The News

By Steve Schlesinger

New Photoshop PC build   November, 4, 2009 One of the most common questions I get is "You use a Mac, right man?"  And I say "Nope."  Then they say "Oh come on man, you really should."  Though I love all computers I never really have taken to the Apple flavor Koolaid.  I actually enjoy build PC's. In the past I have swayed back and forth from making my own or buying a Dell.  From what I can tell you about computers, the Dell PC's are mostly excellent.  They do have their bad models, but for the most part they have Intel motherboards and are well made.  The Macs are also well made, and have some very good hardware.   The problem I have with both is that the hardware is often proprietary.  Yes you can changes out video cards and hard drives, but you can't change out the motherboard.

I switched to having a Photoshop workstation about ten years ago.  I've been through around 3 or 4 systems in that time.  I don't push the computer by overclocking the CPU and for the most part I treat the components well.  Yet the two things that die on me from time to time are power supplies and motherboards.  Heat tends to be the largest problem.  This time I don't know what died first, the motherboard or the power supply but they were both acting up so they both got replaced.  This was an upgrade that was kinda planned anyway with the release of Windows 7 I am very excited about switching over most if not all systems to Windows 7.  The latest build is really set for dealing with efficientcy, especially when it comes to reading and writing files.  The rebuild has slowed me down a little, but hasn't stopped what I am doing and I should be back up and running to beyond full speed next week. 

Bridezilla-October 12, 2009.   One question I get asked from time to time is if I've seen the TV show Bridezilla and how real it is. After seeing hundreds of brides I can tell you that for the most part, the show is well laid out fiction.  The first thing you need to keep in mind is that people who want to be famous for being famous will say or do just about anything to get cameras on them and keep them rolling  Nice pleasant brides like the ones I'm used to just don't make for good reality TV.   So these people tend to be people who will play it up for the camera.  Also, aside from a film crew there is someone who does direct what happens.  Many of the scenes you see are reshot and the director may throw in some ideas.  By the time your done you have something that is  short of scripted, but highly manipulated  and played along with by people who are anxious to be on TV.    

As far as brides are concerned I've seen every emotion a bride can have.  To see a bride get so mad that she yells at someone or starts crying happens vary rarely.  The lack of respect shown toward members of the bridal party, the family and other things you see on the show just doesn't happen.   Oh yes, there is tension and drama and stories of how the bide and maid of honor are no longer friends after the wedding, but this also is rare. 

Pay peanuts, get monkeys! -10/07/009

This is a news story out of Northern England. The bride sounds a bit angry about her wedding coverage.  All I can think of when listening to her story was that she was motivated to find the best deal  and probably blew past many well qualified wedding photographers and videographers to find this crew. And now she's not happy?  BTW, we have plenty of crappy photographers out here blowing weddings every weekend, why go all the way to England for this story?

Jacqueline, Tasha, Lecia, & Steve

Bridal Show August- September 4, 2009-  For the first time in around five years we broke out the trade show booth and started going to the bridal shows.  We attended two in August, the first being at the Queen Mary and the  other at the Orange County Fairgrounds.   We had the very beautiful and vivacious Jacqueline Rojas join us in the booth.    Jacqueline was originally slated to get married on June 20th of this year, and unfortunately we were booked.   So, she went back to her then fiancé and asked to change the wedding date to the week before, which we did have open at the time. Chad was gracious enough to help me out with her wedding, and the rest was wedding day history.  It was held at a new winery in Temecula known as Keyways.    Jacqueline had so much fun at the first bridal show that she had her best bud and marten of honor  Tasha come along.   We set up next to Plug Video at booth at the Orange County Fairgrounds show and were really happy with the response.

2009 will go down in the history books as a light year for weddings.  Some of the larger hotels that booked $50,000 events every weekend were having problems getting people to even come and visit.    But, as our suspicions were confirmed, many people are simply delaying their wedding a year until 2010.    At the Queen Mary show for example we met five brides all with the July 10, 2010 wedding date.    We even met  brides with the same wedding dates in November of next year.  

There is going to be a  point of frustration that many bridal couples will face in the coming months.  Good venues and good vendors are going to be hot commodities next year.   Weddings are an economic leading indicator.  The activity we are seeing is a very positive sign, it means people are planning to get married, buy homes, and start families. Not all in the same year, but  just the same, getting married is a good first step.  Also the weddings are starting to get a tad bit more elaborate, the guest lists are getting larger, the venues  are starting to book a bit more higher end.  What this means to the average bride is that you cannot pull off a Saturday wedding with two months planning. It just won't work next year.  The better vendors will be booked and as will be the nicer venues.   If you're planning a Saturday wedding you may need up to a year's reservation for the more popular venues.   You should also have your vendors secured six months before the wedding.

What were pleased to see that our packages were very well received by the bridal couples we met.  The two that stood out in people's minds were The Fusion Bronze Package and the Solana Package.     So far the interest has been very strong.  More importantly we met some incredibly great bridal couples and we are so excited about what 2010 has in store.  It's going to be a great year in photography!

Special thanks to Jacqueline and Tasha for bringing the fun and excitement to our booth.  They did an amazing job, and we are so very blessed to have women who are as nice as they are beautiful helping us.  It means a lot to us!

Sad story with a happy ending-July 09, 2009-

Bobby and Mary really dig their wedding album, they show it to all their friends.  There it is, in the picture above.    Well, it has seen better days.    Their baby is now a toddler, and spends most of his time pulling things off shelves.  They had a humidifier they used in a room, and to keep it safe from him they put it on a high shelf, next to their wedding album.  The humidifier leaked and the water was absorbed by their wedding album, kinda like a big sponge.    As you can see it dried out and was fine.   Okay, maybe not.

So, Bobby calls me up and said that Mary was all bummed out that the album was essentially destroyed.  The big questions were things such as if I had the images from his wedding still and could I rebuild the album.  I said I had one better, I still had the original build files from the album and within 10 minutes I had my hands on them,  within two weeks the album was back, just like new.   

Here's Mary dramatic recreation of discovering her album was destroyed.   We don't like to see our beautiful brides unhappy, do we?  No!

Here's a very happy Mary after receiving her replacement album. Notice the natural smile on her face, yes we love that smile!  BTW, Mary is doing triathlons  now.    I really should have taken a picture of her butt on the seat of her new 19 pound bike, so you can recognize it when it flies by you one afternoon.    She entered her first triathlon and Bobby thought it would get it out of her system.  Nope, she loved it and signed up for more of them.   You can see by the shape of her body that she is athletic, and yes she did have a baby.    She works as  a teacher and raises a kid and can still keep in good physical condition.  Let that be an inspiration to us all!

Proof that the happy couple is once again happy.   Hey, their 2 year wedding anniversary is coming up in a couple of weeks, they've had a kid and look, they are as happy today as the day they got married.  As long as I'm at it, let me give a shout out for Bobby.  He's an amazing chef, and he's available for catering your wedding. 

The Death of Kodachrome-June, 23, 2009.  It's not hard to explain what Kodak's recent decision to drop the iconic 74 year old Kodachrome slide film from the Kodak product line really means to non-photographers.   This is the same as if Levi Strauss were to drop the Levi's 501 blue jean from it's product line.  Or if Fender Guitar's were to drop the Stratocaster, or if GM were to drop Corvette from it's offering.   It's a film that was so well loved that it showed up in songs such as Paul Simon's Kodachrome, or   Pat Benatar's Out a Touch (she refers to  a Kodachrome kiss).  

So, was this film worth all the hype?  Songs and cultural references?   In a word, yes.    Kodak made magic when they made this product.  If you've ever marveled at the images of a National Geographic, chances are you've seen it's handiwork.   More than vivacious colors it had this uncanny ability to transcend images into something much grander than what they really were.  On more than a few occasions I've marveled at the resulting images of Kodachrome.  Used with Paul Simon approved  Nikon lenses, the combination was truly lethal. 

So, with something this good and this wonderful, why did it get killed off?  Half the story is the obvious migration to digital photography that has resulted in less demand of film based products.   The other half of the story is that Kodachrome cost more to manufacture and could only be processed in one lab in the world.  Yes, one lab, it's in Kansas.    The result was that Kodachrome made up less than 1 percent of all sales  of it's ever shrinking film business.   Do the math.  Currently Kodak has less expensive slide films that can be processed at a multitude of labs.  These films seem to have captured the lions share of the slide film business in Kodak's portfolio. One consideration is that many of the films these days are scanned and turned into digital image files.  Many of the newer films have been designed with film scanning in mind.   Kodachrome came out in an era long before film scanning.

I would love to say that digital cameras are far superior and thus films like Kodachrome are obsolete.  The reality is that slide film can actually hold more of a dynamic range than digital cameras are capable of recording, and thus Kodachrome wasn't an inferior technology.  That being said the world has moved on to digital photography.  Well, most of the world has.  Though I haven't shot a roll of film in 3 years, that's about to change.  I am going back to my roots in a sense and playing with some slide film.  I will be using Kodak and Fuji slide films and scanning the resulting images and seeing what can be done with them.  Someone recently wrote an article that simply states that a 35mm camera with slide film can outshoot Nikon's new $8000 25 megapixel camera.    Along with this will be 3 rolls of Kodachrome slide film  Time is nipping at my heals as the lab won't process Kodachrome after 2010.  This has to be something special because  this will be the last time I will ever have a chance to shoot this film.  It's like taking the Corvette for one last spin down Route 66, wearing Levi 501's with a Stratocaster in the passenger seat.  As my dad keeps telling me, his Kodachrome slides haven't faded after 50 years.  Kodachrome was a great film, and though we move on, any photographer who has shot Kodachrome has nothing but glowing things to say about it. 

New concerns as the economy improves- June 13, 2009- One of my friends works at Costco, he said that during the worst of the recession people came in and bought food, a little bit of clothing, books, and a little bit of  movies or music.  They walked right by the computers, the TV's, the patio sets.  About a week later an economist said the same thing in an article, nearly word for word.     Thus if you use Costco as your barometer for economic health, next time you are at the store, you may notice that LCD tvs are making their way into people's shopping carts, as are computers. and other non-staples.

What does this have to do with weddings?  Economic recover starts small and grows.  It starts with people buying TV's without fear of regretting the decision six months from now.   People go out to dinner a little bit more.  Though houses and cars aren't selling briskly, you start noticing a few more new cars on the highway.   There is less talk about layoffs at work, and your unemployed friends start finding new work. The stock market starts improving (it's running up to 9000 right now).    it's a month by month thing but each month looks better than the previous.  The only looming  problem is the state of California running out of money in July, and how that gets resolved. 

Here's where things get concerning for a bride who is planning a wedding.   Each year a certain amount of people plan weddings.  In 2009 many people put off their wedding plans until 2010.  Many people couldn't afford it, while other felt it was rude to host a huge expensive event when the economy wasn't doing well.    Anyway, in 2010 with a hopefully improving economy you will start seeing huge demands for wedding vendors.    This year you could have not only planned a June wedding in May, but probably talked yourself into a hell of a good deal with non-booked vendors.    Next year, if you try this same tactic you will most likely be locked out.    Thus starting later on this year you will need at least six months of planning, which means dropping off deposits with vendors far in advance of your wedding .  Start planning sooner than later if you don't want left over vendors.

The 25 questions are back!-  June 04,  2009-  Around 1997 or 1998 I found myself face to face with this pretty young bride at this meeting at her condo. I can very clearly remembering that I didn't like how the meeting went because she wasn't didn't seem as informed about wedding photography as other brides I had met with.  I was so bothered by the meeting that I went home and wrote "25 questions to ask a wedding photographer. "    I was in business for less than a year at the time and some of the questions were, well, a bit stupid  I had a question "Do you bring a tripod?"    Of all the things to worry about with wedding photography, a tripod?    Funny  i found these questions in magazine articles and other photographer's websites.    Some of the information on the site was old, I talked about various films Kodak made and about two years later they were gone.  The article stuck around for around 5 years.  I updated sections but as things changed I simply removed it from the website. I had so many people comment about how much they liked the article and how much it helped them. It was quite sad when it was removed. 

Toward the end of last year I decided to take on the article again.  This time it would be translated into Esperanto.  So, if you really wanted to know what it said, you would need a 16 week course to decipher the information.  But my wife told me this wasn't a good idea so it's in English, for now.  Instead of 25 simple questions, they are now 25 topics.  Each topic can have one or many questions.    This time around I have more than a decade of experience behind me and this time I put a lot more time preparing the article.  

Alright, this article won't exactly clinch my Nobel Prize nomination, but just the same, it should be helpful.   There is too little useful information floating around these days regarding wedding photography and never a time when someone needs it more.  By asking the right questions, and having more knowledge on a subject you are in a better position to make an educated decision.  You can read the article here.

The Fusion Package-March 23, 2009