! See you all Friday!

Hope you enjoyed this little series, leave a comment with your thoughts!

I thought this would be an ideal time to share with you a short film I made recently for Shropshire Jelly, a wonderful co-working meet-up for freelancers, home-workers and the self-employed. Hopefully this vid will give you an insight into what its like there. Jellys are now national and even international! If you are a solo worker, go check them out here, you won’t regret it!

Shropshire Jelly from Rob May on Vimeo.

See you all Friday!

See you friday!

My first step is always back-up. In this day and age of digital, this stage becomes more and more important.I know from hard personal experience that  hard disks fail, laptops die, memory cards corrupt. I can’t remember who it was who said it first but in this day and age if you don’t have it three times, you don’t have it. And thus, I have a four-stage stage back up:

1) Laptop. This is the first stop. This is where the files get immediately downloaded to from the cards.

2) On-Site HHD. The first back-up. I back up all the RAW/JPEG files to an external hard-disk. This drive exists only as an originals back-up. It gets plugged in, files are copied onto it, its unplugged and put back on the shelf.

3) Off-Site HDD. The second back-up. I do the exact same as before, but this time the back-up is stored in a separate off-site secret location.

4) Final Back-Up. This happens at the end of the process. I take the now edited and approved photos and add them to both previous back-ups, along with any project files associated with the photos (Lightroom, album designs etc)

Back-ups done, we move on to the actual edit…

The stage is to weed out the good photos from the bad. I tend to work this through on a series of passes. I had 2476 shots taken over the course of the wedding day, far too many to ever show a bride, and most of them will be junk. So the first pass through is to simply drop any shot that is technically wrong. Anything out of focus, anything cutting heads off and the mistakes.

Two that didn't make the cut...

So my 2476 is now down to 2024. So all the shots left in my timeline should be technically usable. So now we get into the more creative choices. On the second pass through I am looking for shots of people eyes being closed, looking the wrong way, looking odd and the like. Everything left after this should be a shot I would be willing to show the bride. This will probably the harshest cut. My remit at this wedding was operate in a photojournalist style and so I will have over-shot in attempt to get that perfect moment.

And now we’re down to 1206. And so we get to the last cut. After the previous culls everything left here will be a good shot, but I’m now getting very fine into the details of the shot. In this case, I have ended up with about 8 shots of the cake being cut that could be used so it is down to me to trim down these to one or two at max. So this final cut gets me down to 812. Whilst this may seem like a lot, don’t worry, I have a sneaky further cut to come.

Once I was down to my ideal selects, the job becomes to edit and tweak the photos to how I want them. If you have seen much of my work, you know that my work tends towards the bright colours and strong contrast but I’ve got to be reactive to the nature of the wedding. In this case the wedding has several vintage and retro themes whilst still maintain a modern contemporary feel. With this remit in mind, I begin to attack the pictures! I use Lightroom for my major colour corrections. Coming from a world of having to put every picture through Photoshop, Lightroom is a godsend. I have set-up and tweaked a set of User Presets, which let me run through the photos with speed. I use the presets as a quick first adjustment and then tweak from there. I do all resizing, straightening and adjustment brushes at this stage, the idea being that I only have to do one pass at this point. Also, I do any spot removal as I go through.

Before and After

This is also the time at which I do my sneaky final cut. As I go through each shot individually, I will see any that aren’t quite as good as I thought, any that I thought could be edited to be better and can’t or simply just ones that aren’t up to scratch. By the time I have finished my edit pass, I’m down to 701.

So where am I now? I have 701 shots in Lightroom, all editing and tweaked to look right. But, there are some things that Lightroom can’t do, so it is to Photoshop we head. The three main things I do in Photoshop are noise reduction, paint-outs and Triptychs.

Noise Reduction – One of the harder challenges in wedding photography is shooting in often very low light situations. Whilst you can use a good flash to help out, sometimes even this will still require you to push the ISO and thus noise will emerge. I’m a strong advocate of  Noise Ninja software, it works wonders on my photos and would be lost without it.

Paint-Outs – With all event photography, you aren’t in control of the location. This means you sometimes have to paint things out. I try to keep this to an absolute minimum,  only using when I absolutely need to.

Triptychs – I’ve never found a better way to do these than in Photoshop.

Father-Of-The-Bride on the drums...

So now the photos go off to the happy couple for them to look at and make some selects! Another wedding done and hopefully some happy customers!

Tune in next week for a complete blog of the photos!