Introduction
Neil Marks Photography provide a high-quality wedding photography service in Leeds and throughout the whole of Yorkshire. Neil bought his very first camera as a young boy in the early 1970's - a Praktica L film camera made in the old East Germany. It was so basic that it didn't even have built-in exposure metering and every single photograph had to be checked with a hand-held light meter. It was an extremely slow, but fascinating way to learn about photography!.
Although today's professional camera's are virtual supercomputers in comparison, the fundamentals of good photography have remained unchanged. It doesn't matter one iota if you have the latest and most expensive equipment, without a great eye for composition and a creative and artistic flair you cannot truly be called a good photographer.
Our approach to wedding photography is to work in an informal, candid "documentary" style. We try to be as unobtrusive as possible, enabling you and your friends and family to enjoy every cherished moment of your most special day. We endeavour to minimise the number of formal group shots, and aim to capture the feel, the emotions, the very essence of your wedding.
Working this way means that we can be be more spontaneous and allows us to capture those unique and memorable moments that you will treasure forever. Whilst a number of formal images are essential, we always look to capture those fleeting moments that can disappear in a split-second. Your wedding day should be a celebration that lives in your memory forever and we don't think that you should be spending half your special day posing for a camera!. Of course, those more formal images are not taken lightly and we will offer you some guidance and direction to ensure that they look as natural and elegant as possible.
Depending on the package you choose we may also have some private time available with just the bride and groom to capture some more intimate and personal images that reflect the love you share and these sessions can be great fun and allow us to produce a more varied portfolio of images.
As well as photographing people, we also like to record the details of your wedding that mean so much to you - the venue, the dress, the shoes, the flowers and the rings, just as a few examples.
If you would like to receive our wedding price list please contact us. This price list features a number of different standard packages, although we are very happy to customise an individual package for you to suit your budget. If none of the options here are quite what you're looking for, just tell us exactly what you want.
Why Us?
A few years ago, in the good old days of film photography, a wedding photographers job was pretty simple. Shoot a few rolls of film, deliver them to the photo lab, and then sit back and wait for the finished prints which would then be inserted into an album. Now, in the digital age, things are very different!.
During a full day's coverage we can shoot as many as 1500-2000 images. These images then have to be sorted and edited on computer before the final portfolio can be delivered to the client. As a rough guide, for every day we spend on site with the client during the wedding we will spend up to four additional days doing the post processing in the "digital darkroom".
The first job is to sort through the entire collection and reduce it down to a few hundred that are worthy of detailed manipulation. Then we individually edit these images using a variety of professional software products, including Adobe Photoshop. We have several thousand pounds worth of image editing software, all of which helps turn a good image from the camera into a superb image worthy of printing. This is one of the many ways that a professional photographer differs from an enthusiastic amateur: the ability to finesse an image from "OK" to WOW!".
What exactly do we do during this editing process?. Firstly, we ensure that the exposure is spot on. This may sound obvious in the days of auto-everything cameras, but even with our expensive professional equipment, we sometimes don't get the exposure absolutely spot-on!. When shooting, for example, in bright, contrasty light, the cameras sensors can often be fooled and end up over-exposing lighter areas of the image. The brides dress is a typical example of this. A photo taken by an amateur will often over-expose the dress and lose all the intricate details. With our professional software we can often recover these lost details.
Our extensive editing service also allows us to remove or reduce those little imperfections such as wrinkles and skin blemishes, and whiten the eyes and teeth. No detail is overlooked to ensure you look your very best!. After checking the exposure, we then move on to other adjustments such as contrast, colour saturation and sharpness. Sometimes there are elements within an image that we would like to remove. Compare the two images below - a nice shot made much better with an hour's work in Photoshop!
Many of the images often look more interesting with some kind of special effects - perhaps a simple black and white conversion, or like the images below a high-key sepia effect has been used to great effect
Once the editing process has been completed we then put all the finished images in a gallery on our website for family and friends to view, and we prepare a DVD with all the high-resolution master files. These are effectively the digital "negatives", and with this disc you can make unlimited prints of any image that you like. However, by far the best way to present your photographs is in a high-quality album, and if you choose one of our album packages you will receive a beautiful hand-made flush-mount album (often referred to as "coffee-table" books), in addition to the DVD. We can offer a wide range of styles including covers in leather, metal and crystal, as well as a variety of different paper types and smaller copies as well for parents.