Welcome to Wednesday – Midweek Musings time.

As a wedding photographer in 2014 it’s inevitable that some kind of editing software will be used in post production – whether it be Lightroom, Photoshop, Alien Skin etc. I was always a photoshop girl but something changed when Lightroom 5 launched. A very lovely and super talented wedding photographer friend recommended it to me and I’ve never looked back. When I first started photographing weddings editing frightened me. No wait, that’s not right; editing terrified me. I felt like a failure if I didn’t get it 100% perfect in camera first time round. I was taught photography by teachers and tutors in a darkroom and everything back in the days of film and film is an expensive material and every single one of those 36 shots counted. Don’t mess up, don’t mess up, don’t mess up, don’t mess up, DAMN!

At my first few weddings I found that digital had the potential to let me overshoot things, weddings tend to have many things going on all at once and you can sometimes feel a little overwhelmed. I grew to love the ability to delete images on the go and re take image after image until perfect. Digital isn’t an excuse for shoddy images – photoshop can’t make a bad image good. But it can enhance our work so easily and over time I’ve come to love editing software – I might crop an image, correct the colour if it’s a little off, ensure the exposure is looking good. And that’s it. I’ve been asked to remove tattoos, moles and scars in the past and I’ve reluctantly agreed but always felt icky doing it. You’re you and you’re awesome as you are.

When I photograph a wedding I want to photograph it and keep it as it is as much as possible – if the sky was grey I’m not going to turn it Bahamian blue, if you want a photo of you in that field, then lets get in there and take the photo. And no, I don’t do colour pop images. I want to photograph what is real, what is genuine and raw.

It got me thinking about my own wedding day in 2010. It was in on an overcast Tuesday in October. In Canada. It was two degrees above freezing. It was cold, a bit dull and cloudy and to me, it was perfect. I would of hated it if my photographer super imposed a different sky or made my husband and I look ‘less cold’ or removed my tattoos. I loved everything about that day – and the photos are exactly how I remember it. We had an great photographer who shot everything just as I had hoped for and then some. I cried when I saw the images for the first time, and I still get emotional four years on just leafing through our album.

All Images by Nicola Gough except last image by Bev Cavanagh