Wedding Proof Books and mixed formats

After each wedding I tend to take a few days before editing the pictures down. This way I have a chance to detach from the event and get a more balanced viewpoint of the images. I've tended to operate in this manner because emotional attachment precludes effective editing.

The bulk of the images for this wedding were taken with the Olympus E-1, but I also used the Minolta A1 and Olympus OM-2S for some shots. The pre-ceremony shots were all taken with the Minolta and OM-2S, while the E-1 was used almost exclusively for the ceremony with several OM-2S shots backing things up. Film choice was Portra 160NC. Had I realized how dark the evening in the forest was going to be, I would have loaded Portra 400NC instead. I mounted the 24/2.8 lens on the camera and zone focused it.

I recall the day when my OM-2S was considered "quiet". Compared to my E-1, the thing sounds like a tree falling. It's amazing how our expectations have changed. Yet, there is a simple pleasure in shooting with a camera that is so responsive and transparent to the image-making process.

As it turned out, there were only two film images which were used in the proof book, however, one of them made it to the cover! The 24/2.8 lens gave me a perspective that my 14-54 DZ on the E-1 couldn't. This points out, again, the need for a wide-angle zoom for the E-1.

The biggest issue that I battled with this wedding was the exposures. The background was so bright that I consistently underexposed the pictures. For the film images, this proved disastrous, but for the E-1 images, I was able to correct it pretty well in RawShooter during conversion. As the E-1 was shot at ISO 400, noise did come up some, but in the final prints it will still be fine. ISO 400 images from the E-1 are not too different than scanned Portra 160 films.

A couple of the silhouette shots converted to B&W very nicely. When using RawShooter for conversion, I desaturated the images, adjusted the highlight, shadow contrast and exposure sliders until it was "close" and then made wild swings to the white-balance settings until the skin-tones landed in the right "zone". For noise-removal, I used RawShooter's "Pattern Noise Reduction" turned all the way up. The resulting image is almost exactly like 35mm Tri-X. This, however, is with the E-1. The Minolta A1 requires similar, but slightly different tweeks--mostly with the inclusion of some "Color-Noise Reduction" and a touch of "Fill Light". The Minolta's "look" is more like Tmax than Tri-X in the skin tones.

Proof book assembly and ordering was totally performed in Miller's proofing ordering software. Total time for upload over my DSL connection was about 30 minutes. It took me three passes to narrow down the images for inclusion, about 20 minutes to batch process the images to JPEGs, a half hour to scan the Portra film as I only scanned the "keepers" and about 40 minutes to build the proof book.

Other than obvious exposure/contrast correction and WB adjustments, I leave all the color-correction to Miller's Lab. They do an excellent job and are far faster than I am.

The only adjustment I'm going to make for the next mixed-format wedding is the 100% conversion to Portra 160VC and Portra 400VC films. By the time I correct the E-1 images to the "look" I like, they are much closer to the VC films.