The Best of Wedding Photography.pdf - Free

Dream a Little. With digital, we have tools like motion
blur, Gaussian blur, and even smart blur, and film “looks”
that we could never have used before. We have old films,
new films, grainy films and ultrasharp films all within one
digital capture—if you dream a little. Now, Maring says he
thinks more like a cinematographer—he considers the moment
he sees on the computer screen and creates what it
truly looked like. This is not fiction, it is design around the
best depiction of the moment.
Use Chapters. Every story has chapters. Maring uses
scene setters that open and close each one. Within the
chapters, he includes a well-rounded grouping of elements
such as fashion, love, relationships, preparation, behind the
scenes, and ambiance. These are the key elements that he
keeps in mind at all times, both when documenting the
day as well as when designing the story.
Become a Painter. Charles Maring has spent time
studying both new and old painters. He discovered that
the rules we apply to photography get destroyed in art because
in art there are no rules. In some of the most incred-
116 THE BEST OF WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY
ible paintings with depth and dimension, for example, the
artist would blow out the highlights of the scene, or possibly
saturate small areas of the leaves in a tree, or maybe
exaggerate an element to bring a statement to life. Artists
think about the details. Maring now finds himself stepping
out of the photographic box and using the painterly tools
to work the print to its full potential.
Color Sampling. One of Charles Maring’s tricks of the
trade is to sample the colors of the images on his album
pages in Photoshop. This is done using Photoshop’s eyedropper
tool. When you click on an area, the eyedropper
reveals the component colors in the color palette. He then
uses those color readings for graphic elements on the page
he designs with those photographs, producing an integrated,
color-coordinated design on the album page. If
using a page-layout program like Adobe InDesign, those
colors can be used at 100 percent or any lesser percentage
for color washes on the page or background colors that
match the Photoshop colors precisely.
You can see the thought process in the page design. The fleet of Rolls-Royces passes the point where Charles is shooting and he shoots with a very
wide-angle lens, bending and distorting the lines of the car to conform to a double-truck treatment. He enhanced the feeling of speed with motion
blur in Photoshop. The spread is balanced with two detail insets, one per page. This is a terrific example of page layout. Photographs and design
by Charles Maring.