Questions & Answers
We get a fair number of emails asking some really good questions that we don’t seem to have a place to answer on our website, so we thought we’d take the most popular and answer them on the blog!
1. How do you decide when to keep a photo full-color versus black and white?
This is a tough one for us, because Corey prefers color and I prefer black and white. I think it’d be awesome to design an entire wedding album in just black and white — maybe that means I’m deranged, or maybe I’m just an artiste. You decide. 
Luckily for our clients, we are determined to solve the color/b&w stand-off by providing all of our brides and grooms with versions of their high resolution images in both color and black and white. 
There are particular times when black and white photos can really shine, such as when a photo seems to have to move impact in black and white so that the subject is more of the focus. I also think particularly emotional moments seem more timeless in black and white. When we create the pre-design of the wedding album, we choose which photos we think look best in color or black and white, but it’s always up to our clients whether they’d like to keep our initial choices or if they’d like to use a different version.
2. How does the album ordering process work again?
You receive a 50% credit to the album of your choice with your package, and we always encourage our clients to use it because the album will be the most important heirloom to your wedding (second only perhaps to your dress!). Each album comes with a default 30 pages, and after the wedding, we design a sample album for you.
That’s where you come in. You and your new hubby sit down with all your proofs and the sample album and decide which pictures you can live without in your album and which ones you’d like to add in. And if there are a considerable amount of photos you’d like added in and there isn’t enough room, you can always purchase more pages at any point.
When you’re totally stoked with your album, we order it and ship it to you ASAP. We always try to put an album pre-design online for our brides and grooms within the first two weeks after their wedding. After they’ve made the changes they’d like, from the time of ordering to the time it gets to your door, the album should be there in two to four weeks. If you’re on the hunt for a photographer, always ask about timelines when it comes to your proofs and the album ordering process (and make sure it’s in the contract!) — we’ve heard too many stories of photographers who did a fantastic job at the wedding, but took six months or even a year or more to get the clients’ products to them.
3. Do you outsource your photo editing or do you do it yourselves? If you do it yourselves, how long does it take and what software do you use?
To be honest, our philosophy is pretty opposed to outsourcing. In part, because we feel that outsourcing is giving up a certain level of detail and attention that would inevitably trickle down to a decrease in the level of service to our clients, and also in part because we would have to raise our rates in order to outsource our work. We don’t want to raise our rates any higher than we absolutely have to!
We use Photoshop to edit our images and Adobe InDesign to design our albums. Everything is done “by hand” as it were, so the average wedding takes about 30 to 40 hours of editing. Also, if you’re wondering how many images to expect from your wedding, we typically get about 60 images per hour and each one of those is fully edited to achieve its highest quality in color, crop, white balance, exposure, etc.
4. How do you protect your images?
Our archive system is very thorough. We use Time Machine, an Apple external harddrive that automatically backs up everything on an hourly basis. We also store the images on two separate computers, as well as burn them to a DVD as a hard copy. Finally, we upload the photos to an online hosting site in case of the remote possibility that we ever have a house fire that could destroy our harddrives and DVDs. And of course, we send our clients the images on DVD, so they have a copy as well!
5. I’m interested in photography as a hobby, what camera and lenses do you recommend?
Check out this post for beginner equipment recommendations. Whatever you decide to purchase, start small and add more equipment gradually.
Is there anything else you’re dying to know that isn’t answered on our website or blog? Leave a comment and we’ll try our best to to answer!