If you've been wondering where our album features have gone, we've moved them to The Queensberry Blog, our new blog directed to consumers. Its main purpose in life is to feature beautiful client albums ("album candy"!) That makes it a great place to send your clients to check out some Queensberry goodness ... and a great place to feature your own work, don't you think? More on that soon. Meantime here's a peek at a couple of albums we've featured recently... (click the images to see the full feature). A Columbian style wedding by Alex Rodriguez A New Zealand wedding by Tracy Turpen And one from To View More >>

[caption id="attachment_1348" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Photography by Michael + Anna Costa"][/caption] Although we'd love all our clients to print with us, and most now do, we can't expect that everyone will. It's a huge ask to send your images to the other side of the world for printing.  But sometimes, for reasons that have little to do with the printing itself, we need really tight control to deliver you a good result. Duos are a prime example. The design and craft processes that allow us to integrate digital and matted pages, create split mats etc are intensive and very demanding. To View More >>

Before they invented pixels much of the stuff that we do in post production happened to the image as it was taken. There used to be a vignette you could apply 'on camera', there were wonderful things that you could do using a softar filter. There also was attention to detail. Details of composition, lighting, expression and, dare I use the word, posing. We now shoot a ridiculous number of frames as we become more opportunist and somehow more reckless. Certainly from this reckless/prolific behavior we get some true gems, but we often create more work than is necessary. I just wanted to give a plug To View More >>

I watched a video on DWF by Jesh de Rox ("Client Connections"). Everybody loves Jesh, and “Jesh loves everybody" ... Actually there are probably a few photographers who don’t "love Jesh" because they don’t know him ... Possibly fairer to say, ‘To know him is to be loved by him" ... and we all know that love works best as a two way street. He talked about getting couples to show their love to you, the photographer. You cannot do it without trust. And you cannot do it without first giving them some love of your own. How profoundly simple but true! Johannes To View More >>

At the seminar I mentioned recently the presenter prefaced anything that might sound critical with, "I know this doesn't apply to you, but..." So, I know this doesn't apply to you, but... Tony Bramley had this to say about Johanne's last post: "There have always been crap photographers. Even in the days of film our old lab used to tell us of terrible exposures etc. "It's just there are more of them with digital cameras who think they can do a professional job in a very amateur way. If they don't know their trade and tools they are not professionals. As a printing company as well as an album To View More >>

We see things differently, Jo (my lovely wife and the mother of our child) and I. She likes punchy images, and I like seeing detail and tone. You can't have both - it's a trade-off. In spite of our differences we both want the best. I sympathise with the lab, trying to keep people like us happy. Its going to be interesting seeing who gets to dress our child (in June). Cheers, Johannes To View More >>

Every wedding photographer has an Uncle Ken story. I was hanging out at a wedding with photographer Brett Prestidge when I first arrived in the UK and something amazing happened... We met the ultimate Uncle Ken. Uncle Ken informed us that he had the okay from the bride and groom to do a big group photograph for them. It is so often the case that as professionals we arrive at weddings and somebody there has a bigger camera than us ... this time it was Uncle Ken. Brett and I were using small, discrete Leica M9s and M8s. So often Uncle Ken tries to take control. This Uncle Ken (his real name) earned To View More >>

Forget about boxing, here are the Queensberry Rules for photographers! 1. Outstanding presentation adds enormous value to your photography. 2. Using the same albums as everyone else reduces the value of your photography. Ask anyone in the street how much a stack of prints is worth, or a disc of images, or a slideshow. Everyone's been to the mini lab, or burnt a disk, so the answer is, "Not much". What you're paying for when you hire a professional, of course, is their time, skill and artistry. Focusing on the presentation takes nothing away from that. It simply places the photography in a new To View More >>

Bob had another noteworthy one-liner in his seminar: "Gen Y is about to discover the difference between a Want and a Need." You need to understand that Bob was sharing the stage with young Danny, and there were plenty more Gen Y in the audience... I'm a Boomer like Bob, so I was fine with it, but Danny said, "I wonder whether he offended anyone?" FWIW it made me think about two aspects of "framing" your photography. Bob used certain words to describe his role (artist, historian) and what motivated his clients (love, pride). He's framing his photography as a Need, not a Want. Something they can't To View More >>

At weddings there are always time burglars stealing from the innocent, so we talk to our clients about how long things really take ... so we don't lose the time we need. Sometimes this means that a cunning couple will deliberately try to run us out of time because they hate having their photographs taken. We distract them by focusing on their feelings for each other instead of their feelings about photography – easy if you aren't constantly asking them to smile for the camera. One of the most guilty time burglars is the make-up artist … stealing time from the photographer to get the perfect To View More >>