Associate
Hi
My wife an I were married in Malibu, California on the beach back in September.
We had a professional photographer, or that's what we paid for anyway. At first, the guy seemed great. He had a good attitude, and seemed to know what he was doing. We asked for candid style shots.
Everything just clicked. A few minutes before the ceremony, 5 US Army chinook helicopters flew past over the ocean. The photographer was quick to get us into position and fire off some shots.
During the ceremony, he was getting all sorts of angles, from what I gather anyway.
Later into the shoot, a flock of pelicans flew overhead... again a great opportunity for memorable photos.
We also got some photos in a Baywatch style lifeguard tower. It was our perfect beach wedding.
Anyway, it took five weeks to get our photos back. All he did was copy the images from the memory card to a web archive.
This is where things went from great to terrible. Almost all of the photos are either over or under exposed. My wife's dress is completely blown out in most photos.
Composition was, for the most part, terrible.
Every single shot uses narrow DOF. We were at a lovely beach with cliffs and crashing waves... we want to be able to see those.
I thought at the time is was odd that the photographer was using the flash all of the time. I understand the need for fill flash, but that's not going to work for the shots where he's 20-30 metres away.
Another thing that really bothers me, is that I think he was using a defective or damaged lens. In all of the landscape oriented photos, the bottom-left of the image is very soft, distorted, contains ghosting and has chromatic aberrations.
According the EXIF data, he used a Canon 5D and the lens is a Canon EF28-70 f/2.8L USM. Pretty good stuff I'm sure you'll agree.
To make matters worse, when I asked for the RAW originals (in order to see if I could save the over and underexposed images), the photographer informed me that he shot the photos in JPEG! What professional, or for that matter, amateur photographer would use a high-end DSLR to shoot an important event, and use JPEG?
I've also noticed a trend in the EXIF. All photos are ISO 250. Flash fired. f/4.5. It was a bright sunny day. I'm sure 1/8000 second isn't always required.
Obviously, there's nothing we can now do to get good photos of our wedding day.
Oh, and the photos with the chinooks - completely blown out and barely recognisable.
I've attached one of the few barely acceptable images, but it suffers from the distortion, so I cropped it.
And this is a 100% crop from the distorted area from the original:
Am I right that this lens is faulty?
My wife an I were married in Malibu, California on the beach back in September.
We had a professional photographer, or that's what we paid for anyway. At first, the guy seemed great. He had a good attitude, and seemed to know what he was doing. We asked for candid style shots.
Everything just clicked. A few minutes before the ceremony, 5 US Army chinook helicopters flew past over the ocean. The photographer was quick to get us into position and fire off some shots.
During the ceremony, he was getting all sorts of angles, from what I gather anyway.
Later into the shoot, a flock of pelicans flew overhead... again a great opportunity for memorable photos.
We also got some photos in a Baywatch style lifeguard tower. It was our perfect beach wedding.
Anyway, it took five weeks to get our photos back. All he did was copy the images from the memory card to a web archive.
This is where things went from great to terrible. Almost all of the photos are either over or under exposed. My wife's dress is completely blown out in most photos.
Composition was, for the most part, terrible.
Every single shot uses narrow DOF. We were at a lovely beach with cliffs and crashing waves... we want to be able to see those.
I thought at the time is was odd that the photographer was using the flash all of the time. I understand the need for fill flash, but that's not going to work for the shots where he's 20-30 metres away.
Another thing that really bothers me, is that I think he was using a defective or damaged lens. In all of the landscape oriented photos, the bottom-left of the image is very soft, distorted, contains ghosting and has chromatic aberrations.
According the EXIF data, he used a Canon 5D and the lens is a Canon EF28-70 f/2.8L USM. Pretty good stuff I'm sure you'll agree.
To make matters worse, when I asked for the RAW originals (in order to see if I could save the over and underexposed images), the photographer informed me that he shot the photos in JPEG! What professional, or for that matter, amateur photographer would use a high-end DSLR to shoot an important event, and use JPEG?
I've also noticed a trend in the EXIF. All photos are ISO 250. Flash fired. f/4.5. It was a bright sunny day. I'm sure 1/8000 second isn't always required.
Obviously, there's nothing we can now do to get good photos of our wedding day.
Oh, and the photos with the chinooks - completely blown out and barely recognisable.
I've attached one of the few barely acceptable images, but it suffers from the distortion, so I cropped it.
And this is a 100% crop from the distorted area from the original:
Am I right that this lens is faulty?
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