Here’s how this works.
This series of posts shows images I’ve dodged and burned for printing in a wedding album. By default you’re seeing the finished work. Put your mouse on each one to see the original with only RAW adjustments.
A photographer’s ability to finish her work this way is the dividing line between a middle-of-the-pack and a high-end product. This is something your digital lab can’t do for you.
Finishing a print doesn’t have to be time consuming. I typically spend 60 seconds preparing an image for an album in Lightroom (or Photoshop if I’m really loving the moment). All my albums have over 100 prints so I’ve got to be efficient. There is no correlation between quality and time spent sitting in front of your computer.
I wish I had these kinds of before-and-after examples when I started out because I learn well through comparison.
We made this simple image on the beach during the sunrise, which feels like it happens more quickly than sunset! The character of light is often very different in the mornings so sometimes I try to get my couples out early. We photographers are used to shooting in the afternoon light but the sun has more looks to offer us. Try it!
The viewer’s eye is usually attracted to the lightest parts of an image, which are often the wrong parts of a backlit scene. Here I burned just enough to bring some visual weight back into the sand and ocean-sprayed background.
Next I dodged just enough to put a bit of fill light on their faces so my bride’s expression – the visual center of gravity – will be instantly felt by the viewer. The goal is always to draw your viewer into the story with zero effort on her part.
The image above is largely fine after only the RAW adjustments – some might even prefer it – but I felt there was room for improvement. By bringing down the background tones and increasing the exposure on the bride I made her the obvious focus of the frame. If you can make a bride look her natural best you will always have clients.
This portrait illustrates why we study the work of the great historic photographers whose books I review. Their work lasts because it is so well-composed. A developed sense of composition allows you to create big value for your client in a split second.
This is also a good example of why I use Zeiss lenses. The transition from the bride to the out-of-focus areas is very gentle, almost feminine in its smoothness. The background is blurred but you still get a strong sense of the details back there, precisely the way our eyes and brains perceive the world. This quality is the Zeiss signature and I love it.
The burning and dodging I did in this image (shot moments after the wedding party recessed from the ceremony) is typical of what printmakers did for professional photographers in the film days. I discovered this because I own multiple books by Elliot Erwitt, Richard Avedon, Ansel Adams, and Eugene Smith. Often their important images would appear in each new published collection, and usually their negatives would be reprinted for each major release. This allowed me to see exactly what burning and dodging was done, and many times the improvements to the negative would be dramatic.
The shot of the bride with the wedding party simply needed some tonal changes to make her the center of attention and highlight the expressions. When I composed this frame my intention was to give the viewer the same experience the bridesmaids were having.
Ansel Adams is famously quoted as having said quite cheekily, “dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships”.
In the environmental portrait above I didn’t want my bride to be competing for attention with the other bright parts of the image. I never want the viewer’s eyes to have that unsettling feeling of being pulled in more than one direction.
I set up this image on the bar late into the reception. This wedding included a station with locals rolling Dominican cigars for the guests so I took advantage of that theme – otherwise using a cigar for this shot would feel irrelevant and forced.
This picture was a special case so I finished it in Photoshop:
The blue cast in the image came from neon lights behind the bar. It gave a cold and clinical feeling to the image so I removed it by decreasing the blue and cyan saturation levels in the highlights only. Now the out of focus regions do not command so much attention.
All that remained was a bit of burning and dodging to focus the eye on the hardware. The cherry on top was a hint of extra warmth to give the tobacco its true earthy quality.
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