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Frequently Asked Questions
Why should I have a professional photographer take photos of my event?
This is one of the most common questions I have heard from people with the latest pocket sized point and shoot digital cameras or whose "Uncle Bob" has a good camera and takes a nice photo.
The best answer to this question is that being a photographer isn't just about pointing the camera and pushing the button to take a photo. It is much, much more than that. Ever have look at a photograph and find it totally captivating - so much so that you can't look away? It's because the photographer has studied all the other elements of capturing a photo. Elements such as composition, colour, equipment knowledge and use, digital manipulation/special effects, just to name a few. For example, the last thing you need on your wedding photos are what I call blown out highlights on the wedding dress. This is where there is no detail shown on the dress because the photo has been overexposed. This happens a lot as many non-professional wedding photographers, simply put their camera in it's "automatic mode" and just simply snap away. Automatic mode means the camera decides what the photo will look like, which is OK some of the time, but for real creative control and outstanding photos, the photographer should be in charge of the camera, not the other way around. Automatic mode is not real photography, professional photographers rarely if ever use the automatic mode and ninety nine percent of the time work in manual mode to take full control of the camera to give you the photos that you dream of.
Take a look at other photographers work. Take special note of the backgrounds as well as the people in the photo. If the photo was taken with trees as the background, or perhaps taken on a warf or dock with boats in the background. All too often I have seen photos where the people in them appear to have a boat's mast growing out of their head or another part of their body, or perhaps a tree branch growing out of their ear. A truly professional photographer who has studied and had proper training, would ensure that this would not happen.
Shoot and Burn Photographers - Beware of them
Shoot and Burn Photographers are those photographers that simply turn up to your event/occasion, take a lot of photos. Then go back home and copy them straight to a CD/DVD and give them to you. No editing or enhancements are done.
Digital cameras are not like film cameras. In the days of film, professional photographers would choose a film to suit the type of photoshoot they were about to undertake. Certain films, such as Fuji Velvia where best for landscapes because of their saturation of colours and contrast. While other films such as Fuji Astia, Pro160 and Kodak Portra were known for beautiful skin tones and as such were used for weddings and portraits.
Now that we are in the digital age - digital sensors are like a clean slate and the image is quite plain and needs to be digitally enhanced by using software such as Photoshop - this is the same as if you were choosing your type of film. All digital photos benefit from subtle amounts of digital enhancement.
Shoot and Burn photographers simply don't do this and as such are giving out a sub-standard product for your dollar. Doing this not only gives themselves a bad name, but also other truly professional photographers as well.
More often than not, these "Shoot and Burn" photographers have bought themselves a nice SLR camera and "decided" they could be a professional photographer without any training or industry qualifications. They also have a "day job" and don't have photography as a profession.
At Matt Lee Photography - we strive for customer satisfaction and image quality with beautiful vivid colours and sharpness. WE ARE NOT SHOOT AND BURN PHOTOGRAPHERS and never will be. This is not a weekend hobby for me to earn some extra pocket money, this is my profession. Hence we don't do things "on the cheap". Our end products, being the photographs, wedding books, picture frames etc are done to a standard of quality that is not compromised.