Welcome to the blog of CKP Weddings.
CKP Weddings are London and Jersey based documentary wedding photographers that cover amazing weddings for our clients around the world. We truly believe in the power of documentary photography and how those special, unrepeatable moments of your wedding day, captured well, will always be a reminder now and for generations to come of your wedding day, your family and your friends.
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BEAUTIFULLY. DISCREETLY. NATURALLY
It has been an exciting week if you are a Leica fan! Leica brought out their new camera and it is called the
Leica Monochrom and as the title suggests shoots only in black and white.
Whilst my initial thoughts about this camera was what was the point as you can convert the colour files into black and white and with a little work in post production have an image that is pretty exceptional in it's tonal range etc. But now that I think about it a bit more and are seeing examples of the images that are coming out of the latest Leica camera I am starting to come around to the idea.
When working as a
documentary photographer I used two camera's a
Leica M6 and a
Leica M7 in my M6 was always black and white Kodak Tri-X and in the M7 I would have colour slide film. This always worked very well for me and when I saw an image that just cried out black and white I would use the M6 and vice versa with the M7. The benefit of having two camera's with different types of film is that you can really discipline yourself in the art of colour or black and white.
You start to see things really differently once you are restricted to black and white, there are many scenes that for me just do not work well in black and white and when you come across them you would quickly move on to finding a subject that does work well. It really is an art seeing and working in black and white and I think the
Leica Monochrom will be a great tool for photographers to really get into the art of photographing in black and white.
The down side of this camera is the price at £6100 for the body it is out of the price of most photographers.Working with the rangefinder system also takes some skill to master, particularly if you are shooting wide open with very shallow depth of field as all the focusing is done manually, which is fine if your subject is not moving but tough if they are!
It has taken me a little while to get to the point where I am comfortable shooting the
Leica M9 at weddings, as my style dictates that I document everything at it's widest aperture (apart from any group pictures I take when I shoot at about a f5.6). The margin for error shooting wide open is great when dealing with people that are moving around as it takes time to master the manual focusing. Thankfully, I am relearning skills that I already had from a few years ago and they are coming back to me quite well.
I have now gone on to stage two of the introduction of the Leica M9 into my
wedding photography work and started documenting the dancing with it. Covering the dancing has proved to be quite tough as I have been using the
Noctilux 0.95 for a lot of the dancing images and getting the focusing just right is a real challenge.
So, with the above said I thought I would show some examples of some colour shots take using the
Leica M9 at a recent wedding. I will make my black and white selections soon and post about those images in the coming days. The below images have been processed through
Aperture and have not had any sharpening and only slight contrast and vibrancy but nothing dramatic added.
And my favourite image.........well that would have to be of the bride looking out of the car window as we drive through Hyde Park. She looks very happy and content after her wedding.
As usual do feel free to comment or if you have any questions I would be happy to answer them.
Poppy and I completed a wedding recently here in Jersey for Claire and George. I think you can tell what kind of couple they are and how happy they both are. It was a great winter wedding and thankfully the weather was kind to us.
One of my favourite images is of the bride getting ready with her bridesmaids at hand to help out. I like the way the hands are coming from the left of the image which then takes your eye to the bride and then leads you away to the bridesmaid in the right of the picture. I think, every picture should lead the viewers eye on a journey from one part of the image to the next and I think this image is a good example of this.
For those photographers of you reading this blog there is a mixture of Leica M9 (my favourite camera) images, Canon 5D MK2 and the new Canon 5D MK3 images below. Feel free to see if you can spot which camera took what images. Good luck!!!
I was pleased with the new Canon 5D MK3, although ergonomically I don't get on with the camera, it is reasonably discreet depending on what lens you are using. The files are pretty amazing in low light but I have to be careful as a photographer to make sure that what I document is representative of what the bride, groom and guests remember the light/atmosphere being like. With such a sensitive sensor the camera can very nearly turn dark into daylight!!
Enjoy the images and feel free to comment.
Poppy took a bit of time to photograph the children of our studio manager Debbie last week so I thought I would share with you my favourite images from that shoot. My absolute favourite however, is the last image of the boys posing for the camera.
My preference is 99 times out of a 100, always for the unposed pictures but on this occasion I think Poppy has done an amazing job to capture the boys in a relaxed and happy state that there is a real strength to the image. You can also tell that the boys have a great friendship and perhaps this reminds me of my two boys who are not to dissimilar to Debbie's fine young men.
Poppy's favourite is of image three "I just love the expression on those boy's faces as they were running towards me." says Poppy.
As usual feel free to comment on this post or anything else on this blog.
Poppy and I had a fantastic wedding here in Jersey over the weekend and it was with much delight that I had my Leica M9 back from Solms in Germany. Using my 90mm 2.8, 35mm 1.4 and my Noctilux 50mm 0.95 I am delighted to have the dream team back together again.
What I love so much about the Leica is the actual taking of the images with the camera - it is a real pleasure to use and I get a lot of satisfaction when I get the shot right. The Leica M9 is a hard camera to master and shooting at the widest aperture can be a challenge especially using the Noctilux 50mm 0.95. I think I have another year to go before I master that lens shooting at 0.95 - the slightest movement out of the range of focus and the image is totally unusable and shooting weddings nothing stays still for long........but if you get it right the images are absolutely mind blowing. So, a years more experience with the Noctilux and I reckon I will be pretty on the ball with shooting at 0.95. (and for those of you that don't know the Leica is a pure manual camera - none of this auto programming and auto focus!!)
Anyway, below are a selection of four images taken using the Leica, the first three images are with my amazing 35mm 1.4 lens all shot at 1.4 and the last image is with the Noctilux shot at 0.95.
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