The Wedding Photo Shooting and the art to make an amazing coffee

Today I'd like to talk to you about the creative process of a Wedding Photo Shoot, a Couple Photo Shoot or a Family Photo Shoot, which starts from the first contacts with my clients and ends with the editing of the photos.
"What does coffee have to do with it?", You ask. I'll tell you right away!

I am a person who is always looking for improvement in many fields and cooking is one of them. Today I'm talking about coffee, in particular espresso coffee, which seems to me to have some analogy with what I want to talk about.

Preparing an excellent espresso is not complicated at all, but you should have:

• the right tools;
• knowledge of the subject matter;
• an excellent raw material;
• lots of passion.

As in any field, in fact, when you are curious and start digging deeply, you come to discover many things that you never even suspected existed. For example, regarding coffee, here are just some of the things I discovered:

• it is not enough to have an espresso machine and a quality coffee grinder, but it is possible to replace some parts to greatly improve the result;
• there are filters and showers (the main filter from which the water on the coffee is dispensed) that cost as much as half a professional machine;
• the coffee must be pressed – strictly with the tamper – with a force that corresponds to about 12 kg (about 26 pounds);
• the grinding level should be calibrated every day, before starting to churn out coffee in bursts;
• depending on the place where it is grown, each coffee has very specific organoleptic characteristics;
• the toasting can vary and significantly modify taste and aromas;
• only a wise knowledge of the two previous points allows you to mix different qualities to obtain the right coffee for every occasion.

A shot made by IstantiSenzaTempo for Weissestal, for the catalog of the Cottage line

You may not know it, because Italy is considered by Italians themselves to be the home of espresso coffee, but in reality here in Italy it is really rare to find a bar or a café that can serve you excellent quality coffee. Very often the starting product is mediocre (if not worse) and is extracted almost at random, "burning" perfumes and aromas.

Here, this speech can give you an idea of ​​how complex it is to create a wedding photo shoot, precisely because of the quantity of variables that must be combined wisely, as long as you are looking for a high quality product. So here is roughly what my own creative process includes.
Before and during the shot:

• knowing in depth who I have to photograph: I don't want to limit myself to portraying people in an aseptic way, but I like to go further, try to transfer the emotions and feelings that I experience into my photographs and that I feel myself;
• seeking perfection right from the shooting stage, paying attention to many variables: the moment, the emotion, the light, the composition, the disturbing elements to avoid, the part of the photograph I want to focus on, the exposure time.

After the shot:

• carefully choosing a single photograph, in case there are several of a particular moment;
• after finding the right color tones for the whole event, applying them to the single photograph, so that it is consistent with all the others in order to have an harmonic tale in the entirety of the wedding photo shoot;
• analyzing in detail every single photograph, and then applying changes that, while keeping it natural in its general appearance, make certain elements stand out and limit others;
• review the entire wedding photo shoot for consistency and apply minor corrections where necessary.

Comparison between unedited (left) and edited (right) photo

The entire editing phase is the one for which days and days of work are essential. In fact, one is mistakenly led to think that the work of a photographer ends on the wedding day, but it is not so: if you want to dedicate yourself in a meticulous way to the editing process, it takes a lot of time.

Finally, I am writing a consideration that is obvious to me, but which may not be for you: the time devoted to editing is not so long to remedy errors made during the shooting phase. If a shot is bad, it remains so with all possible and imaginable post-production (unless you're making a fake picture).
The time devoted to editing, as I have already written, is part of the creative process that began with the shot and completes it: it realizes what, at the moment of shooting, is still a "vision" in the photographer's head.

There are photographers out there who think like me and others who believe that the camera or a software that applies filters, with automatic and completely generic processes, can complete their "vision" – if they have one.
Still others rely on external agencies around the world, some of which require just a few cents to post-produce a photograph: do you think your memories have that value?
You can't imagine how many requests from external agencies we receive, and we always discard them: returning to the analogy of coffee, it is as if I bought the raw material and had another person prepare the coffee for me; and the cases in which that person has traveled the same path as me and can understand my needs in this field are really rare.

When you are looking for your wedding photographer (aka coffee), you are the type to prefer the bar that serves you burnt coffee, or the passable but standardized coffee of a franchising like Starbucks or, finally, that of someone who would prepare it for you with genuine passion, using high quality raw materials and state-of-the-art equipment?