Why hire a professional photographer?

I know I'm not the first photographer to address this and certainly won't be the last. Many photographers have addressed education & the thousands of dollars spent on equipment. These are very valid points and much of what I'm going to talk about does come from my education as well as experience but let's look beyond this. Over the next couple days, I'm going to address 3 key areas:

1) Why hire a professional photographer?
2) Its the camera that makes the difference.
3) Why use a professional printer?

Why hire a professional photographer?
So what is the difference between a professional & Uncle Sam who has an expensive camera? You hire a professional photographer so that you can have beautiful images. That's it in a nutshell right? But sometimes, Uncle Sam captures some really great images! First, I recognize that everyone can take a great picture every now and again & today's technology helps that. But the real question becomes, do they know why it looked so great that time & can they do it again? A professional captures beautiful images every time. With weddings, the question is do you want to chance that Uncle Sam might capture the important moments during the wedding? Or do you want to rely on a professional that has captured these important moments for other couples & will capture those moments for you?

I'm sure it has happened to every reader out there that they took a picture and it looked so awesome but when they tried to do it again, they couldn't do it! A professional knows why a picture looked so awesome AND they know how to do it again! In a formal portrait setting, this means the photographer understands composition & lighting. There are several rules of composition that all professional photographers know...Rule of Thirds, Leading Lines,etc. They also are trained in posing techniques that can help reduce the appearance of certain things the subject does not like about their body. For example, say you are like me and have huge thighs (yes, I admit it) & you are taking a picture sitting in a chair. There is a certain posing technique that will help in diminishing the size of my thighs. Professionals know this....Uncle Sam more than likely not.

Outside of posing/composition, lighting is critical to photography. A professional understands how lighting affects the final picture & this extends way beyond the studio session. The studio is the easiest place for a photographer to take pictures. Why? The lighting is in the photographer's control. In studio, I create the ideal lighting situation along with artistic lighting. Not only can posing help hide those imperfections, lighting also has a big impact. Take a headshot for example. Let's say your face is naturally wide & it's something that has always bugged you. How I light that person's face can either accentuate the wideness of his/her face or we can actually give the appearance of a face that isn't as wide. Uncle Sam probably isn't familiar with how to do that!

When a professional photographs a wedding, for a majority of the time they are in an uncontrolled lighting environment & actually most people take pictures this way. When taking pictures outside the studio whether in a church or outside in a park at high noon (a time all professionals hate on a sunny day), I know what to do to help the current lighting situation so that you have great pictures! A professional controls his/her camera to create a beautiful image. Non-professionals allow the camera to control the situation and create the image. This leads me to my final difference.

Finally, the main difference between Uncle Sam & a professional is that most professionals shoot in manual mode. Hmmmm....what's manual mode? I control the F-stop/aperature, shutter speed, & ISO settings to provide the best image I can in the lighting situation I find myself in!! This is the key reason why Uncle Sam can sometimes take a great picture & then in other situations, can't! I understand how lighting will affect the final image. I know when to use flash or bounce flash & how to do this in situations where the camera in one of those lovely programmed modes won't! F-stop/aperature can be used to create lovely images with a real depth to it. Hmmmm.....what do I mean by that and what the heck is an f-stop? All lenses have a "diaphragm" that lets light into the camera & exposes the digital sensor (or the film if you have that). Depending on how wide this "diaphragm" is will control how much of the image appears in focus!

Some non-professionals know this which is one reason why they sometimes use the aperature priority mode on their DSLR. But what happens when you shoot in aperature priority mode is the camera will set the other settings (shutter speed & ISO) to properly expose the image according to its internal reading. So? Well many times 3things will happen. First, the shutter speed will drop so low that the people moving in the picture will create a blurry image. Or you may have a nice hot shoe flash that will then fire off so strongly that even though there is no wall behind the person, there will be this big ugly shadow behind them and I absolutely can't stand seeing that (it's my biggest pet peeve...I would rather see red eye since that can be fixed). The second thing that many times occur with slower shutter speeds (and digital cameras are much more sensitive to this than the film cameras were), the person taking the picture is moving ever so slightly which will create a blurry image. Finally, if the shutter speed is slow enough, the simple motion of the mirror moving out of the way to expose the sensor can create a blurry image. The professional knows how to control all the camera settings to achieve beautiful images & to create special effects like dragging the shutter.

This actually leads me into the next topic. Nikon has a lovely commercial out there about how they gave a community a camera & they all took great pictures. Their tag line is "Anyone can take amazing digital pictures with a Nikon in their hand". Another photographer I know insists that the camera has nothing to do with the outcome & that great photography lies in the skill of the person holding the camera. So, which is it? Is it the camera? Or is it the photographer? We will talk about this tomorrow!

Feel free to post to this; I would love to hear your thoughts!

God bless!