While being busy working and sacrificing to build a vision, it’s always wonderful to come across people that believe in your work and support you in your journey. Mahroo and I have been blessed with many friends all across the country that appreciate our vision and truly support us. Recently, we were fortunate enough to have a wedding of ours be featured by some fabulous editors of some great wedding blogs. Sarah and Ahmd Azab’s wedding was featured by Fri of Wedding Nouveau and the wonderful editors at MyWedding.com‘s “Delightfully Engaged” blog.

Today, I would like to introduce something new Mahroo and I are starting to offer – gift cards!

We have two types. Shown in this post is our “session” gift card, valued at $400, that is valid for a family, individual, fashion, or couple’s photo shoot. You can purchase this for your loved ones on any occasion – anniversaries, reunions, graduation, child birth, and so on.

Our second type of gift card is directly related to weddings. The couple’s family and friends can now purchase gift cards of either $150 or $300 value and it’ll go towards paying for the couple’s wedding photography package. Think of it as a sort of photography registry – clients make their package, their loved ones help buy the goods =)

I am often asked about post-production and how important it is. In the digital age, the computer is just as important as the camera in delivering a great product. Also, processing can make or break an image just as bad composing can. So, I thought I would put together a little demonstration of before-and-after samples to show what happens to images after the initial capture.

This is a picture from Sobia and Fahad’s wedding. Close up pictures usually require some skin softening, hair strand removal, and blemish fixes along with creative color and contrast augmentation.

A well exposed and composed image can work perfectly straight out of camera. If you know what you’re doing and handle capturing part well, then processing isn’t always about fixing things. The image here is from Kiswa and Sameer’s wedding and as you can see, there really wasn’t any work done on exposure. The image is treated with a split toning recipe along with some work on the tonal curve.

On days I have beautiful light and gorgeous skies, I like to really pull in the blues. Selective burning and dodging are old darkroom tricks that still work wonderfully in the digital age. Mixed exposures allow for a more dynamic looking picture as seen in this shot of Sarah and Azab.

Black and white conversions can be some of the most complicated processes. I really liked this picture of Lucia and wanted to make a duotone piece out of it. Shown first and second are the straight-out-of-camera image and basic software black-and-white rendering. After some cloning, brush work (burning in shadows / dodging highlights), and hint of color toning, we have a more dynamic duotone composition.