All about lenses! Do you NEED that wide aperture glass?

Steve and Nick are running on empty through a busy wedding season! In this show they look at their respective collection of Sony fit lenses. Do we really need that F1.4 aperture? And what else do they look for when choosing and using Sony lenses. The guys also look at their back up strategies for wedding raw files, do we have a blind spot in our workflow? And, at what stage do we break out the flash gear at a wedding, if at all?

Evoto One launch event in NYC https://luma.com/1c3nl5kq

Fujikina London https://www.fujifilm-x.com/en-gb/events/fujikina-london-2025/

Transcript

Steve Vaughan (00:00)
Nick, this is the time of year that wedding photographers typically go and lie in darkened rooms after an exhausting weekend. And I think you've had a pretty flat on weekend and so have we actually. How you been getting on out there in wedding mass market hell?

Nick Church (00:13)
You can, you can

normally tell by, by the, by my choice of drink during our podcast records. So if it's, if it's coffee, you know, I'm quite tired. If it's a nice orange juice, I'm feeling all right. If it's wine, you can tell us what we can have. If you ever see me with like a, if I've, if I've got like a whiskey old fashioned or something, you know that things aren't going well. It was, it's a, it's a nightmare, isn't it? And we always complain about it, but we do all love our jobs, but there is a point.

Steve Vaughan (00:18)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it's only 10 o'clock in the afternoon. No.

Yeah.

Nick Church (00:41)
Normally, but for me, it's usually August where it's just brutal and you can't really, because everybody's busy at work. Everyone's jobs is really busy, but it's just the relentless nature of it. I know you've had what, three weddings last, last week?

Steve Vaughan (00:44)
Hmm. Yeah.

We had three weddings in four days. So we went Thursday, Friday, not a Saturday, interestingly, but then the Sunday and then the Monday, the bank holiday Monday, we had a wedding fair. So yeah, that was interesting. And you've had a phone few days as well, I think.

Nick Church (01:09)
Yeah, well, it's, you know, for, for the listener that it's not, um, a wedding photographer, which I'm sure there's plenty, very much, very many of that, you know, a wedding day is a long day, isn't it? There's you're, you're prepping either in the morning before you go, or you might try and do that the night before to give yourself a couple of hours sleep. If you're not, if you're quite far away, you're leaving at nine in the morning together.

Steve Vaughan (01:24)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Nick Church (01:31)
And then you're shooting from maybe 10, if it's doing the bridal preparations through till I go to about sort of nine 30, 10, the other side. So it could easily be 12, 13 hours door to door. And it's in that time, it's just nonstop and it's not, um, physical because you'd have thought that we'd all be thin as rakes, but we're not. So it's, it's not physical, but it's, it's tiring cause you're on your feet all the time. Yeah. And the three, the three course meals that you get in the good, in the nice venues. And, it's the.

Steve Vaughan (01:37)
Same here, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's the Sweetie Trolley.

Nick Church (02:00)
You know, I suppose if you could just do a, if you're happy with 80%, you could probably just drop down your effort to almost 20 % and get 80 % of the results. But I know you're not into doing that. And neither am I. want to put a hundred percent into it. And that means you're always looking out for everything that's going on. And if you do have a quick drink, so you have a quick glass of Coke for sort of five minutes, something happens and you're off again. And when you get the wedding meal that that technically

Steve Vaughan (02:10)
No, no, absolutely.

Nick Church (02:23)
ought to be two hours. never is by the time you set up flash or gone out to do some drone shots or something like that, you might get 20 minutes where I'm sitting down. But yeah, I had a wedding in Not Worcester, Wolverhampton, and that was a big Indian wedding party. it was, but it started at six in the evening. So I left here about, you know, that sort of distance. I'm kind of a, let me get there an hour and a half early and I'll just have a coffee kind of person. I'd rather just do that.

Steve Vaughan (02:31)
Yeah.

Nick Church (02:53)
So I left it about two and got, got there about with five minutes to spare. So I was in the car for about three and a half, three, three, three and three quarter hours. And then the wedding party went from six till about one o'clock. So I got back here at three in the morning and I had a wedding at 10 the next morning in Clevedon. I, so I couldn't even just, I thought in my mind, I would, when I took the bookings, I was thinking, that's right, three o'clock.

Steve Vaughan (02:53)
Yeah, same here.

Man, wow.

Nick Church (03:19)
10 o'clock, that's seven hours. But of course I then had to back up all my images when I got back and charge all the batteries up. So I had to sit while that was all backing up and then leave an hour before to make sure I got the wrong time. So it ended up about three and a half hours sleep. So I was really running on fumes that day. And I had to really dig deep to do the same job that I would have done had I been properly rested. And I did, but it was, it was hard work. was, I had a good friend of mine, I knew he listens to the pod, doing the video on that wedding.

Steve Vaughan (03:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Nick Church (03:47)
And that

was a lifesaver to have somebody there, somebody there that I could sort keep me quite sane. So that was good.

Steve Vaughan (03:50)
Hahaha.

Sure.

Yeah, I think, you know, no matter how poops we might be at this time of year, it's obviously important that the next customer is the most important customer that you've ever had until the next one comes along. So making sure that we do a great job. as I know you, of course you do. And we do as well. We haven't been quite as bonkers in terms of the traveling that you've had. did have, ⁓ we had an Indian wedding as well, actually on the Sunday, which started with a UK legal ceremony followed by

Nick Church (04:16)
Mm.

Steve Vaughan (04:20)
a little break with a lot of group photos and and Indian, it wasn't the full Hindu, that two day thing, but it was a full on ceremony. Fascinating, really, really enjoyed it actually. But by the time we got back, as you say, you've got to back everything up, because I can't settle until I've backed everything up, get all the batteries charged for next day as well. It's pretty full on at this time here. We're not complaining, dear listener, we're not complaining.

Nick Church (04:38)
Yeah.

This was a similar thing. Yeah. don't

usually, in these days, I don't usually try all that. I'm saying that I've got a few in Hampshire later in this year, so September, October, but I'm staying, I'm going to stay down there the night before to make it easier. But this was a similar thing. had their wedding ceremony in Cornwall the week before. And I was, I was shooting on an associate basis. So the photographer that took the booking couldn't do the wedding party aspects, which I think she was on holiday. Um, so I, so I stepped in to do that one.

Steve Vaughan (05:03)
Right.

Nick Church (05:13)
And, it was just to make it worse. It was hybrid as well. I subsequently, he subsequently was interested in video. So I said, would do a video alongside the, alongside the photos. man, which as you know, is, is even harder. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (05:16)
man.

Gosh, yeah. It's an extra challenge. an extra, it's like splitting your brain in half. And then of

course we have all the editing to look forward to as well. So let's start the show, Nick. And I know we've got a lot we're gonna talk about today, but let's get on with the show.

So yeah, welcome to the photography pod with me, Steve Vaughan and my good mate, Nick Church. And one of the things we wanted to talk about today is lenses. So photographers get excited about glass. Uh, and I know we're no different on that really. So we've got lots of lenses here. know you have as well. And you know, one of the joys of interchangeable lens cameras, of course, is the fact that the lenses are interchangeable. So

What is it that you, if you decide that you need a new lens or you're looking at a different lens for your business, Nick, what is it that you would initially look for? What is the first thing that would cross your mind?

Nick Church (06:11)
Well,

it's an interesting point because I don't know about you, but when, certainly when you start photography, I'm sure a lot of listeners will resonate with this. You're, you know what focal length you need. that's the, that's the initial thing. Obviously, you know what focal length you're going for this portrait lens or whatever, but then you go straight to the maximum aperture and you don't really read much of the other spec. That's it. You know, the maximum aperture is the, is the main thing. And it kind of wears off after a while because I'd like to talk about flash later as well. think we're going to talk about that later as well.

Steve Vaughan (06:38)
Hmm.

Nick Church (06:40)
That maximum aperture is less important than it increasingly becomes less important to me as I get more and more experienced in photography, because the, that 1.2, 1.4 versus a two or 2.8 even in reality is giving you an extra half an hour at the end of the day before you need to bring out the flash anyway. so, um, so the other things that are really important that, and this, this occurred to me because I was creating a, um, a module all about lenses for the

Steve Vaughan (07:00)
Yeah, interesting thought. Yeah.

Nick Church (07:10)
photographer unleashed course. And I'd never really thought about it to that level of depth before, but these things like additional buttons, know, customizable buttons, never really considered that. And I've got that all my GM lenses have got customers with buttons. The 70-200 has got four of the damn things on that. Do you

Steve Vaughan (07:26)
That's right.

Do I ever use the buttons on the lenses? Yes, I do actually. Yeah. Normally from doing weddings, then it's just another way of triggering autofocus for me. So, you know, if I'm at the front of a wedding and I want to lock on. Well, I was your caveat that I use

Nick Church (07:40)
Okay.

Steve Vaughan (07:48)
the AF on button on the back of the Sony's anyway as I focus. So I make it basically hit on the eye. If I'm pointing the camera in the right direction, hit the back button to immediately lock onto the nearest eye. So the lens button does the same thing. Having said all that though, if I'm doing sort of drinks and nibbles time, as I call it, on the Sony A7C2, which I like to use for that, Shock Horror has only got one.

Nick Church (08:05)
Okay.

Steve Vaughan (08:15)
SD card, but you know, there it is. ⁓ I know, ⁓ I use the lenses on the button on those lenses on that camera for silent shutter mode. Cause I'll switch to silent shutter on and off and, know, hopefully not get any, any, ⁓ Rodney shutter. Cause I really don't want to change what's going on there. I did the same for street photography as well. So

Nick Church (08:16)
Ugh, I'm gonna phone the police.

Hmm. Okay.

I expect if I had

a, camera with, with just one fewer buttons on the a seven four on the back, I probably would be doing the same because I've got a silent shutter on the back. You that bunks, I do switch it out of that quite a lot. The, the IOS focus. tell you, I was in, I was at a wedding and I, it was really dark. I did a wedding. It is a venue called the forum. It's not wedding venue. It's a theater in bath, the forum, and it's actually owned by a very small church next door. And so they.

Steve Vaughan (08:59)
I know it, yeah.

Nick Church (09:03)
members of this church were getting married. So that's how I ended up doing a wedding. And then it was obviously really dark and the, kind of wasn't focusing on the eye very well. I thought, what's going on? This is normally faultless. I could not work it out. It would occasionally work. So wasn't like it was turned off. So I knew I had disabled it. I thought, it just so like lack of contrast in here that it can't, it can't buy deny. And then I remembered that I'd done a shoot in the week, uh, with a couple that had a dog and I put it into, um, an animal mode.

Steve Vaughan (09:30)
⁓

And it wasn't a dog getting married, funnily enough, Brilliant. ⁓

Nick Church (09:33)
It wasn't, it was, have got some absolute bangers if there was a dog getting married that day.

So I was resorting to frantically moving the spot around. But yeah, got there in the end.

Steve Vaughan (09:40)
Yeah, and newspaper headlines, yeah.

Going back to lens functions generally, so are you an aperture ring changer or an aperture changer on the camera?

Nick Church (09:54)
I'm always on, on the camera. all of my GM lenses have got, you know, they've all got the aperture ring. Uh, I just put it into a, which, which is they call it auto. It's a bit annoying because it's not auto is it just means it's controlled by the back of the camera rather than on the lens. But yeah, I, I, I never use it. I lock it. I, you know, I actually, I lock it in place because I don't want to lock it into F 22 by accident. I know filmmakers use it a lot more and they'll use the de click.

Steve Vaughan (09:56)
interesting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's interesting. ⁓

Nick Church (10:22)
options, they can get nice smooth iris effect and be able to control exposure that way.

Steve Vaughan (10:25)
And without the sound of the

aperture clicking as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Cause, um, Sam, you know, we obviously photographed somebody, well, mommy saying that she's not a technical photographer. She's a brilliant observational photographer. So I always make sure her camera lenses are on a for that reason. So she doesn't shoot anything in F 22, not she ever has really. Um, and there's, can't remember which lenses, but there's at least one of the lenses that don't lock there. So there is the risk that you can knock it into.

Nick Church (10:42)
Bye.

Steve Vaughan (10:54)
F22 without realising and obviously you'd realise pretty quickly really with you know, sugar spurt.

Nick Church (10:55)
Hmm. I think the,

um, I don't think there's 35 GM locks. know my 7200 does, but it, it's got a, you know, it's, it's sort of a thicker clunky click. If you don't want to mean to go from F22 or F16, whatever it is on there to a, but I have not did before, but it's pretty obvious pretty quickly what's going on. I think, don't think it matters, does it? It just depends where your muscle memory is.

Steve Vaughan (11:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

It's pretty obvious very quickly what you're doing, yeah. ⁓

Nick Church (11:21)
where your hands are going to go to do it. And as long as you're consistent with it, you're going to, you're going to be fine. Um, I've just

Steve Vaughan (11:22)
Yeah.

Because

I grew up with film cameras and then my main experience with digital cameras was with Fujifilm, which is very much based around that sort of retro look and feel of cameras. I'm very much an aperture ring person. I love changing aperture on the ring around the lens. I very, very rarely would do it on the camera really, unless I picked up Sam's camera and taking pictures with Sam's camera for some reason. It's just, I guess, it's just a muscle memory and what you're used to really, isn't it really? So yeah.

Nick Church (11:36)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (11:52)
And I do like that iris lock option there is on some of the Sony lenses as well. Having said that, of course, there are some lenses, some of the cheapest Sony lenses and like the Tamron lens I'm talking to you on right now, that don't have an aperture ring at all. So I have to do, I have to use the, yeah.

Nick Church (12:05)
Well, no, that's it. You

know, loads of lenses. I used to have the, the Baptist lenses, which are great lenses. It didn't have anything at all other than a little, little readout, minimum focus distance. That's something that I would definitely look at more now be more interested in that than I would have been before, because that the new 70 to 200, for example, and in fact, all the, the, new GM. Lenses, you know, the version two is they be called them version two or they know they do conversion to, ⁓

Steve Vaughan (12:11)
Yeah. People say,

Mm.

They do, yeah.

Nick Church (12:31)
But

the 35 and 24, which were already their first iteration was already the new technology. They do all focus extremely closely in the 7,200. Yeah. And in particular that 7,200, you don't pretty much, you know, I very rarely will take my, um, macro lens, especially this time of year. You can tell if I look through my light room and see when I've used my macro lens, really tails off around July time. As I get more more tired, I think, yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna stick with the 7,200 cause it's absolutely fine for it. You can get really quite close with it.

Steve Vaughan (12:38)
24 especially does.

I'm not looking that around. Yeah.

I did use for the first time quite a while this weekend, the lens that we mentioned when we had the last podcast with Luke from the International Wedding Photography of Year Awards. And that's the 135. As I always take it, it's normally in the bag that I have with all the flash gearing, because I've got no room for it anywhere else really. And I'm irritated by it there is a scratch on the front of it, but not that that would make any difference. it was the wedding we had on the Sunday, you we were at Nottingley Abbey, which is a

Nick Church (13:16)
Mm.

Steve Vaughan (13:27)
beautiful venue and lots of great walks and things and perfect for that really just that sort of creamy bokeh and it is a gorgeous lens but it's a serious lump of glass to look around if you're not using it. Interesting.

Nick Church (13:39)
Yeah. I mean, the other,

other things are like focusing speed or the GM lenses in that, in that second iteration, the 1.4 isn't the older, the older GM. I'm sure that the 85 1.4, GM lens, I suspect the new version of that is I haven't, I haven't played with it, but I suspect that is equally fast because the others, as I said before, they were so, they're so fast. I just assumed that I didn't have it set up right. Something wasn't working. It's so fast and so quick, but that, that's that's a big deal.

Steve Vaughan (13:45)
Just take it for red with Sony, don't you really? Let's be honest. Yeah.

It is. Take it from me.

Nick Church (14:07)
Do ever turn on or off your OSS on lenses that support that?

Steve Vaughan (14:11)
only if I'm doing tripod work and that would only ever be if I'm doing video really. So when we did a bit of hybrid work on Thursday last week, I videoed the speeches and that is a static camera on the tripod because I'm photographing and I tend to use the 24-105 for that, F4 and that's got OSS built in. So I was always told I've never tried and experimented with it. I was always told if you have the stabilisation on in the lens.

And I assume in the camera on a tripod, it fights against the tripod. I don't see how that is the case, but that's what I was told.

Nick Church (14:44)
Yeah. I, I, I, yeah,

I, I think that's probably a myth nowadays, but that's, that's also based on no information at all. But you'd have thought that the technology going on the camera, I'm sure they can work out when it's okay. This, this camera is not moving at all. Let's just say, let's roll off the wall. The effects of that, because it would just be such a pain. Um, I've never turned mine off. I just, cause I, in fact I did once and I did also change the 70 to a hundred from, you know, the full range of focus.

to infinity to three meters you can do if you want to get slightly faster focus, turn that off once, and then couldn't work out for the next two weddings while I couldn't focus very closely. So I tend to, I should almost like just like glue gun them in, in place, as soon as I need them. It's just too dangerous.

Steve Vaughan (15:15)
Yes, can. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

I love

it. Just on a slightly different topic, but kind of related topic where they come and turn the bit, is, which is backup as well. I hope I'm not making my customers listening to this, I've resolved it anyway, but we've videoed the first dance, this wedding a few, a few days ago when we were doing video as well. And Sam tends to do that while I'm doing photos on a monopod. So she's videoing, know, starting monopod. And

I hadn't checked beforehand. I don't nearly always use any batteries. I do have some Hanl batteries, they came with the charger that we bought. But we'd gone through batteries like nobody's business that day. So in the video camera we use, well, the camera we use for video, which is the A7C2, it had a Hanl battery in, and I didn't realise until after we finished videoing that the camera died with video. Oh dear.

Nick Church (16:08)
Mm-hmm.

⁓

yep.

Steve Vaughan (16:16)
So,

and I looked at the back of the camera, looked at what I changed the battery and I didn't have any video with the first dance. dear. So got back home thinking, dear nevermind. Got the card into the computer and there was a file on there called something dot SRV. So I Googled that and basically what had happened because the camera had powered down mid

Nick Church (16:23)
right ⁓

Okay.

Steve Vaughan (16:42)
mid filming, the camera had to time to convert the raw footage into MP4 compressed or MP5, was MP5 compressed video. So this was basically a Sony raw video file on the camera. And after a lot of Googling and a bit of gnashing your teeth and squeaky bum, I got it back. And I had to use the Sony catalyst software because it had the gyroscope data. Basically what you had was a lot of video that looked like people were on speed. ⁓

Nick Church (16:44)
Mm-hmm.

Alright.

right. because it's yeah,

because of the, it has to do with the, yeah. also the, way it's encoded as well, because it encodes, ⁓ I frames and then B frames and predicted P frames in between. it just all takes between them. And all the, all the ordering of those is stored somewhere else. So we'll store it stored in the header of the MP4 or the, or the move file.

Steve Vaughan (17:12)
because the IBIS and everything,

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly, but I've got it back and I've got it and I've got it so whew. But there's a lesson there dear listener, check your battery before you start videoing because you don't with the third party batteries you don't get the percentages counted you just get a block to show you. So we very rarely use those, I'm never going to use them again I don't think.

Nick Church (17:30)
That great. ⁓

Hmm.

Was that at the

Indian party, at the Indian wedding?

Steve Vaughan (17:47)
No,

no, it was just a small local wedding where we were doing photo and video. The video we do is basically just a bare bones video. it's, know, ceremony speeches, cut first dance, kind of stuff.

Nick Church (17:55)
Yeah.

I was quite worried about this Indian one because it was at a venue called the Grand Station in Wolverhampton. Really lovely venue inside. It's a bit like, there's a similar place in Bristol that people around it from where I'm from alongside Temple Meads. It's obviously a thing that there's like an event space near stations, but it's got nothing else around it. so given that I'm, that's my style of photography is kind of nice epic landscapes and you know, there's nothing, you know, apart from a car park, there's nothing there.

Steve Vaughan (18:05)
⁓ Yeah, I know it.

⁓ Yeah, yeah.

Nick Church (18:27)
So it was all about inside, but luckily I've been the, the, the probably the three, I think I've done three or four best, three or four Indian weddings in the past. And the three best parties of all the weddings I've ever done have been those, those four weddings. They've really put so much effort and, and, and thought into it. And it was an absolutely fantastic party. So I had this off camera, sorry, static camera to the side. So just sort of locked off angle, just taking the dance floor.

Steve Vaughan (18:44)
Wow.

Yeah.

Nick Church (18:56)
And that was going for two hours and I came back to it and it was 70%. I was amazed how long, yeah, it was really good. There was like.

Steve Vaughan (19:01)
Wow. Did you

shoot 4K video or 1080p? interesting. Yeah.

Nick Church (19:06)
4K 25. Yeah. Uh,

but yeah, was dry ice fireworks, indoor fire. It was, it was just epic. It was, was so good. So, so when I edit that, that little highlights video for them, that's going to be, going to, I'm looking forward to that, to get, get into that bit and it's going to be really good.

Steve Vaughan (19:14)
That sounds amazing.

Yeah, no, sure.

That'd be great. There is a railway place near here, the Buckingham railway centre, which is on a bit of disused railway line. Not far from where the great train robbers did their deed, actually, if you remember that. Yeah, you're only too young to actually remember it. I can just remember it. You know of it. Okay, 1960s, I don't know, early 60s. I'm conscious of it, seriously. I don't remember it.

Nick Church (19:33)
All right. But I don't remember it. What year was it?

Steve Vaughan (19:44)
He says hastily backtracking. Anyway, it's full of vintage car trains and steam trains and stuff. It's a really cool place to get, get married. We've done a few there. yeah, interesting, interesting railway connections with weddings. So, we, kind of veered into it. So let's get on to talk about our next topic today, which was backing up of gear. And again, I've got a story to tell here. but what is your process for backing up and then having, if you like working files on the go. Cause

Nick Church (19:55)
All right.

Steve Vaughan (20:12)
None of us have ever got just one wedding. We've always got like five or six weddings on the go at different stages.

Nick Church (20:15)
Yeah, well, this is

exactly. it, the, time of year, that's the, as you found, you know, when you find some, there's an issue with data, which I have had before, which is incidentally the time I changed my backup hardware to what I've got now. yeah, it's, your main thing is juggling with data and it doesn't, I always think about backup as being like a, you know, I like to use the cross channel ferry, analogy, which makes it sound like it's a thing where I've just made it up.

Steve Vaughan (20:38)
Okay.

Nick Church (20:40)
Which is, is, yeah, exactly. You roll on. So you're getting data into the system and it's a,

Steve Vaughan (20:42)
Roll and roll off. Okay. ⁓

Nick Church (20:47)
and then you've got to deal with it and pack it all in and be as efficient as possible with it. And the number of cars you can get onto that, you know, it doesn't know how big the boat is. At some point you're going to use all of the storage and then is there a roll off, part of the process. And so my process is I've got a bunch of SSDs. So I know that could be, ⁓

sort of raid system or with, with redundancy built in and all that sort of thing. That just isn't what I've gone for. I've gone for straight SSDs, one to four, and then the weddings come onto there. And then I've got four other SSDs, which are duplicates of those and they live in, they live in the house. So they, I'm in my studio now and the other ones are in the house. So whenever I do anything significant to those drives, like

Steve Vaughan (21:25)
⁓

Nick Church (21:34)
bring it to Lightroom or load raws off of the SD card. Then I duplicate them. And I wrote an app, I wrote an app to do it. Um, which is part of the Lightroom unleashed course. Actually you can get the app free, but it's, cause I thought I might sell it, but then no one was interested in buying it. So I thought I'd just give it away as part of this course, but it basically creates an identical duplicate of that drive. And it doesn't do that by copying everything each time. If you change one file, it will just realize that one file's changed and copied that one file over. So, um, what I do is.

Steve Vaughan (21:39)
Yep. All right.

Nick Church (22:03)
I take all of my rules off of the SD card. I put it onto the first drive. So I've got a folder in there called temporary rules, which is where all of my stuff goes. And if, people are listening to have taken the the light run each course, and they'll, they'll know this process. Cause we go through in great detail there. And the reason I do that is twofold. It's because SD cards are basically gonna stitch you up at some point because they're built for size and weight.

Um, not, not security because if, you can get an SD card for what one, for one terabyte and they're still that size. So there must be a reason why a SSD drivers won't have as much bigger because it's got so much redundancy and backup and stuff. All right. So getting off the cart is important to me. And also if you've got more than one camera, means you can just get everything into one folder and then bring into Lightroom in one go, rather than have to load different SD cards. Cause that's exactly the sort of thing.

that I forget to do. If I have to copy them into, onto my, into my temporary folder first, one car to the other, I'm going to sit there and do that. It's going to take three or four minutes. I'm going to do that. If I have to load one SD card into Lightroom, that then takes what three hours once she's converted to DNG that I have to remember, that's card one of two. That's a very weak point there that I could forget. I've done only the one card. So I like sitting down until I've got everything off of that. Then, then back it up. And I don't know the

Steve Vaughan (23:04)
Yeah, makes sense.

Yeah, that's a that's a that's process.

Weak points, yeah.

Nick Church (23:25)
Whether this is, mean, I back up, then I duplicate it. So I've got him in this, this, in this folder. I'll then duplicate that drive at that point and then let it load it into Lightroom. Now Lightroom, I've, I organize it so that it creates folders in a very logical structure in one parent folder. So everything's inside there. I still keep those raws, the initial raws off the card in that temporary folder until I've delivered the wedding. Now it's on the same drive often.

Steve Vaughan (23:28)
Okay.

Nick Church (23:53)
Sometimes it's not, but sometimes it is. So it's not really providing that much redundancy. It just feels senseless to get rid of it when I've got free space on that drive. There's no, there's no point. There's no point in freeing up space if you're not, if you're not going to use it. And then, this is then, so then what happens is I fill up the, I work from the first drive and then go, then shuffle shoots down through drive two, three, four, and then four is actually a bigger old hard disk. I say old.

Steve Vaughan (24:01)
Completely, yeah. And how long would you keep the rules for?

Nick Church (24:19)
Just, just a hard disk, you know, rather than an SSD. Yeah. So it's like five terabytes when that one fills up. That's the point that I then offload stuff from there and then keep shuffling things there. But, basically I have, I have to, I have to remove stuff from that last drive because otherwise I don't want to keep adding drives. I can't have a system with like 20 drives is pointless. And typically that's you're looking at two or three years or three or four years actually. So it's plenty of space. Why, why do to.

Steve Vaughan (24:20)
Yeah.

No, no, and that's expensive as well.

Nick Church (24:46)
extend the time before I need to take it off of that last drive is after a year or two, year or so, I'll remove all of the raws that I didn't deliver. So I'll delete them. So I still got the raw files of all the ones delivered. I think a year, 18 months is a reasonable amount of time to keep all of them because some people might take six months before they look at them properly. And I just have this

Steve Vaughan (25:04)
I agree. I agree.

Yeah, agreed.

Nick Church (25:13)
feeling of if I delete them too quickly, which I know plenty of people do, they did it once they deliver it, they're off. If somebody says, my grandfather's just passed away. If you've got any other photos. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that, and that definitely will be, they just won't be quite as good, but they'll be the most important photos ever to that person. So you want to keep them knocking about. So by doing, by whittling them, whittling away those ones and you can do it, you know, with a good workflow in Lightroom, you can just select all the ones that you haven't delivered.

Steve Vaughan (25:16)
Yeah, me too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've had exactly that, we've had a granny pass away. Anymore pictures of granny anywhere.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Church (25:42)
in my system, in my process that I teach is that they're gray. So you just don't, you just select all the gray ones and delete them all. I can get to about five years of stuff in my setup. Then what I do is, and I'm just at this point now of thinking, what do I do with those? Cause everything's pretty full at the moment. So we need to get stuff off of that last drive. Now I've got, I've got it. I've got the JPEGs typically are in Pixie set. So they were on an online gallery. So they're kind of safe anyway.

Steve Vaughan (25:51)
Well.

cloud based on it. Yeah.

Nick Church (26:09)
But yeah,

but it just feels, and I have got this, I've got storage. So I do have, I drive cloud storage. It's like a backup, backup system. The reason I chose that it's yeah. And I looked at black base, the backblaze, the problem with backblaze I think is that it's, it's a, doesn't give you the fine.

Steve Vaughan (26:20)
Is that like backblaze type thing, is it?

Nick Church (26:33)
find the level of detail is kind of a just right click right off you go. And you don't have to think about it again, which is great. Yeah. It doesn't really work for wedding photographers. I don't think because what happens with backblazers is you've got one drive or five drives doesn't have any. And you say right back these up. It'll create a duplicate of that, but it can't, you know, if you've got a hundred gig of roles for a weekend, it can't upload those that quickly. So what happens is then

Steve Vaughan (26:36)
Yeah, that's why I didn't like it. Yeah.

a lot of users.

Nick Church (26:59)
You're off shooting again. And then two days later, bring back another 50 gig of 200. It never catches up. And the most important content. So all the stuff that's up there is the older stuff that you delivered the stuff that is most valuable. Cause you haven't even added yet is still yet to be, it's like, which is completely back to front. I drive lets you select the actual folder. So I create little subfolders delivered files and I can just, just back up the delivered. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a really good service and it's fast as well.

Steve Vaughan (27:03)
so it never catches up. That was my finding with it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. And that's where based is it? Yeah, okay. I might look at that one. So that's really interesting, Yeah, really interesting.

Nick Church (27:29)
Um, so when I roll these off of that thing, I'm trying to work out at the moment, do I just export the JPEGs? But I've done that already because they're in Pixie set. There's no point just pushing the raws up to iDrive on their own because then I've lost all the edits. So I've, I thought I could export them as TIFF. Then I've got a bit more flexibility if I wanted to re-edit them. But what I've, what I've decided upon is export each of the folders, one folder per wedding or per shoot. Export each of those as a little catalog.

Steve Vaughan (27:41)
No. Yeah.

Nick Church (27:58)
And I just, with the, you know, where you can select in the exports catalog, you can select include the rules, the original negatives do that. Just get a little, a little folder with some raw files and I'll upload those. So at least I can download them. I suspect if I ever needed to do it, I would download them back. I'd have to upgrade the catalog to the newest version of Lightroom, but then I could, I could edit them again, at least and see all the edits that I'd had. So that's the system I've got in place. don't know.

Steve Vaughan (28:19)
You would.

Nick Church (28:26)
I suspect I'm going to go through all that hassle of exporting this catalog for all, for about 200 shoots. And I guess I'll never look at any of them ever again, but no, but if.

Steve Vaughan (28:32)
than you ever will now. It's really interesting

that that process it's different to mine. And I could identify possibly a weak point of yours. And there's definitely some weak points of mine. So I'm not one of these photographers that's got 80 SD cards like some do. And every wedding is stored on the SD card. Because to do that, you've either got to have very, very deep pockets, or you got to use very cheap and very slow SD cards. And I don't want to do that either. my get gone.

Nick Church (28:47)
Neither am I.

Correct. Yeah. Talk about SD cards. Do you just enjoy your minute? you,

um, when I was shooting with Greg at the weekend, he uses, he's got a seven fours and eight and a one and stuff. And he uses the compact flash. What's it called? Express. Man, they're fast. Good Lord. Getting it, it copied off about a hundred gigs of video from one camera in about 40 seconds. I'm going to get into that. They're the same price as my V90 cards, my SD cards.

Steve Vaughan (29:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

CFExpress.

Yeah, I know. I keep looking at it thinking, do I need some? then, yeah.

And what you download and do you have a reader for them on the computer? What you plug them into?

Nick Church (29:29)
Not my computers. have

to, you have to buy like a USB for reader. That's what 30 quid or whatever, but just, it's just that cop, that initial copying once that, you know, it doesn't really help with, although what he does, interestingly, sorry, I've been interrupting you and also gone off topic, which is very rude. So what he does is he shoots raw onto the CFE and then JPEG onto the V90 SD in the other slot, doesn't support CompactFlash.

Steve Vaughan (29:44)
No, not at all. We hadn't noticed.

Nick Church (29:55)
And that, yeah, but the reason he does that is because then it gives him virtually limitless buffer. So we can hold it down at the maximum rate on his A1. It will just keep shooting forever. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, what were you saying?

Steve Vaughan (29:55)
but you could still send raw to that as well. It would just be...

speed.

got you. Got you. But you've still got JPEG's backups rather than rules. Interesting. Well, none of this is, I can't remember though.

None of this is an exact science. So my process is, and again, I've always keep changing things around. So, I don't use any cloud-based backup at all. I have one SSD card, sorry, SSD drive that is actually built using bare bones. So it's using a

Nick Church (30:26)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Vaughan (30:30)
NVMe, whatever it is that you build into a computer in a case and that's got a Thunderbird 4 interface. So it was like 200 quid to build it, but it's way faster than any of the USB because Mac doesn't have the fastest USB speed yet.

Nick Church (30:34)
Okay.

No. And, and that

I've got all of my drives plugged into a 12 port hub, maybe, yeah, about a 12 port hub. And that thing gets roasting. have to have a USB fan, although it's a bit meta because the fan's being powered from is from the hub itself, but the fan keeps it. have the fan. don't know if it might be cooler if I turn the fan off, but it gets really hot. So like too hot to touch.

Steve Vaughan (30:56)
Wow.

Okay.

So that drive is like

my working drive. So when we come back from wedding, I still use a photo mechanic and download or ingest all the wedding into photo mechanic onto that drive. So the wedding we did on Monday, the Indian wedding, there was six and a half thousand images from that wedding, which is a lot for us. So that's about 240 gig. So they were ingested straight onto that drive. And then...

When I go to bed, I leave you backing up to a spinning disc hard drive. And there was another spinning disc hard drive hidden in this room, but also USB power that I can then back that up to. But then my other process, I used to have another drawer that another driver lived in a secret location, which was Sam's underwear drawer, figuring that no one ever go there if we broke in. Sorry, Sam. But now what I do is.

Sorry, if I made you laugh there Nick, sorry. What I now do is I back that work and drive up to an external USB and I give it to one of my stepkids, so that's offsite. So they were here on Monday, it was Sam's birthday on Happy Christmas. It was a birthday on Tuesday, should I say, not Monday. I keep thinking, because I did a wedding on Sunday, my day is like a day out of sync, wedding Saturdays on Sunday. ⁓ So all of my...

Nick Church (32:08)
Happy Christmas. Happy Christmas. Here's a joint.

that days don't make any difference to wedding photos.

Steve Vaughan (32:21)
working raw files or to be edited are in three places here and also another place offsite on the basis that if our house burned down, got burgled, everything got stuck. I do have a copy of those raw files in another place, which I won't mention on a broadcast here. And then when I've edited that wedding, because I tend to use one catalog per wedding and then have a master catalog, which I, so I export the

the editor's another catalog and import that into a master catalog. I then point the the Lightroom files to the raws on a spinning drive. So if I do need to go back to them, I can still edit them, but rarely do I have to. And then the wedding I've edited, I take off the working drive. So that's effectively like a holding pen, if you like, for the, and it's currently full, it's two terabytes and it's full. So with...

Nick Church (32:59)
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (33:15)
There's five winnings and some video to edit and that's filled in. So, but the two spinning drives are both 10 terabytes. there's plenty of room in those. So, so I'm sure there are weak points and if you can identify weak points, listener, I'd love to hear it, you know, and I like you, did play with Black Blaze and I found it too inflexible to use it really. ⁓

Nick Church (33:18)
Hmm.

Okay.

Yeah, it's fine. I think it's fine

if you're doing the occasional shoot, if you're, if you're ripping through that many rules, unless you've got like a thousand megabit upload, you know, on cable. Yeah. ⁓ yeah. Well, all of them, yeah. All the ones you took.

Steve Vaughan (33:40)
No, no, a hundred, not a thousand. Yeah. And then I keep the raws for a year. I think that's reasonable. Yeah. Yeah. All of

them, all of them off of every wedding. Yeah. Cause you know, the amount of weddings we do, can get them all onto a 10 terabyte spinning drive. then next year that becomes a backup drive for a new wedding and deleted and then, you know, start again, really. So, uh, and I've never had anybody after a year and I don't think it's, it's reasonable for anybody to come back a year later and say, Oh, do you have any more photos of us from?

Nick Church (33:54)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Vaughan (34:10)
cutting the cake or whatever. think that's just, know, sorry we don't know.

Nick Church (34:10)
Yeah. I think I think that, yeah, I

can't, I can't, I can't, I'm sure people do ask, but I think it, like you say, it's reasonable. It'd be reasonable for you to say, I'm sorry. Don't, know, after, after this, at the time, the, I used to have a, I've always used this, this workflow in this system, but I used to have five terabyte, hard disks, know, spinning disks, external drives, and just had the horrible.

Steve Vaughan (34:21)
No. No.

Nick Church (34:37)
That horrible noise of click, click, click, click. And I thought, ⁓ God, what's going on? And I just uploaded a load of, it luckily was, it was a wedding. It was a wedding film and I'd uploaded a load of YouTube content. did some interviews through lockdown. and so I uploaded that. thought something's going on here. We quickly back it up. So the backup then duplicated this corrupt, whatever the corrupt file was that got duplicated to the backup. And that meant I couldn't read the backup properly. And I lost, ⁓

Steve Vaughan (35:00)
Yeah, right. Right.

Nick Church (35:04)
about an hour of that wedding from one camera angle, which didn't matter. It was fine. ⁓ and that video just never could never make it to the light of day, sadly, which is a shame for the person that was on it. ⁓ was like the wedding suppliers, but, that, that was when I thought, right, I'm to get SSD. ⁓ yeah.

Steve Vaughan (35:07)
isn't that of the world? Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And from an editing point of view, they're so much quicker to work on as well, of course.

So, I've got a drive here on my desk, which has come out of an external USB drive and that's gone bad on this. yes, it's slightly irritating. So it's, it had very early weddings from us. So weddings that we did 12, 13 years ago, and obviously our works are fair bit better than it was now. All of our weddings from the last seven years are all in big time or the predecessor shoot proof, which we used before. so ⁓

Nick Church (35:34)
Mm.

Yeah. It's just so

nice to have them in Lightroom. Like, you know, when you want to, mean, I suppose not everyone does this, but at the moment I'm, I'm doing creating lesson content for training. And so I want a load of, I'm not interested in just the last 10 weddings I've did. I'm looking for when I did some shot someone's, dogs or the cat in lockdown, you know, just something different so I can do a nice selection stuff and not to be able to have all of that.

Steve Vaughan (35:46)
It is nice to have them. I'm slightly annoyed. Yeah.

Yeah.

It is annoying.

Nick Church (36:11)
to hand is going to be a little bit frustrating

and go, I could go to pixie set. You can't search for, you know, it's not like I can just search in the same way I can in Lightroom, but, but something's got to give. And I can't have all this content hanging around just for the odd time that I need it. But that's absolutely why I totally recommend having a single Lightroom catalog rather than multiple, because you can't do anything like that. can't do any, what's your 10 favorite bouquet photos? What's your 10 favorite landscape photos?

Steve Vaughan (36:22)
No, no, that's right. Yeah.

Hmm.

Well, it's designed to be a cataloging software, isn't it? Yeah, Yeah,

Nick Church (36:38)
Don't know. could open

Steve Vaughan (36:38)
exactly.

Nick Church (36:39)
each catalog and have a look, but it's going to take me about three days to do that. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (36:41)
Yeah. No, I've got

a master wedding catalog and I've got a master personal photography catalog as well for that reason. So interestingly, there's an IT guy that I know in the networking group, I'm in here locally and I said, would you have a look at it? And he said, the thing I can do, know a chap who does the hard drive recovery, 600 quid he wanted it to, to recover it, to try and recover it. So I said, I'm not bothered.

Nick Church (36:59)
Mm.

They basically rebuild

the drive around that initial data data platter. Yeah. They basically make it again and, ⁓ use the internal, you know, the actual disc is the basis of it. think, well, yeah, I don't know what, you know, I've never looked into it, but I know that's what they do. If they have to, they'll rebuild the electronics around it. in this, you're using a Mac and you've got it. you know, it's got the SSD or not. No S.

Steve Vaughan (37:06)
Is that right?

Right. So it's not a rip off price. Actually do do a lot of work for you then.

Hmm. I would just think.

Nick Church (37:26)
I've got alphabetized where, where all your drives are encrypted. Like when my, ⁓ MacBook internal drive, my old MacBook went just died. it was, it was not, so it wasn't the drive. It was the motherboard, but that meant that all the data on that drive has just gone instantly. She can't get to it. So it's incredibly encrypted. So if you, if you do it, that is one downside of encrypting your data with Apple or any other platform that supports it.

Steve Vaughan (37:31)
Yes, I'm with you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't

know. Our password protected.

Nick Church (37:53)
that

if you lose that key, you you just can't get it. It's sort of military secure, so you were never going to get it back.

Steve Vaughan (38:02)
Let's move on from IT hell and all things, motherboards and spinning drives and all that nonsense. Come back to photography again. One of the topics I thought we'd knock around today and we've talked about before is flash and it really based on a WhatsApp exchange you and I had on the basis of the conversation we had earlier about lenses really. And you said it already today as well that

you're not so worried about, you know, really fast wide aperture lenses because it just means you bring the flashes out an hour earlier. I don't tend to use any flash at all at a wedding until first dance at the earliest really, unless I'm doing any fill flash for group photos, but it sounds like you do. So what are you doing differently?

Nick Church (38:40)
I use flash if I'm not happy with the look of the photo and there's no, there's no real rule for it for me. because it could be, so in, the main, I'll shoot with natural lights as long as I can. But there comes a point where you might still have a bit of gas in the tank in terms of aperture. You might be only, you know, it might be to go wider and still keep going, but the lights completely lost all contrast and there's no, there's nothing interesting going on in which case I want to.

Steve Vaughan (39:05)
Yeah.

Nick Church (39:07)
put some of that contrast back in. that's when I'll just revert to flash. And at that point, I'm then stopping right back down to F4, F5, F6 or something. And so it occurs to me that I never get to 1.4, my 35 mil lens for that reason. The only reason I go to 1.4 is if I want a quick crafty shot on some wedding rings or something close up and I can't be bothered to go and get the macro lens. I'll just get really close in, but I wouldn't use it as a means to get that much light in because

Steve Vaughan (39:14)
course, yeah, yeah.

Hmm.

Nick Church (39:36)
Typically, for me, by that point, the scene already looks a bit crappy. The light's not good.

Steve Vaughan (39:40)
Is that because,

and this is very generalist in terms, but you're tending to do more epic shots than we are, we're tending to do it more observational documentary type stuff? Is that a sweeping generalisation?

Nick Church (39:52)
No,

I think, I think that's, that's fair. think the, yeah, it's true that I don't, I'm not that kind of, um, this is reportage style kind of right, right in, in, in your face sort of thing, in which case it probably would work quite well for that. do it all throughout the day. do like shots that are to me, artistic and oil painting-y is my best way to explain it. So that kind of.

Giro Scura sort of Italian way of using light in the, in, in sort of, the classic sort of painting style. and there gets to a point where I can only do that if I'm going to use it by starting to use flash again. and, and for me, just does, I do get, I do use, get right in and use black and white and stuff without flash when the moment's more important. And there's times where off camera flash isn't.

that if that is restricting your abilities capture moment, then that's the wrong choice.

Steve Vaughan (40:51)
That would be my concern

really, because we're mostly 95 % of what we do is observation or a retire style photography. And the last thing I want to do is go with a flash gun in somebody's face when I'm trying to do that. What was it? What's the, what's the famous photographer that does that? New York photographer. can't Diggy Wallace is the one I know over here. There's a, yeah, there's a camera. Yeah, but it sort of leaps out in front of people and goes, boom, a massive flash gun. Yeah. can't remember who it is anyway.

Nick Church (40:57)
Mm.

⁓ Right. What the street photographer?

Yeah, I've seen it. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (41:18)
Don't email the show, listen if you do know.

Nick Church (41:18)
Yeah, no, it's, think it's just, um,

mean, I'm yeah, the off camera, I'm not shooting off camera in those scenarios. I'm not bouncing off a ceiling. So it's pointing up. It's not in people's faces and it F four ISO six 40 or something like that. You're, you're still at, you're only at sort of one of a 32 power flash. You're not, you're not blinding people. You know, you can, you can get, get some really nice shots. And there's times then of course, when if you get some

Steve Vaughan (41:27)
Yeah. No, no, no.

No you're not, no.

Nick Church (41:45)
So let's say it's the sun's going down and it's just looking a bit dark. I might be doing that. Then suddenly the sun gets so low, it's coming straight through a window and suddenly flashes off. I'm going straight in for that light. and, know, but so it's all that is completely moving feast all the time. I'm not ever sort of, you know, adopting any sort of rules in it, just, just what, works best for me at the time.

Steve Vaughan (42:00)
Interesting.

So we will do

full flash, I was doing a fair bit this at the weekend for group photos, but then I guess the limitation is even with high speed sync on the Godox flashes, the power that drops up dramatically as you go, or then you're shooting at 1.250th and F11 or something and everything, know, yeah.

Nick Church (42:22)
Yeah. So I never, I never do. never

use flash. Yeah. I never use flash in the day. I never use flash when I've got good light, even if it's overcast or, even if it's very bright and we try and, you want to lift shadows. just, I, yeah, I never use it. Just not used to using it.

Steve Vaughan (42:28)
Yeah, sometimes you can't get good light, though. Yeah.

Yeah, it was so

contrasty and you know, no matter where I put the groups, they got panda eyes and whatever it was like trying to find somewhere. So yeah.

Nick Church (42:41)
Yeah, that there, yeah. I, yeah,

I just have to, in those scenarios, either looking for, which happened at the weekend, actually looking for a bit of shade, because it was very bright down here on, on Saturday, looking for a bit of shade plus I was knackered. Otherwise going to go for shade or what I find is if they're in, if they're backlit and you can get yourself in shade and there's nothing bright behind them.

Steve Vaughan (42:52)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hahaha

Nick Church (43:08)
You almost get like a golden hour effect, even at sort of one or two o'clock. It's fascinating how it works. As soon as you step out into the sun, you lose all contrast and then you start getting massive shadows in the face. It's fascinating how that works when it just, just by moving. um, yeah, typically, yeah. Yeah. High speed, probably high speed sync. It knocks about a stop off even before you start.

Steve Vaughan (43:10)
That's right. Yeah, yeah, you do. You get like a nice rim lighting. Yeah. Yeah.

Unless you've got serious power of course, which you know, people like Helen Williams who's been on with Neil Redford on before, know, she would take large powerful flash guns exactly for this reason. But obviously that's a thing to look around. Yeah. no, well for sure. Yeah.

Nick Church (43:38)
Yeah. But it still, it still take a, it still take a stop off compared

with your, the other, the alternative of the ND filter for sunlight. know, that, that, that, that's, that's, that's what I mean. Yeah. ⁓

Steve Vaughan (43:47)
Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. Interestingly, what

we're talking flash on my desk, I bought this a few weeks ago. This is a Godox IT30, which is like a little tiny brick flash. And it goes, it popped up as an offer. I used to like using, and I think they go for stupid money now. Fujifilm do a little flash like this for the Fuji system and little tiny brick of a flash. This one is obviously a flash, but it's also a trigger and a receiver as well.

Nick Church (43:59)
Is that right?

cool. ⁓ And triggers any go docs stuff.

Steve Vaughan (44:15)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, usual, usual. It's got the same menu structure as the, no, you can't. ⁓ And we played with it this weekend, though we had some misfires with it, interestingly, but we were just setting things up and actually the bride and groom came in a bit quicker than we expected and Sam just pitted it up and went, oof, and got some really nice editorial type photos, which isn't something we would ever do normally, but like direct flash of them coming through this sort of walkway. look great, actually.

Nick Church (44:20)
You can't fault, you cannot fault Godox, can you?

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (44:44)
just with this little flash. And

I like it for, I've quite liked using it on the first dance. Cause again, I can just get high up with this. can, first dance, but dancing. I can get in close, hold it high on a wide lens and do sort of drag shutter and all that kind of stuff. only about 70 quid, I think it was.

Nick Church (44:53)
Yeah.

I think a small flash works really well for that editorial kind of stuff, doesn't it? You want a smaller source of possibilities. You want those really to be quite harsh, which is the exact opposite of what we've always been taught. Do you want to soften the light? now you, and now we want, we want out of focus shots with harsh lighting.

Steve Vaughan (45:12)
⁓ Yeah.

No doubt that's what Taylor Swift will be having a hair wedding. I don't think she'll be working with us, unfortunately. ⁓ okay, so you got the gig already, have you?

Nick Church (45:20)
Well, I'll, I'll let you know. I, I assume, I assume I assume so I haven't, you know,

I'd not had the official. Nod yet, but I just, you know, I'm not sure who else she would get to do, you know, he's got a job. I, so I assume so I'm keeping it free, put it that way just in case. Yeah. But she'll pay the booking fee same as everyone else.

Steve Vaughan (45:29)
So you checked out your website,

You never know. No, you never know.

no free work for, know, for endorsements or anything like that. We don't do that, do we? One last view on Flash before we wrap up, actually. What we do like doing is what I call the last picture of the day, where I will do some Phil Flash and do some, try and do a bit more creative. And the wedding on Friday, they had this sort of kind of a gazebo-y thing, I've heard about a phrase.

Nick Church (45:42)
you

No, exactly exposure. ⁓

Steve Vaughan (46:05)
with all little fairy lights up it. But like a framework, I can't do the right phrase for it. And we had a good play with that. I got the videographer that actually to hold my flash gun on a beam with a soft box on the end of it and directly over them. And I took one with and one without him and the flash and basically just combine them together. It's the one I sent you today on the WhatsApp. Yeah. They have.

Nick Church (46:20)
⁓ so, ⁓ that, and I say what you're saying is video crows have got some use. Am I right?

Am I right? come on.

Steve Vaughan (46:29)
Yeah. Please don't write in videographers. If you want to complain to Nick, his email address is no, he

was a nice guy, actually. I Navy names. He was a very friendly, very chatty sort of guy. Nice to have. Whereas the one we had a few weeks before was completely the opposite. But we're all different people. So anything else we want to touch

Nick Church (46:40)
It was a top place, yeah.

I'm sure there's loads

of videographers that probably say the same about us as well.

Steve Vaughan (46:50)
I'm

sure they do. Yeah, I'm sure they do. That Steve Voughty never shut up the whole day. Anything else we want to quickly touch base on? There's a couple of events I've noticed. Did you see the thing that Evoto are putting out? I think it's on the mid Tuesday the 16th, something like that. They're announcing in New York. So of course we both want to be there. Some big new product announcement. yeah. Yeah.

Nick Church (46:53)
Yeah.

yeah, come on.

Mm-hmm.

⁓ right. You shared the, you know, the Voto one, the Voto

AI one. Yeah. No, it'd interesting to see what that is about. We spoke a bit about this, didn't we? I wondered if they're moving in or broadening their remit to be other genres of photography rather than being quite portrait centric. That would kind of make sense because I think that's where they are limited. I think they're great. I really like Voto.

Steve Vaughan (47:17)
Yeah, yeah.

big. Very much portrait century. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nick Church (47:37)
but

I think they're limited compared with some other platforms that, that like, you know, that they have AI for all sorts of things. Like, you know, for example, after shoot, come after you coming from the other direction, where they'd be completely, no genre specific at all. And I'm now adding in more portraiture features. So I suppose just two ways of, you know, killing the same bird. Is that the right expression?

Steve Vaughan (47:56)
Mm.

Well, if you do

want to fly us out to New York, it might still just be available. ⁓ think we could. We could. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? Live on all one end applications and streaming platforms. And the other thing in terms of events is good friends of Fujifilm are having a number of events in London around the house of photography. So they're calling it Fuji Kina. So it's the last two weekends in September and also the Thursday and Friday.

Nick Church (48:03)
We could do a live, a live podcast during the, during the announcement and, and yeah.

Steve Vaughan (48:27)
And there's all kinds of talks, some of which are paid for some of which are free. There's walks. There's all kinds of tuitions. People like Kevin Mullins, Carl Hare, who works with Fujifilm, is a great guy. think Neil James is involved. Scott Johnson, I think he's doing some stuff as well, but it's not wedding centuries. Unfortunately, the dates don't work because we've got weddings and then my son's wedding. So I don't think we can get down to them. So it's the last two weekends in September.

Nick Church (48:48)
What dates are they, Steve? ⁓

That's weird, isn't it? To have just two, two weekends with the gap in between.

Steve Vaughan (48:57)
Yeah, well, it's the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, as I see it. We'll put the link in the show notes anyway for anybody that wants to know. But I'm sure it'll be a great event because the people down there are really, really good people and the House of Photography for Never Been is a fun place to go as well. Yeah, we need to arrange a visit, which is the last thing I do want to quickly mention that we are trying to look at dates probably October onwards where we can have another meetup and perhaps do some street photography in London.

Nick Church (49:01)
Alright.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, No, I'd like to go there as well.

Yeah, I'd love that.

Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (49:25)
Yeah.

So watch the space, make sure you check out the Facebook group, Dear Listener to see what we're looking to do there. But it would just be a social media, public street photography, no doubt a bit of beer as well. Possibly a curry. I know, yeah, we can see if we throw one across the Thames. I had a mate once, and we should wrap up now, but I had a mate when I used to work as a research chemist for ICI many, many, many years ago.

Nick Church (49:36)
I haven't dropped a camera for ages and it's about time. See if I can get it from one side to the other.

Steve Vaughan (49:53)
We were all out having a drink in Marlowe and he was a good golfer and he decided that evening to get his driver out and start driving golf balls across the Thames straight towards the very posh pub across the other side of the Thames. So I've got this vision of some guy sitting there and also this golf ball comes from nowhere and lands on his very posh dinner.

Nick Church (50:12)
That could be

a terrorist incident these days.

Steve Vaughan (50:15)
It was the 80s, he got away with things like that in those days. Anyway, I won't mention his name, but he'll know who he is if he's listening. Time to wrap things up, Nick. Good to catch up with you, mate. So if you've enjoyed the show, Lester, make sure you do follow us and subscribe to the show. Give us a review also on Apple or Spotify. does help us in lots of weird and wonderful ways. We know that we haven't been doing the YouTube.

Nick Church (50:22)
All right, Yeah, absolutely, you too.

yes please.

Steve Vaughan (50:39)
stuff for a while. We're probably going to pause any attempt to do YouTube on this podcast because frankly, Nick and I just don't have the time at the moment. Possibly we can revisit that again. Yeah, come the autumn. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We will catch up on that. But for now, we're going to focus on the audio stuff. Thanks for joining us, dear listener. We'll be back again in a couple of weeks time. Until then, happy shooting out there and we talk to you soon.

Nick Church (50:45)
I think that will reconvene after the old bell curve of weddings kind of tells off a little bit. Yeah.

Goodbye.