Digital Photography and Post-Processing
The “Sepia Bride”
The bride loved her wedding photographs — until she didn’t.
Photographers: Are you familiar with the above-linked kerfuffle?
The TL;DR version: Couple spends USD 8,000 for a reputable wedding photographer to photograph their wedding. The photographer does an overall terrific job, has a super eye, great timing, and knows how to anticipate l’instant décisif, so the couple is thrilled. For a month.
Then, having (obsessively?) reanalyzed the pictures repeatedly, the bride notices she has yellow teeth and jaundiced skin, and all the once-green vegetation in her background appears dead!
This excellent, skilled, successful photographer’s advertised style involves heavy use of a sepia-toned filter. It is not an anomaly. You can find her website and see it on all of her samples. The couple spent eight grand. They knew going in that the sepia look was a stylistic choice, but after a good think, they concluded it was icky.
Maybe it’s because I do not and never have considered myself an artist. I am a skilled craftsman. For some fifty years, I have strived to “get the picture.” Trying to get “creative” is rare because I am not very good at it. I love to take photographs that look like the subject I saw with my Mk-1 eyeballs. When I cull a shoot, I first look for sharpness. Slightly fuzzy photos that don’t respond to Topaz Photo AI are trashed.
I shoot for accuracy. I rarely use over-lens filters, even a CPL, because if I only want a crisply detailed sky, it’s better to do that in post with a graduated filter or the sky selection tool. Lightroom Classic comes with a plethora of presets that I rarely use. I do have some presets that I created and use to save a little time. I never buy presets. I have an old copy of DxO I never use. I do most of my RAW editing in Lightroom Classic 2024.
I wonder if I have a “style.” If I do, it’s mostly plain vanilla, the “natural” color. On the other hand, I rarely show any picture that has not been carefully post-processed to bring out the best in every RAW capture.
I shot many weddings during those thrilling days of yesteryear when all we had was film. Today there are “filters” that (they tell me) can simulate the distinctive look of certain films, Kodak Portra 400, say, vs. Fujifilm Superia 400.
Ummmm… Why?
I shot most of my weddings with Portra 400 in 6x6cm Hasselblads. The film was processed and printed by a pro lab. It was natural color, and it looked great. Our lab even had skilled negative retouchers who could work on the tiny images.
At my legitimately curmudgeonly age (82), I struggle even to imagine why I would start applying film “looks” to my pictures. Since I transitioned to digital in 2007, I have not shot one single solitary frame of film. If you love film, go for it; film is simply obsolete for me.
I have written stories about my disdain for the Latest Thang. If you know my work, you know I am captivated by what I can do today in post that was flat impossible in analog, and I revel in it. Indeed, it’s a “latest thang,” but I love it, so it doesn’t count.
I love digital and wish I’d had it sooner. I work hard to “get it right in the camera” to build a solid base in post. Getting it right means being well exposed, sharp, having good overall color, and having a robust and balanced composition.
It appears that the luckless photographer in question did precisely that—before applying her signature sepia. Her original raw captures are (IMO) perfect, with clean, crisp, accurate colors: greens are green, flesh is flesh, white is white, black is black, gray is gray—plain vanilla natural color.
But she has a style! That our hapless bride already acknowledged and said (then) that she loved! Our photographer sepia-tones everything in post production.
Let me be clear: personally, I hate it.
But it’s not my style!
Where the controversy comes in is the pushback from both sides.
The bride changed her mind (after stewing for a month) and now wants the pictures restored to the original RAW renders. The photographer essentially refuses on principle. “You said you loved my style. It’s what you contracted for. It’s what I delivered. Go pound sand.”*
*(Compromises have been proffered from both sides with indeterminate success.)
In the commentary, photographers, especially professional wedding photographers, tend broadly to side with the photographer, but equal numbers suggest that good customer service perhaps ought to trump principle.
Reading many comments, I notice considerable photographers going on about the light (overcast), the this, the that, and the other things that could have affected the overall results, and I call bee ess. Any pro (or past pro) should be able to handle these challenges. I pride myself on being able to shoot digitally, handheld, in rich color, in absolutely any light or lack thereof. I especially love working in museums, which are often dark, with mixed light sources. For example:
I don’t grok why overcast should be a problem. It is low-contrast, generally touted as good. You need fewer flashes since there are fewer shadows to tame. It should have little affect on color. I carry a collapsible gray target that can be inserted into the first shot of a sequence. The white balance eyedropper ensures that the rest of the sequence is neutral.
I think digital and post-processing are nothing short of a miracle (I’m a longtime Adobe man). I joke that forty years ago, I’d have killed for what I can do today. In this instance, if I were this photographer, I’d likely revert all the changes at no charge (no wonder I never made much money) just to keep the bride happy and not trashing me all over every “influencer” site there is. We never advertised; it was 100% word of mouth. One bad mouth could have been career-killing.
But that’s me.
From that day to this, my mindset is, “If the client ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
After sixteen years and maybe 600-ish (?) weddings, I never had an unhappy couple. I was never sued. (I also never made much money, which is why we were forced to give it up after sixteen years.) We had tons of repeat business. Families with four daughters proudly showed off four wedding albums shot exclusively by Mister Haacker. I never had a second shooter. My long-suffering wife was by my side on nearly every job, keeping the shot list, fluffing the gown, herding the cats, and carrying the second light on a monopod. If something went wrong, she was the Lady in the Spangled Tights, vamping to direct attention elsewhere while I literally sweated buckets into my camera case to retrieve a backup (Anything You Have Only One of WILL break).
From my experience, I see responsibility on both sides. The bride was effusive and fully cognizant of the photographer’s sepia style but changed her mind.
The photographer is correct that this is a client problem, but she has attempted to mitigate the issue while avoiding compromising her principles or her income.
The bride made an unforced error by taking to social media to trash her photographer for not immediately acceding and changing everything back. Apparently, she considers that eight grand is enough.
On balance, I think there is a greater fault on the bride’s side.
But this vociferous, public bashing threatens the photographer’s career.
There is a reason I have not shot a wedding since 1995.
📸As always, gratitude for looking in. I sincerely appreciate it! Questions in the comments will be answered promptly, so please ask.😊👍
