This month it was held at the Wentworth Golf Club, who just recently opened to the public turning semi-private. They feature not only a HUGE 70+ hole course, but a beautiful conservative decor and clubhouse, room for intimate weddings with indoor and outdoor options plus full bar and catering.

If you are ‘foodie’ like me you will certainly appreciate the collection of photos and videos as it grows, feel free to follow along with me! You can find the videos here if you would like to make things for yourself

Planners work very hard but the next day it’s done and gone. Flowers can be thousands of dollars but a few days later they don’t exist. Entertainment? Gone as soon as you leave the room. Catering, bar – gone in hours forever. Hair and makeup? Washed away in hours. Invitations? In the trash, forgotten. Jewelry, dresses? On show at home to be seen a few more times in a lifetime, never worn for full effect again. Photography? OUTLIVES US ALL.

All those other vendors and more, NEED our product. It’s what they use to market, show off work, build websites, advertisements, etc. In most cases, we as photographers can benefit as well, if not equally at least to a degree that we should be sharing. I’m not going to debate if we should be charging for sharing such a thing, that’s dependent on quite a few variables most importantly your relationship to each vendor. I believe it’s quite appropriate to share freely in some instances and charge in others, and that’s going to be up to you. What I want to go over is HOW you should be sharing.

I’m not just a photog, I also do quite a bit of website work for friends in the industry. I do everything from simple blogs to sites for other photographers, wedding planners, florists, officiants, sports teams, retail stores, jewelers, furniture stores, you name it. I’m just wrapping up another wedding planner’s site and this has been a big one, processing over 800 photos from a few dozen different other photographers. I have seen first hand exactly what and how many are sharing the photos with vendors and have really seen what works best.

First of all, when sharing photos with vendors you need to know where they will be used. 99% of the time they are going in a simple gallery or blog post on the vendor’s website. Occasionally they might want a shot or two for printing such as an advertisement. In the latter case you can simply send whatever is appropriate, that’s not what this is about. It’s the 99% that go to a website that this is about.

Let’s break this down in to some simple points, so you can evaluate what you are doing and hopefully make some adjustments for the ease of the vendor and/or their webmaster.

• File size
• File naming
• Image dimensions
• Crop ratio
• Delivery method

File Size
There is no reason a vendor needs or should have to deal with 25MB photos. You should be delivering small, web optimized files. Lightroom and Photoshop both have perfect exporting/save-for-web capability to compress images to appropriate sizes. If you are using no compression or very high you are just wasting space. These shots are not getting printed. They are showing fairly small on a screen. Set compression between 60-80 or equivalent to produce appropriate sizes.

File Naming
Everyone has their own file naming conventions and there are tons of options and reasons for doing different things. I’ve seen everything from no naming convention, the files the same as they come out of the camera – to full SEO renaming and 30 word file names. Using keywords in file names has it’s place and advantages but not for what you deliver to vendors IMO. First of all, if you are simply sending duplicates of what is already on your site/blog, you aren’t going to benefit from the same keywords for a duplicate image on another site. At least make new ones but preferably simply use a short simple naming convention. Most importantly do not use special characters that are not web friendly such as brackets, periods, parenthesis, etc. Stick to letters, numbers, spaces and dashes. Doing something such as “so-and-so-photography-1.jpg” is perfect.

Image Dimensions
I have gone through everything from 150×150 tiny useless thumbnails, to equally annoying full resolution D800 files. Guys, these vendors are not printing posters. You are wasting so much time – on your end, the vendors, and whoever is working with the files, by not providing appropriately sized files. Stick with delivering files around 1000px on the long edge. That’s more than enough for a full width image showing on any site, small enough to easily upload quickly and not need any additional work. Again, Lightroom and Photoshop provide the tools you need. A quick tip I tell vendors when they get such huge unusable files is to add them to an email draft, most email clients have a resize capability built in and it’s about the easiest ways the often tech-challenged vendors can deal with such problems.

Crop Ratio
I would say more than 99% of photos I have seen and worked with from all photographers are standard 35mm 2×3 (4×6) ratios. Yes of course there are a tiny percentage of photogs using medium format film formats with different ratios, but that’s simply a special case. The problem here I see is people delivering arbitrary crops, or photos they have added logos and borders too OUTSIDE the image. When vendors use our images in blog posts, galleries, real weddings, etc. it’s important that everything is clean and uniform. When you have a mish-mash of crops, things just don’t line up right on webpages and it makes it very tough to go through everything, re-crop images or work around things. Simply delivering standard image crops is by far the best thing to do. If you are one that likes creative crops, at least create your images so they have white space around it to the standard, so they can be dropped in place without a problem. I wasted over 2 hours dealing with this on the last site I just did, doing it myself.

Delivery Methods
These days there is simply no excuse for any photographer not being able to deliver vendor size files in a matter of minutes simply and easily. Services such as Dropbox are fast and free, available to anyone. Create your files, ZIP THEM UP and put them up so the vendor can just download one easy file. Done! Do not mail CD’s, DVDs or thumbdrives. That wastes time money and there’s no point. If you’re only delivering a couple files email is fine of course, as long as you heed the previous tips! Trying to email 40 25MB jpgs doesn’t work for example! Likewise do not put up 3GB of files in Dropbox because you were too lazy to resize or cull. Yes that happened multiple times.

So I just wrapped up a product shoot and accidentally discovered something I sure have never read somewhere else. Not saying it’s not known, but it was news to me! For those of us with recent Canon bodies (this may apply to Nikon/Sony-sensored bodies as well but I don’t have one to test), we have the ability to shoot at multiple RAW resolution levels. There are plenty of times when it’s a good idea to use those lower-res settings, such as when shooting for web-only use, or something you know will never be printed big or cropped. It saves a ton of space and time!

I do a lot of regular product work and also do a lot of standard cigar shots for my other business, reviewing cigars. Every day I take the exact same shots of cigars for the website, and they are only used in videos and on the web so I always use small raw, using my settings in one of my custom slots. Which BTW I LOVE and use the crap out of!

I was setting up my lighting for these products tonight, and like many clients they needed transparent backgrounds. I shoot tethered to Lightroom, and set my background light to bring the levels just to highlight clipping for easy masking and removal in Photoshop. The first shot I did was right where I needed to be (I’ve done it enough that I could probably do it blindfolded at this point), showing data right at the clipping edge, a nice even red masked background. I then realized I shot it on my C1 setting which is for my cigar video shots, the only big difference being it was set on Small Raw, and I always work at Full size for commercial deliverables. I switched back to manual and retook the exact same shot on a tripod, exact same exposure settings, nothing special. When the shot appeared on screen, I knew something was up – the background was no longer clipped.

I did more experimental shots and found that using Full Raw gave just under a stop more of dynamic range than Small Raw, with Medium somewhere in the middle. Most of it was highlights,  with a touch expanded (or reduced I should say) in the shadows, mostly in the red channel.

So long story short, when you need the most dynamic range, especially in your highlights, like a wedding gown – do NOT use anything less than Full Raw.

We did some beautiful group shots prior to the ceremony, of course keeping the guys and girls separated throughout the huge grounds!

Getting to the Ala Carte Pavilion everyone was treated to absolutely lavish details and room setups, using 100% of the venue space.  Post ceremony guests were treated to a sprawling cocktail hour while the lovely couple and I went off alone for more bridal shots, after doing just a few family group portraits on the stage.

I LOVE it when I get dedicated time (the more the better) for bridals, it is the ONLY way to get the sweet artistic shots and take advantage of scenery or a venue space.

The rest of the night was a blur, consisting of hours and hours of dancing to both a live band and rockin’ DJ that kept the hundreds of people on their feet when they weren’t being fed by the two huge buffet setups!

View the full highlights gallery below!

Vendors