It’s been a while since we posted about our new recession beating packages. Well, the wait is almost over. While we looked at the pricing structure in detail for our budget conscious deals we realised that we could also offer a complete package for those for whom nothing but the very best will do.

Our new wedding photography mini site will go live in the next few days with options for our

• Simply Wedding Photos, a complete professional wedding photography package that includes high-quality print-ready images on CD from only £300.
• Luxury Wedding Photography Service, which is essentially a selection of our existing packages with a few more options available.
• Bespoke Wedding Photography Service, with the highest quality exclusive wedding albums and an unprecedented level of personal service.

Update: 23 February 2010: the new wedding services are now live.

Following on from the high and low key options, here are some different ways to present family portraiture, in duo or triple frames.

Achieving a balance is the key to success and choosing images from the shoot that work together and help to tell the story of the day.

Colour and monochrome images in the same frame can look good together, especially where the colour is kept soft without too much saturation.

This is a very informal “low-key” photograph of John…and he just loved having his photograph taken. The secret of good portrait photography is to capture the essence of your model – whether posed or unposed, to bring out their character in the fraction of a second that it takes for the sensor to record the image.

My previous Blog of baby Georgia shows what is known as a  “High Key” effect. The predominant tones are light coloured, tending to white, making the result more dramatic,  but keeping a light, airy, happy, clean interpretation.

Both High Key images and Low Key images make an intensive use of contrast, but in a very different way, in order to interpret the image. Everyone has a camera these days and even camera phones are capable of good quality results, but it’s the ability to interpret the resulting images that makes dedicated professionals that little bit different.

When making decisions about the processing of my portrait of John, I knew that I wanted to bring out his dark characterful face in the best way I could. I examined the raw colour file and decided that colour was definitely out – this had to be low key and it had to be monochrome. The decision about post processing is about finding the best way to interpret the mood that the picture will ultimately convey to the viewer. Low key portraits are full of drama with dark rich tones. Although the photo of John is essentially a happy one, low key can also be used to great effect to introduce a dark and brooding atmosphere to suitable subjects. Low key images, although predominantly dark, do need some areas of bright highlight to contrast strongly with the black tones and it was essential here to ensure that the sparkle in John’s eyes wasn’t lost.

Georgia

We just love photographing babies…from their tiny hands and feet, to delicate skin tones, fine eyelashes and huge innocent eyes. Every baby shows his or her own character, and we do our utmost to bring that out at your photo session. Our high resolution photos can be enlarged to fill wall sized canvas or we can supply single or multi-aperture framed prints of timeless elegant design…and how about a modern approach by sandwiching the photo between two layers of glass to have prode of place on your mantlepiece? Lifestyle shoots with baby provide lots of real-life photographs of happy unposed moments shared with your family and photobooks from the session have become very affordable. Just ask for our price list.

Post-processing

We have advanced editing capabilities and can interpret the original image in a variety of ways, like the very modern high-key version below…and you might even consider timeless black and white or toned sepia…we have the skill to produce any of these effects – just ask!

Georgia - high key

Welcome to the new year. The naughties have gone (did anyone ever really use that name?) and hopefully the worst of the recession with it.
Personally the last few months have been some of the busiest I have known (so apologies for the dearth of postings) but we have still found time to think about how we can help those who are still feeling the pinch, without compromising on our high standards. We believe we have found some alternative wedding photography pricing formats that you may find interesting.
We have not forgotten those who are not contemplating the leap into marital bliss. We are re-arranging our portrait services, bringing them right-up-to-date by focussing on a Lifestyle approach.
We have some new products under development and others we have refined enough to offer to our commercial clients.
I’m looking forward to 2010 and it promises to be an exciting year.
The website will be updated as we roll out these innovations.

Have a great New Year everyone.

Hope to see you soon.

Mike

We’ve done a couple of charity events for Breast Cancer Care recently. Here’s a photo from one. If you have a charity event coming up, check with us to see how you can get photos of the event and make a little profit for the charity by booking us at SteelOrchid.

There is an increasing tendency for wedding clients to buy a CD of images to accompany their album. This way, they can choose their favourite pictures for the wedding album but continue to share the wider selection of images that we supply, with family and friends, via the internet and by making slide shows. We give a discount on the full price of album and CD for couples wanting to do this, as we only have to process the images once.

A lovely way to share pictures is by setting them to your favourite music, so we are putting together some tips to help you to do this.

We are starting off by showing you how to make use of a superb piece of software that we use to produce many of our own slide-shows, to show your images with music on a computer or TV.

The software is called Pictures To Exe and is very inexpensive – it’s available from WnSoft.
For those who are not familiar with YouTube click on the second button from the right at the bottom of the player to make it full screen (see inset).

Pictures To Exe Basics:

Part One

Part Two

How to use Pan and Zoom in PTE:

Let us have your comments.

Enjoy.

Fine Art Shop

It’s been a very busy month…but we managed to find enough time between weddings and events photography to get the new Fine Art shop on the road and on schedule. We’ll be adding more prints soon so please come back for another look.

Wedding Shop

We are also developing a Wedding Shop, where couples will be able to log in to their own page and pay for their wedding package in installments.  We’ll also be selling some wedding fare in the shop, for example personalised thank you cards for the happy couple and gift vouchers for family and guests to buy. So, yes, it’s another “watch this space”. The wedding shop will be online soon with a simple selection of products.

Wedding Albums

To help out in these uncertain times, we are reducing the price of our storybook wedding albums. This year, they will start at the same price as traditional (matted) albums, from £395 for a 30 page book with a level one cover.

Events Photography

On the events front, we have acquired a brand new Fuji dye-sublimation printer, so we’ll be able to print even faster than before and produce bigger and better prints at events. We are already expanding that side of our business and believe that we are now the premier events photography team in the Oldham area for producing instant prints on the night. But we don’t confine ourselves just to Oldham – we can cover most areas of the north, including Yorkshire, Cheshire and Derbyshire. For charity events we can arrange to donate to the charity a part ofour profits from the evening.

Exhibition Photography

We’ve been too busy to do much exhibition work this year so far as competitors, but Chris was invited as a judge at the Southport National Exhibition of Photography (Digital Section) and also the first UK International Small Prints International Salon (Birmingham event). She has thoroughly enjoyed judging both events. Chris also picked up another award for her fine art print “Ivy Impression” in the Southampton International Salon of Photography at the beginning of March. This work is now available to buy as a “Signature edition” print in our shop.

Whilst Mike has been working hard on the innards of the new SteelOrchid Fine Art store (online shop), I’ve been populating it with products ready for next week’s launch – with some old favourites and some brand new work.  For discerning collectors we have introduced luxuriously double-matted signed prints in our new  “Signature” collection. If you would like to own a print but prefer to dip in at a less expensive level, we have introduced some smaller sizes of mounted prints at very affordable prices.

Our collection of prints would not be complete without a Saddleworth section – being based in one of the most beautiful and varied areas of the Pennines, local shots are an absolute must and this winter has provided some interesting opportunities for capturing the best and most dramatic of Saddleworth weather conditions.

We have some special offers for the first few weeks and will be introducing featured prints at special offer prices on a regular basis…so please keep coming back for another look! In the meantime, here’s a taster…

Chris

The new Magento based store is now fully working (except for the PayPal account, of course) and we will have enough fine art prints available in the new range of sizes to open the store on the 8th March  2009.

Getting the store (B.T.W. which term do people prefer: store or shop?)  up and running was relatively straightforward but far from simple. The documentation is not the most comprehensive I have seen but in its favour it has an active forum where you are very likely to find a solution to most any common problems and the software is pretty much “feature complete” “right-out-of-the-box”.  So for basic use it is simply a matter of choosing a theme and away you go! That is assuming you are running it on your own server. If, like us, you are running on a shared host you need a provider who is either very understanding, like ours, or one that is optimised for Magento. It is rather demanding of the server. We think we have ours configured for our use.

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