Our System

I thought I'd take some time and tell you a little bit about our photography system...meaning...how we shoot, store, edit, and deliver your wedding day to you in really awesome, colorful pictures.

We're forever in the tweaking mode when it comes to the way we work with our images. New technology, programs and lesssons learned at workshops help keep us on our toes...and our clients' images safe. When we explain our process to some clients, I think they are surprised at the lengths we go to to protect our images. But it's because of this system, I'm proud to say, that we have NEVER misplaced or lost a SINGLE image that someone has paid us to create. And there's no need to knock on wood!

So here's the system. Take an average, full-day coverage wedding for example:

Regardless of if it's just me, or Stacey and I both, covering the wedding, we arrive with around 30 GB in memory cards. That's enough memory to shoot around 4,500 images. Now before you get too excited, let me clarify that we wouldn't not be alive today if we shot 4,000+ images per wedding. We have this much memory with us because, we never know when a memory card is going to lock up or fail all-together, which means we have to be prepared to replace one at a moment's notice.

One of the great things about the camera I use to shoot weddings is its interior ability to backup images. When I take a picture at an event, my camera automatically saves two seperate images to two seperate memory cards. This allows me to shoot all day long without ever having to worry about losing images on a memory card.

At the end of the day, before we pack up any equipment or even leave the shoot site, Stacey and I put all of our memory cards into a protective case together, away from those evil cameras that could accidently erase them if we weren't so careful!

We've made a policy out of immediately backing up all of our images on a number of different platforms.

First, all of the images are downloaded from the cards to our main iMac editing computer in our office. Once they've been transferred there, they are burned to DVDs and placed in a dust-proof, ultra clean storage case. The digital files are than copied from the iMac to two seperate external hard drives. At this point, if you've been keeping count, we have five seperate copies of each and every image that we took at the wedding earlier that evening.

We store the DVDs outside of our office and home, which keeps the images in two different locations to protect from fire, flood or some other catastrophe. At the end of the day (mind you, this storage routine all takes place the same day as the wedding) we will have three usable and full copies of every image, in two seperate locations.

During the editing process, we run through the same backup system about every 50 edits. This means that if something were to fail in the middle of an editing session, we would still have the original copy of the image, but also would have only lost a maximum of 50 edited pictures.

After we've delivered the final edited images to a client, we back those images up in the same way that we did the originals on the wedding night. We've been in business for almost three years, and we still have every image that we took from our first wedding.

As an onlooker reading this post, you might think we're a little overly-cautious. But once you've become one of our clients, and entrusted us with the images of one of your life's most important moments...we're thinking you'll be OK with a little overkill.