That new term feeling

It's April, and the wedding season is upon us and from twitter goings on it looks like I'm not the only one shooting my first wedding of 2012 this weekend. In fact I've got a whole new-term feel, I'm full of inspiration of things to do and where I want to drive this little business and part of what I want to do this year is to blog more, not just to talk about the shoots but also the business end of it as I see it; things I've learnt, post-processing and workflow, inspirational stuff - business things really which might not be entirely interesting to all of my lovely couples, or potential couples so to that end I'll be adding a little something to the top of the page so you can hop straight to weddings and engagements. Partly, what feels so real this time round is that I've just invested in new equipment - I'm so excited I could scream about it but instead of doing that I took it for a little spin round the house and garden, just to check all the buttons were in the same places as the old ones (and they are) so here are some random bits and bobs. Apologies in advance for the number of cat pics. Pippin Poppy

  To the left are my artificial roses from Atelier Abigail Ahern, they actually look amazing real, in fact all of her faux flowers are fantastic. To the right is a painted Mexican diablo from a little store in the East Village in NY. Incidentally, all of the above were edited using VSCO film, a new aquisition. I'd never really had much love for editing within Lightroom - basic RAW adjustments, exporting and converting to neatly sized blogable jpgs were all well and good but I'd really honed the look I do within Photoshop and was happier to trade off long hours in front of my Mac for images that looked the way I wanted rather than like they looked after full editing in Lightroom - always with highlights blown, colours skewed and things just generally looking, frankly, a bit dodgy.

When VSCO film came out it seemed everyone was waxing lyrical about it but I've held off until now to buy it. I'm pretty impressed by it as a Lightroom product but I don't see that I would ever stop using Photoshop completely because of it - there's still not quite fine grained enough control for my liking and the cool grey tones need something warmer, which I'm not sure that you can achieve using this product alone. Pinks look a bit odd too - it renders them too magenta somehow.

It is, however, a massive leap forward to be able to achieve Photoshop quality as quickly as you can using VSCO film - a full review to come once I've used it a little more.