Post-Covid Plans - Photo, Hybrid Shooting and Taking to the Skies!

What a rubbish year it’s been for many of us, with weddings cancelled or moved, charity events cancelled and of course missing our loved ones. It’s also been rough for the photography business, and I’ve had to put A D Hall Photography on hold since since New Year 2020, with zero wedding and event photography happening.

But there are the green shoots of recovery; wedding and event bookings are starting again following the Government’s outline plans recently. Small weddings of up to 15 guest - INCLUDING the photographer - able to go ahead from 12th of April. In fact I had an inquiry last weekend for a wedding on that day! As you can see below, we then ramp up to 30 guests from mid-May and then (fingers crossed) we’re back to ‘normal’ from 21st of June. I can’t wait!

Of course, many will be waiting until after June, and indeed all of the dates for weddings and events that were delayed from last year are now re-booked for July onwards - a sensible move I think!

Naturally if you (or anyone you know) are looking for a wedding photographer, I still have gaps in my diary that I’d love to fill - I’ve got a feeling 2021 weddings will be awesome, and I’ve held my prices from last year.

So what else is new? Well, before the lockdown I’d started to experiment with ‘hybrid shooting’ - essentially capturing snippets of video in between the stills shots. By the end of a wedding day, I end up with a 5 minute (ish) highlight reel of all the main events. Personally, I think there’s a higher chance that you’d sit through a 5 minute clip of your day rather than a full-length video. I am of course not taking anything away from the awesome job wedding videographers do, and it may be right for you to hire one; but I think it could be an interesting extra I can offer. I’ll certainly be looking to re-energise this option this year should anyone want to add to the existing packages I offer.

Talking of new ways of shooting, I’ve decided to take the leap and get one of these:

I’ll be taking delivery of a Mavic 2 Pro sometime in April, and will be undertaking a full commercial training course, with a view to adding to the hybrid video I talked about earlier. It’ll also be great for capturing those ‘whole wedding’ group shots that up until now I’ve needed to hang out of windows to get! On a personal level, I’ll be using it for landscape shots once lockdown is over and I can get out and about.

I intend to do a series of videos on YouTube to document the drone, my practice and training, the regulatory workflow I’ll need to follow and of course some awesome footage. I’ll be sure to update this blog with the links.

Thanks for reading and see you all soon!

Al.

Event Photography - Wittering Summer Ball

July is proving to be a busy month with weddings at different ends of the country, but I also had the immense honour to be booked as the photographer at RAF Wittering’s Sergeants’ Mess Summer Ball. Their previously-used photographer was already booked, so thanks to some speculative communications on my part, their committee already had my contact details.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll see that I’ve done Balls at military bases before – however, this time there was an interesting request: could I do ‘green screen’ and offer a choice of background?

This is something I’d not previously even tried, let alone accepted payment to do. So, wanting to secure the booking, but not leaving myself in a position to fail, I asked for a couple of days to check out the options. Some parts are quite simple, such as buying a plain green backdrop, and shooting tethered to a laptop. However, the actual processing of green screen at a speed and simplicity required at an event was a new proposition. I did the usual Google search and tried out a couple of software trials, before finally selecting an application called ‘Green Screen Wizard.’ As the name suggests, it automates a great deal of the processing, and allows the preview and selection of a number of different backgrounds.

further trial at home in the living room proved that I could create a work-flow that not only ensured I could offer the service, but that it could be done pretty seamlessly and swiftly at the event (guests are quite rightly more interested in enjoying their evening than waiting an age to choose their photos.)

So, on 8 Jul I set up at the Sergeants’ mess, with my eldest Niece acting as my glamorous assistant for the night, in one of their rooms and prepared to see if what worked in testing would work in anger.

All set for the green screen magic! 

In the interests of speed and reliability, I set my camera up to store 2 copies of each picture: a full-resolution, maximum quality file that would stay on the memory card in the camera, and a small, low(ish) quality file that would be sent to the laptop.  In this way, the guests could rapidly see a preview of their picture, and choose their backdrop.  This actually worked really well, as the preview was of high enough quality for viewing on the screen and allowed the laptop to rapidly process the green-screen with no glitches or slowness.  Once back at the studio, I then processed the high quality version, and produced their final image.  Also, for the images that included areas of the room outside of the green screen (large groups for example) I could then open the image in Photoshop and fill-in those areas with a green fill, re-import into Green Screen Wizard and produce the final image.

With the green screen.

After the background is applied.

If you went to the event, your pictures have been printed by my pro lab (the excellent Loxley Colour based up in Glasgow) and I’m now waiting on the mount frames (from the equally excellent Photovalue) with the correct event info printed on them – I hope to have them this weekend for a bulk delivery to the mess.

A Lincoln Engagement Shoot

Hi everyone, just a quick update today.  I had the very great pleasure of photographing my good friend Tom and his beautiful fiancee Aimi this weekend.  I'm photographing their wedding later this year, so I suggested we do an engagement shoot, to get them used to working with me, and it also gave me the excuse to use a location I'd been thinking of for a while.

Those of you who know Lincoln, you may recognise the little church of St Benedicts, on the pedestrian section of the High Street.  It's right in the centre of the busy shopping area, but I always consider it a little pocket of calm!

We were really lucky with the weather, the sun was out with the trees giving some really nice light.

I'll leave you with some of my favourite pictures of the shoot - and remember if you're looking for wedding photography please consider discussing an engagement session with me as it's a great way to spend an hour or so, and really helps on the big day removing that 'not-used-to-being-in-front-of-the-camera' feeling!