How to Set your Pricing for your Photography Business

In this episode of the Photography Pod, hosts Steve Vaughan and Nick Church discuss various aspects of running a photography business, including pricing strategies, understanding costs, and the impact of VAT. They share insights on efficient culling techniques, camera settings, and the challenges of high ISO photography. The conversation emphasizes the importance of community, continuous learning, and the value of photography beyond just monetary gain.

Transcript

Steve Vaughan (00:00.91)
Hello again and welcome to the photography Pod a photography podcast for both working professionals and enthusiast photographers alike. My name is Steve Vaughan. I'm a wedding photographer and also a business coach up in Oxfordshire. And I'm here again with my good mate Nick Church. She's also a wedding photographer and also a trainer, albeit in this case a photography trainer. How are doing Nick?

Nick Church (00:19.953)
Yeah, good. Yeah, very good. Yeah, we're a bit later than normal today, aren't we? so we've got sponsored by Brewdog this this pod. It's not is it?

Steve Vaughan (00:23.406)
We are. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit late. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (00:30.674)
I can't have a beer because I've got to take Sam somewhere in a couple of hours actually so I've got to behave myself. Lucky you. I've got Brew Dog Envy now because that's my favourite beer out of a can. Other beers are available in case anyone wants to sponsor us.

Nick Church (00:38.972)
I really love punk IPA. I don't know what it is. just like, it's just, but it is very strong though, isn't it? 5.4%. I mean, that one of the, cause these are quite big cans. So one of those is you're probably at the limit just on one.

Steve Vaughan (00:49.518)
They are big. Yeah. Oh, I wouldn't I wouldn't even go there. Have you got chairs in them?

Nick Church (00:55.311)
I haven't know, but I wish I did have about because they BrewDog was a pub. don't know the backstory of it. There's a pub in Bristol called BrewDog 15, 20 years ago. So I think it's a bit like, I think it is though, because they had a punk IPA. Yeah, I think it is. I think it's a bit like the, you know, the lounge that there's one that we went to one in Ambyster, the lounge that there was one in Bristol, the first lounge, there only one of them just down the road from here.

Steve Vaughan (01:04.62)
Right.

Steve Vaughan (01:08.558)
Probably not the same people, is it?

Steve Vaughan (01:16.686)
The lounges, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't know that.

Nick Church (01:22.455)
And if you knew that, looking back in time, get shares in these places.

Steve Vaughan (01:26.914)
Well, my brother did. So the breweries in Ellam, which is north of Peterhead, right north of Scotland. And my brother bought chairs in them, late brother, sadly now. And they went on Dragon's Den and they wanted something like 20 grand and they got turned down. And then that 20 grand investment will be worth about 10 million now. I'm a beer nerd, dear Lister, just to let you know. And I think they're the biggest UK owned brewery left in the UK, because all the other ones are all owned by...

Nick Church (01:52.591)
is that right?

Steve Vaughan (01:54.018)
by foreigners, yeah. But no, I do like my punk IPA, but sadly, it's a cup of tea for me today, for the recording. So not that I'm jealous. I can, I can indeed. So anyway, we had a lot of positive reception to our last pod with Carl. That was great of Carl Arne and really enjoyed that discussion. And I watched his film. Did you watch his movie as well? Fascinating.

Nick Church (01:55.249)
Nick Church (02:00.739)
Well, you can have one later. You can have one later. Yeah.

Nick Church (02:16.337)
Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah. Strong recommend to anyone. And yeah, if, um, I imagine he is listening, if, if Carl's listening, like, no, no, I don't know. had to fight him off to come on it. was, but, but yeah, if he, he is, thanks for coming on Carl. Um, yeah, very, popular episode. Um, and all of our back catalog of episodes as well. So to all the other guests as well, we, know, we, we do monitor the stats, not obsessively, although Steve does a little bit.

Steve Vaughan (02:25.07)
I bet he never misses an episode.

I know, yeah. Yeah, it was brilliant.

Steve Vaughan (02:40.769)
Absolutely.

Nick Church (02:46.417)
Um, but, but we do, we are keen to see growth in this, in this podcast. And we see through the, through those stats that people are coming new to the platform, uh, news, the podcast and still look at and going back through the old episodes and that the old episodes are still trickling with really good numbers. So yeah, that's great. It's really, really encouraging. And it's why, you know, we, don't do it to, um, be superstars or Steve doesn't, um, that's, that's my job. But, but it's nice, of course, but it's nice to, it's nice to see, isn't it? It's nice to see progress and.

Steve Vaughan (02:56.632)
which is awesome.

Steve Vaughan (03:02.616)
Yeah, it is great.

Steve Vaughan (03:08.462)
I already am.

Nick Church (03:16.633)
more people benefiting, know, which means we're talking about the right nonsense and people are finding it useful.

Steve Vaughan (03:21.528)
think so, yeah. I mean, we always say we weren't doing this to try and make money. You know, it's a labor of love for both of us really, because we love the industry, we love photography, we love cameras, we love photographs, we love people that take photographs. But obviously getting some recognition is nice. So what have you been up to since we did the car recording?

Nick Church (03:38.833)
I've been doing a bunch of photography tasks. I've got a few little bits of product photography that I've done, which is not that common for me to do product photography, but I've done for those loads of coaching. So on the Nick Church creative Academy, I have, um, a few slots for mentoring and I can't offer too many because that is, you know, obviously we're really busy. Um, but yeah, so, so I had a few sessions with them and that I just love that because it's, it kind of reminds me of those.

Steve Vaughan (03:57.359)
It's time to cheer me up.

Nick Church (04:05.989)
The times when your business is like it, you know, to the, the audio listener, I'm showing like about 45 degree angle when your business is really taking off and, it's getting off in the right direction is really important. And it's such an exciting time for a business when sometimes the people I'm working with. They really haven't quite been able to articulate what it is they want to do. And then through the sessions, they think, do you know what? would really love to do this. And it's often not the thing they started doing. So that's always really great.

Steve Vaughan (04:16.855)
It is, yeah.

Steve Vaughan (04:25.794)
Mm.

Steve Vaughan (04:29.197)
Hmm.

Super. Yeah.

Nick Church (04:32.465)
I've been, we've been looking for a house as well. we are moving house. So Nick's church photography HQ is going to be somewhere else. We're not moving far. But one of the requirements, yeah, yeah. And quite stressful, but there we go. But one of the requirements of course is the studio from which I'm talking now. We do need somewhere that it's got space, either like an out, an out building that is the perfect.

Steve Vaughan (04:41.23)
OK. OK. It's always interesting time moving out, isn't it?

Steve Vaughan (04:52.408)
show.

Nick Church (04:59.981)
situation for a studio that we could convert like a stable or something like that, or space to build, you know, a decent sized studio. that, that does kind of certainly puts the price up a little bit. And that's pushing us a little bit further away from where we are. are for listener, we're quite close to, we're in the countryside, but just outside Bristol. And it is, it is pretty high property, property prices here. but the plus, so I will, I will be sad to leave this studio, but the plus side is that

Steve Vaughan (05:10.154)
limited. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (05:18.702)
It's a very nice place we've been there.

Nick Church (05:28.337)
It is a little bit low. You've been in SDV and it is, you're quite tall. So it is a little bit restricted on height and for things like headshots, it's a little bit tough. Um, but you don't know what you don't. Yeah. You'd be able to stand in it, but I wouldn't be able to take a headshot of him because it'd be completely under lit. It'd be like clamshell lighting, without the top one, not the most flattering. So, but that'd be quite exciting to sort of design and design a new studio and you know.

Steve Vaughan (05:33.26)
Yeah. I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah. You still got my steps on a six foot seven, actually. won't be able to do it.

Steve Vaughan (05:47.633)
Ha

Steve Vaughan (05:51.119)
It would, yeah, yeah would. So if you live in the Bristol area and you're of selling your house and you've got space for a studio, Nick's your man really, so he'd love to hear from you really.

Nick Church (05:59.087)
Yeah. Yeah. Cash cash by literally cash in a suitcase. That's that's how it works. Yeah. So that that's that's keeping me pretty occupied as well. But yeah, we got a bit of a so no guests today, but we have a series of topics that I think are going to be really interesting. So we've got a bit of business bit on photography and about editing and a few bits of news as well. industry news. So should we just crack into those then Steve?

Steve Vaughan (06:03.515)
Okay, yeah, no questions asked. Yeah, yeah.

I'm sure. Yeah, sure.

Steve Vaughan (06:15.768)
We do.

Steve Vaughan (06:26.54)
Yeah, I think while you were just talking about photographers starting off their business, understanding their niche of things, one of the things that people often struggle with, of course, is pricing. How do they work their pricing out? And there's lots and lots of different ways of working out pricing. But without giving too much away about what you do in your mentoring and your academy, what's your view on how photographers should approach pricing? What kind of advice would you give people on that?

Nick Church (06:55.697)
Well, I would certainly, what I would definitely say is what not to do, which is what most people do as far as I can tell. But certainly when we start out, which is to think about, we almost start at it back to front, we think about what our hourly rate should be. That's what we focus on. And that's understandable because we've often, know, lot of photographers have come from other careers, not all, but a lot. So you kind of think, well, I need to earn X. So I need to, that's what I need to my hourly rate at.

Steve Vaughan (07:09.811)
Mm. Mm. Mm.

Nick Church (07:25.019)
And the problem there is that you can, you can very easily forget about all of the other business costs that come with a business. it's, it's not how any other, any business in any other industry is set up. It's set up in the exact opposite way, which is that we have to think of what our business costs are first. say, right, what, what do, so if I'm, if I was going to create a new package, let's say it was a, architecture package, right? photography. I need to work out what my costs of the business are.

Steve Vaughan (07:25.091)
Hmm.

Steve Vaughan (07:32.373)
Absolutely.

Nick Church (07:54.351)
which is heating rent. If you're renting somewhere, the kit, our kit depreciates. We all buy new cameras every what four years, three, four years. So yeah, well yeah, bad example. So you're dropping sort of, you know, that's the, so we're looking at one, two, three grand a year just on kit depreciation. We've got our IT stuff, all these things that in our jobs, in our jobs, all that stuff was paid for.

Steve Vaughan (08:04.025)
Well, in my case every week almost, but yeah.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

insurance, software, all those things. Yeah.

Nick Church (08:21.681)
Wasn't it? You rock up your first day and you get a brand new laptop for your job. That doesn't happen. have to, we have to buy it. All those things need to come into a big spreadsheet and say, right, this is how much my business costs. All the subscriptions for Adobe for all those other things. And what I always suggest is a really good idea is to get a separate bank account, which I think most people pretty soon realize is it going to be a good idea. Get a separate bank account and pay yourself a salary out of that bank account into your personal account.

Steve Vaughan (08:24.751)
Yeah. Great.

Steve Vaughan (08:41.613)
Yeah, they have to have to.

Steve Vaughan (08:48.268)
Absolutely.

Nick Church (08:49.521)
Then you can actually see from that business bank account how you're doing every month. And because what happens if you don't do that is that what all that happens is every time is that we start eroding our hourly rate and because all those Adobe are reduced in our prices because we're not very busy. So what happens is we end up earning less and less. And in loads of cases, you end up not making a profit and loads of businesses that go belly up is because they've got to a point where, do you know what? I'm basically running a charity because I'm

Steve Vaughan (09:02.479)
Funny that. Yeah.

Nick Church (09:15.365)
giving loads of photos out, but I'm not actually earning anything from it. There's yet alone any profit in the business that I could reinvest to grow. So.

Steve Vaughan (09:21.583)
Absolutely. There's some really, really important points there. Obviously, as you know, I've spent most of my life in sales and in business, and I think people get lots of things confused. So, you know, when you sell a wedding or you do a wedding and you sell it for a grand, that's turnover, that's not profit. I know you know this, Nick, but just to, you know, just for the benefit of people listening, don't know the sort of business side of things. What you've described are what are called fixed available costs for the business.

Um, so when you, you amortize them across the year or, or the day really, the money that you charge for the wedding less those is your margin. And that's what you're, know, you, you need to focus on really, because as you say, there's no, there's no benefit in doing lots and lots of weddings and running out or, or headshots or whatever you do and running out of cash. Cause lot of businesses can be profitable, but run out of cash. Um, so.

Nick Church (10:13.947)
Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. And, and that's why, you know, the, the high end kind of management accountants can come into business and make a massive profit by, by switching things around. And then as soon as they leave it crashes again, but they've, they've earned their money. the, yeah, I mean, but once you've got all of that knowledge in front of you, you can start to think about what, okay, what do I need to set my packages up? It's not an easy thing because we don't know how many packages we're going to do, but however much work you do has to match what you've just put in that spreadsheet. So.

Steve Vaughan (10:28.001)
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Nick Church (10:45.541)
That means you either need to have a price that's high if you're not doing many shoots, or you're going to have to, you're have to just make sure you know that you need to get more and more shoots coming in. it's, it's always a little bit uncomfortable thing when we do this, when I do it for clients of mine, because it can result in a fairly frank discussion about your, your business isn't currently profitable. It's not, you know, and if you can't, if you think the market can't tolerate the increase in packages that you need to do.

Steve Vaughan (10:54.242)
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (11:12.983)
Hmm. No, it's not. reduced costs or... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Church (11:13.047)
your business isn't working. It doesn't work. Something else has to change. Exactly. It's not a comfortable conversation sometimes, but it's better to know that than you think. I have seen people that are funding that, rather than taking a salary, they're actually funding their business bank account just to keep it running. In one case, was team members that they had permanent staff. I think it's a real...

Steve Vaughan (11:24.463)
Mm.

Steve Vaughan (11:33.207)
I know. Yeah, so do I. Yeah.

Nick Church (11:41.679)
You are literally being a charity that you're giving, you're giving these team members a job and security and put them on training and stuff, but you're, you're not, you're not taking a salary. You're actually paying for your savings and it's, it's madness. So yeah, there is no point.

Steve Vaughan (11:50.928)
Yeah. And what's the point? What is the point here? It's a vanity project that really isn't there really. One of the first things that I learned to do when we first started our photography business really, and this is one of the good things about the wedding photography business is that you know exactly pretty much to the day when your revenue is going to come in. You know, I mean, will vary, but typically most photographers get paid a month before the wedding. They'll take a deposit and they're the month for the wedding. So what I've always done ever since we've started, and I still do to this day is I run a cash cash predictor and I've got it running out into

2027 now, which is when we're, we are going to stop on this this time. Um, and I can put in all my fixed costs. Um, you know, Sam's currently taking a salary from the business. doesn't always, but she is at the moment, uh, when we want to take dividends, when we want to pay pension contributions. Um, and, and I know almost to the penny when cash is going to come in, when cash is going to go out, when we're going to have a bit of a cash drop or when we might need to transfer some money from the savings account we have, these are all business accounts by the way. And it's so easy to do that because you know, exactly.

Nick Church (12:40.464)
Yeah.

Nick Church (12:47.505)
Mm.

Steve Vaughan (12:50.521)
pretty much when you're, and obviously as you get new weddings.

Nick Church (12:51.471)
Yeah. So you can see when they, and you're, you're evening out those peaks and troughs because you know that you think, yeah, yeah. And that, that, that, is that ultimately the best way to do it. And because as you say, wedding, I think if you're a head shop business or if you're, some, a high street type shop where you're relying on people coming past, that's difficult because you don't know what's happening that day. Weddings we do, you know, and like Neil said, Neil Redfern said, was it Neil? Can't remember, but, know, pretty early on if, if,

Steve Vaughan (12:56.491)
Exactly. I just amortize them across the ear.

Steve Vaughan (13:06.679)
different.

No you don't.

Nick Church (13:20.945)
things aren't. Oh, no, I'll tell you, was a friend of mine, Phil Warren, really good photographer from Cardiff. No, he wasn't. But he was saying that, you know, wedding photography, if you're not getting bookings, you're fine for this year, but you know, in 12 to 18 months, you're in trouble, because that's you're going to have a... Yep. Which is quite handy.

Steve Vaughan (13:25.165)
Okay, it was not the podcast. Sorry, Neil.

Steve Vaughan (13:39.345)
That's right. You can see exactly it gives you the cash crisis you're going to face. On pricing, one of the things that, you know, in this hours training that I, that I run, which is, you know, for different industries for life sciences and life equipment, I do some training on pricing and there's, there's some like 13 different ways a business can set their price. So what you've described as a cost plus pricing, you know, there's market pricing, you know, looking at what the competition is doing and setting a price accordingly. The psychological pricing there's

whatever the airline business is, and God knows what you call that, but it's funny how every airline, you try and book a flight to somewhere, every airline seems to be within two or three dollars of each other, have you noticed? Yeah, funny that, it? Yeah. And you know, how that business changed. So pricing is a big topic, but one thing I'd encourage people listening to this who are thinking about their pricing is not to think about price, but to think about value. Because value and price isn't the same thing. You know, and what value is, you know,

Nick Church (14:15.705)
Yeah. Yep.

Nick Church (14:30.926)
Exactly.

Steve Vaughan (14:35.088)
in our case, experience, knowledge, familiarity with the industry, familiarity with weddings, know, safe pair of hands. That's value, you know, it's not price. the example I always give is that we live about a mile from what I consider the worst place on earth, which is Bista Village. You know, a highland outlet village where people can and spend four and a half grand on a handbag or pocky pocky for you in the States.

Nick Church (14:44.145)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (15:00.56)
which to a middle-aged or late middle-aged guy like me, that would seem insane, but if you've traveled all the way from China, that might seem like really good value. Whereas we could spend, we have spent five, six grand on the camera, which might seem good value, but to somebody on the high street who takes a picture with a phone, that seems like insanity. So, know, values in the eye of the beholder.

Nick Church (15:05.841)
Mm.

Yeah.

Nick Church (15:13.349)
Yeah.

Nick Church (15:18.181)
Hmm. I think that that value is, is a really good point because that's what, that's what we have to communicate to our clients to justify whatever we're charging. And for some reason, photography seems to be the least likely for people to do that. We often find ourselves trying to justify an hourly rate or, and it's not helped by, those, the sort of, sort of clients that weddings where it's people rather than a business.

Steve Vaughan (15:25.068)
Exactly. Exactly. The value you bring.

Nick Church (15:45.713)
I think businesses are a lot more logical about it. But you know, we all know that there are wedding couples where they're kind of saying, Oh, right. It's quite a lot for a day, isn't it? And that isn't, we never say that to a builder or an architect or a dentist. We're not, we're not saying to the dentist, well, hang on, you're only there for 15 minutes, you know, um, because we're saying, well, you fixed my teeth or I now have got, had a checkup or whatever it is. And we've got that value. And so it was a builder. We, we've got the, we know what.

Steve Vaughan (15:48.293)
Dale.

Nick Church (16:15.621)
that value of that, bit we've been asked to build, we know what it's worth to us, and so we're happy to pay that. We're not kind of trying to work out what his hourly rate is or her hourly rate or, you know, it's a strange thing. So, and this kind of brings me on to that because we've kind of had a few, I've had a few discussions about this because there's been some discussion about the government might, there's rumors that they're going to both increase it and decrease it. So we'll have to see which one it is.

Steve Vaughan (16:20.528)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (16:32.763)
wow, great topic.

Steve Vaughan (16:43.044)
We should just do a quick explainer actually before we go any further for people who aren't in the UK. So very quickly before we get into that. So VAT is Value Added Tax or sales tax according to the parts of world. And here in the UK, the person who's responsible for the government's money is called the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It's a lady now, Rachel Reeves. And in a couple of weeks' time, she's going to announce what they call the budget, is basically the government's incoming and outgoing for the next year. And there's high speculation the tax is going to have to go up.

including sales tax. Sorry for that Nick, but thought it might just be worth just positioning that. Yeah.

Nick Church (17:14.885)
Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah. It sense. Yeah. And it's a much more complicated situation in the States because of course that every jurisdiction, every, every state has its own tax tax rules. Yeah. but so we've got this, this crazy cliff edge threshold of 90 K is it moment? Is it so, so if you were, if your business income is one pound less than that, you pay nothing. Otherwise then you have to, you have to add tax. you had to have that to your prices.

Steve Vaughan (17:21.914)
state tax is different.

Steve Vaughan (17:31.024)
83 I think it is at the moment, yeah. It might have gone up, yeah.

Nick Church (17:44.913)
But for some reason we're compelled to incorporate, to absorb that VAT into our prices. So I'm VAT registered and I've done exactly that. And it seems bizarre to me that I did that because again, if you, if you went to, um, a builder, I keep using builders because I have my builders here this week. And that's not a euphemism. I actually have. If you go and bought a load of fence panels.

Steve Vaughan (18:04.752)
You

Nick Church (18:14.513)
Right. And you think, that's going to be 1500 quid. When you get your invoice is 1500 plus VAT, you kind of tut a bit, but you think, oh, they're out of VAT. But for some reason we never do that because VAT is odd to incorporate it because VAT is supposed to be a, it's a consumer tax that the consumer pays for luxury, luxury, good or service. So for some reason we absorb it. think we do that because of this worry that if we don't do that, once we become VAT registered, because of course, if you hit that threshold, you suddenly have to start paying 20 % of

Steve Vaughan (18:22.457)
Hmm.

Steve Vaughan (18:29.861)
It is

Yeah.

Nick Church (18:44.227)
off your profits, then we worry that we're going to be outside of what the market norms are, brings us, know, links to what you said about pricing, that it isn't just all your expenses and everything else, it's what can the market tolerate? And so we tend to absorb it. what will be interesting? So I know the rumor that it may come right down to sort of something like 30k has caused a real worry in the photography industry, and I'm sure loads of other industries as well.

Steve Vaughan (18:45.349)
Yep.

Steve Vaughan (18:56.785)
That's right.

Nick Church (19:14.063)
because people were saying, I couldn't cope with that. But I think it would actually be better for us all because certainly for those of us that are registered, because there wouldn't be this cliff edge. Everyone, virtually every full-time photographer, right, part-time people probably still sail under that. Full-time photographer is always therefore going to be that registered if it went down to that level. So there will be no temptation to absorb the value into our prices because everyone's going to be doing the same.

Steve Vaughan (19:20.719)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (19:39.875)
Exactly. think, first of all, quick disclaimer, nobody knows what's going to happen in the budget. We're not financial advisors. Don't make business decisions based on what we're saying. don't sue us. But you're absolutely right that it's supposed to be a sales tax on luxury items really or consumer items. But when they set the laws up, mean back in the 70s, some of the things are so archaic really. So for a photographer,

If you're VAT registered as we are, you can reclaim VAT on things that you buy to some degree. So if you buy camera, you can buy a lens from a shop that has VAT added onto it. You can get back the 20 % of that when you do your VAT submissions. But a lot of the things that we buy, like albums, prints, zero rated, there's no VAT on them. So if we were a business buying and bits,

It's easier in many ways to deal with VAT as you say in our industry. Unfortunately, it's just 20 % off your pricing really.

Nick Church (20:42.961)
Yeah. I think, I think we're quite rare as an industry that our outgoings are very low. I know we whinge about them, but for most other businesses, if you think about it, you can start a professional photography company with what? 10, 10, 15 grand, get some cameras, bit of insurance, you know, any other small company, you know, even if you did like building, decorating, you're buying a van, there's all kinds of plants that you need to buy. Those, those.

Steve Vaughan (20:46.897)
I think that's right.

Nick Church (21:11.937)
Examples have got the advantage that they're buying stuff all the time. And so they reclaiming the VAT, but for us, we hardly buy anything apart from camera. So once we've got them and it means, so that's why the likes of people that are registered don't go for gray market, you your Panama's or infinity, because we need to claim once you take once you add, you know, the, you take that off, something from blooming John Lewis or Curry's is about the same. So yeah.

Steve Vaughan (21:15.409)
Yeah, that's right.

Steve Vaughan (21:30.929)
You go fuck.

Steve Vaughan (21:37.234)
It's a similar price, yeah. I think if VAT did come down to those kind of levels, so if you had to become registered on some of the 25, 30 grand, I think it would have a benefit in sorting out perhaps some of the, I can put it, I don't wanna use the phrase weekend warriors, that's a derogatory term, but people who perhaps aren't as professional and people who aren't doing it seriously, so to speak, really, because all of a their prices have to go up 20%, really.

I hope it wouldn't encourage sort of cash payments and off the books payments, think it might do frankly, to some degree, which is not a good thing to do in business. But I mean, who knows? think, you know, worrying about it isn't an option because none of us knows. I hope she does.

Nick Church (22:17.872)
Yeah.

Nick Church (22:22.853)
Those weekend warriors have got a problem because regardless, and they're often the ones that struggle because they've got all the same fixed costs pretty much that we have. All right, maybe not. They should have. Well, this is the thing. They have to cut corners because they've got all the same fixed costs, but they're only doing half the amount of work. And because of that, they tend to be charging less. And we all know for a fact that is the thing.

Steve Vaughan (22:34.831)
Well, they should have. I hope they things like insurance and things.

Steve Vaughan (22:43.835)
See you.

Nick Church (22:50.597)
That's the sort of thing that they are compromising on. They're compromising things like insurance, maybe a spare camera body. They're probably compromising on because you couldn't justify it. You couldn't justify to have three cameras when you, when you're only using one weekend for a, you know, a sidekick.

Steve Vaughan (23:03.665)
We shot a wedding a few weeks ago. And in fact, we were there again last week at a venue. We go to often in the Cotswolds. won't say which one it is, but we were there about five years ago. I think it was pre before COVID. And there was a videographer there working for the day. And I kind of got the feeling that he was quite new to it and everybody was a nice enough guy, but he got a 5D Mark IV and a 85 millimeter 1.4 lens on a tripod.

and he'd put it down on the side. And then we'd had our dinner, we'd talk to him. And this particular venue, you go out onto the grounds and do some portraits. It's a golf course, actually, so go on golf bookies and things. And we said, oh, we're going to go off to do some portraits. Do want to come with us? Oh, yeah, yeah, I'll come. And as he got up, his camera, he picks his camera up and he ends, tightens down the quick release plate and his camera slid off, fell onto the ground and the front element of his 85 1.4 came rolling across the

patio and landed up my feet and I said mate absolute nightmare you know nightmare at least insurance will cover it won't he said I haven't got me and I said you're videoing somebody's wedding without an insurance any kind of insurance I said you you're a disgrace really you know you shouldn't be anywhere near for this for the sake of the couple you know it's not fair it's not fair

Nick Church (24:09.681)
Nah.

Nick Church (24:16.633)
Yeah.

Nick Church (24:22.955)
And he's lucky because if that all right, he's going to pay a new 1500 quid for that lens, but at least it wasn't an elderly person tripping over his tripod and smashing their face onto the floor because that's kind of, you know, being sued and then sell the house kind of situation.

Steve Vaughan (24:33.264)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And God forbid. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You are warned if you're not out there, not insured, you get insurance quite quickly, very quickly. So, but we moved away from pricing a bit, but yeah, the whole VAT thing, who knows really? Yeah. I did read that making this into party political broadcast, that there's never been so much money.

Nick Church (24:46.223)
Yeah.

Nick Church (24:51.621)
Be interesting to see. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see what happens. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (25:02.13)
controlled by so few people in this country that there is now. So perhaps there's opportunities to do something different. But then you live in Bristol, which has got its own political climate and economic view on the world. My daughter lives in Bristol and I think it's a different country.

Nick Church (25:05.52)
Hmm.

Nick Church (25:14.427)
Yeah

Nick Church (25:18.193)
Yeah, well, well, she knows what we're like by now. So, yeah, but that's the thing. I mean, it's yeah, the what we I think we're starting to realize is that our

Steve Vaughan (25:21.542)
Bohemian.

Nick Church (25:31.729)
let me put this delicately, the roundabout painters and the people that are completely against all of them as well, which is me, but actually we're just being controlled by, you know, there's other people pulling the strings. We're kind of being sort of set against each other when in fact that's nothing to do with it. It's the billionaires across the country that are not paying their tax. And that's why the country's in this situation is.

Steve Vaughan (25:40.316)
I mean.

Steve Vaughan (25:58.555)
I couldn't agree more, mate. Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

Nick Church (25:59.385)
And it's people that benefit from there being a real distrust of, you know, the working class being immigrants, middle class being ex-working class. They really profit from all of that. And yeah, it's disgraceful. And hopefully more and more people start to realize that. And who knows, we might get changed in the future, but yeah.

Steve Vaughan (26:17.778)
Let's hope so, but let's not veer too much into politics, otherwise we might lose quite a few. But I think we're of the same view. Shall we move on to cameras and software and all that kind of stuff? Have you had a chance to play with the latest version of Lightroom? It's just literally hit the street in the last couple of days.

Nick Church (26:21.488)
You

Nick Church (26:25.028)
Yeah.

Nick Church (26:28.867)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nick Church (26:34.967)
No, I haven't. haven't. I thought my, cause you mentioned this earlier and I thought my light room updates automatically, it obviously doesn't because I know I haven't got that. Tell me, tell me about it. What's, what's the,

Steve Vaughan (26:44.018)
I'm just trying to work out which version it is. to go into about, anyway, if you go to, if you've got Creative Cloud or Adobe and you go to download the latest version of Lightroom Creative Cloud, then that's what you get. So I've only literally downloaded it yesterday and I'm in the middle of editing a wedding. So, but what it seems to...

Nick Church (27:03.577)
Is there a new splash image on load up? I, cause I cry criticized the last one. maybe I'll, I know. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (27:06.596)
Yeah, I didn't notice it particularly, but yeah, there is one. Yeah. I know you did. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure they were, they were mortified in Adobe headquarters. So one thing it seems to have is a form of AI culling or AI-cystic culling. So getting into the domain of aftitude and imaging. Now I have seen Martin Chung formerly of this parish.

Nick Church (27:28.709)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Vaughan (27:34.382)
has already commented in a group said he wasn't that impressed with it and I take Martin's opinions very seriously. So I don't know how good it is. If you've got experience of using it, deal is to let us know. But I guess it's inevitable. Yeah, very much so. Very much so. Yeah. Yeah, very much so.

Nick Church (27:44.964)
Is Martin a, is Martin Chung a after shoot user? Yeah. I thought it was. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've not, I've not used, after shoot for culling purely because I've, well, I've never tried it, which I should do, but I've just heard reports that it's kind of, it gives the wrong results. Sometimes you have to check it and I feel if I'm going to check it, like I've, I've got this, this process that is pretty blooming quick to be honest. I can go through a 5,000 shot wedding in about an hour, in about an hour.

Steve Vaughan (28:13.116)
Tell us more. Tell us more.

Nick Church (28:14.809)
So, well, the, it's an Excel, there's, there's two methods. What, what the, what I teach for people that, cause a lot of people really struggle with cutting, don't they? They spend hours and hours and hours on it. There was a client that had that, that spent, she reckons she spent about two hours just going through all the confetti shots. So people go down these rabbit holes.

Steve Vaughan (28:26.002)
me too.

Nick Church (28:39.385)
So what I always just sort of people in that side, they are going down rabbit holes of things is to separate that. The reason we take so long is we're trying to do two things at once when we select images, we're trying to work out how good the image is. And we're trying to decide if it's better than the last one or whether we should include it in all of this, whether we should include it in their final set. And all of these things kind of combine into us kind of go backwards and forwards. So the quickest process for people that are new to large set large culling sets, excuse me, is.

I will say to go through once and rate your images one to five. Don't use zero cause zero then you don't know if you've, if it was just rubbish or we've not got to it. So one is like one, one is a shot of your foot or out of focus to two might be two might be in focus is fine, but it's not great. Three is, well, it might be useful. Four is like, wow, that's really good. Five is these are the best 10 % of the, of the wedding and these are great. Um, so you go through those.

Steve Vaughan (29:18.118)
No. And is five higher one high?

Steve Vaughan (29:25.234)
I've got loads of those.

Steve Vaughan (29:34.642)
Killer. Yeah. Yeah. Got you.

Nick Church (29:39.321)
And then we look just at the five-star shots because basically unless they're the same, but let's say use confetti example. If you've taken a hundred shots, let's say to a hundred shots, confetti, 30 that were in focus. You don't need 30. Confetti shots for, but they're probably all going to be five-star. Let's say they were, they were great. you just, what you do is say when there was a shot that was just one, obviously you include it. So most of the five stars I tag yellow because they're going to be included when you get loads.

Steve Vaughan (29:52.454)
No you don't, no.

Nick Church (30:08.689)
We think, well, they're all the same because we've given them all five stars. So when you went through the confetti shots and we gave a few of them four stars, because they'd be able to, you know, you get a confetti over someone's eye, don't you sometimes, or, um, so that'd be four stars. Oh, that one's really good. Cause they're looking at each other and the confetti there's lots of confetti in one shot. That's a five star. Once you just look at your five stars, they're all as good each other. So doesn't matter which one you pick. Cause you just pick any of them. It doesn't matter. The couple didn't know your client didn't know what photos you took.

Steve Vaughan (30:31.837)
No, doesn't. Absolutely right.

Nick Church (30:35.409)
And you've just decided that's the best shot. So don't, don't go any further. And you, and you then, so you end up with all your five stars shots that weren't duplicates. there's, if there's 10 other confetti shots, which are the same five stars, it doesn't matter. Does it just pick three of them? doesn't matter. Then, then you include the, bring in the four star shots and what we're looking for the four star shots. And this method uses collections as well, because you want to see those five star shots that you've included and

All of the four star shots. And you're just looking for anything that's different, a different moment. Oh, that's different. Include it because you've decided it's a great shot already. So don't need to worry about, is it good? Include it. Yep. Got that. Well, there's one there. Oh, hang on. That's that, but that's similar to a five star one. Don't need it. Cause there's one that's better than it. And you just rip through it and do the same for three stars, two stars and one stars. get rid of move them out of the way. And that's a very quick way to go through and what you tend to do after when you do that enough time. that I reckon takes about an hour and a half to do a 4,000.

Steve Vaughan (31:20.968)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (31:28.189)
Yeah.

Nick Church (31:33.169)
wedding like that. What happens after a while with experience of doing that is you kind of just go through them once you don't need to bother rating them because you can kind of just tell you know which ones you can end up with. So it comes with experience, but this method really stops people going to those rabbit holes of spending hours and hours or up to a day sometimes. I just do it in Lightroom. I do it in Lightroom. I don't use Photo Mechanic. I know it's faster in Photo Mechanic because you don't have to import them into Lightroom.

Steve Vaughan (31:40.401)
Yeah, yeah, completely.

Steve Vaughan (31:49.736)
And you're doing it in Lightroom itself. Do find the pictures render quick enough? Yeah. We do. We do in Photomechanics.

Nick Church (32:00.105)
And I think that's a really good idea if, if you're making use of either, in situ culling where you're maybe during the wedding meal or something like that, where you've got a break or in the car afterwards, you just want to rip through and cull them. But I tend to bring them all back in Portland to Lightroom and then go to bed. So they're already imported. So once they're imported in Lightroom, it's as quick as photomechanic.

Steve Vaughan (32:23.207)
Yeah, yeah. I think think we're kind of renders a little bit quicker than pictures come up bit quicker, but that's just a personal thing.

Nick Church (32:28.207)
Yeah. But if you're building your smart previews, building smart previews and building standard size previews in Lightroom, it's just as I did experiment the other day for one of my lessons on the online course. And I can get through 5,000 images in 24 seconds by holding down the right key. And that's in full quality. So, but you have, but it has to do rendering first. If you haven't done that first, then yeah, you're sitting there with that loading thing for half a second every time. And that is a pain. That is really frustrating.

Steve Vaughan (32:33.799)
Yeah, true.

Steve Vaughan (32:42.341)
Wow. Okay. Yeah, no, no brainer. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (32:51.783)
Yeah. There's a pain. Yeah. So it's interesting. So our process always was doing something very similar, but we did it in Furnam mechanic. five, four, three, two, one, as you say. And, Sam did it cause I'm, she's far more ruthless than I am and she enjoys it and I hate it. but with, aftershoots. So this year, what we've done is let aftershoot do an initial call. and it will do a five, four, three, two, one in the same way. but then I bring all of those.

into Lightroom with the ratings into Lightroom. So if it's a 4500 wedding or 4500 come and then I just filter on the five stars on the four stars. But then as I go through, if I feel that picture isn't quite right, I know I've got the threes and the twos and the ones, they're going to have a quick look. Where it does help, I find is group shots. Yeah, because if you know, I'll take particularly with the A1 now, because I'm just on burst mode, it's just insane. You know, I can very quickly take

Nick Church (33:24.379)
Yep.

Nick Church (33:40.869)
Yeah. okay. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (33:50.612)
15, 16 photos of the same group in like two seconds. And I do that because I know I'll get hopefully three or four frames when everybody's got their eyes open, you know. And it's really good for that because I can very quickly, yeah, that one's fine, that one's fine, that one's fine, one's no, I don't like that one, I'll go find another one. So I'm finding it does help a little bit and speed things up, but do I need to use it? No, probably not. It's just, you know.

Nick Church (34:14.449)
I once worked out a, um, I'll have to take it out. share it to the Facebook group. If I do, if I can find it an algorithm, I worked out how many group shot, how many shots you should take for a group shot per number of people. it's an exponential algorithm because once you've got 30 people, you know that you can have to take a hundred or we're to take 50 at least because there'd be one person in those in that group. This, this got the right shot, um, which is why we all take big groups. There's always something with the right shot that I deliver. like I'm not, you know, if I can be really bothered.

Steve Vaughan (34:23.944)
Go on.

Steve Vaughan (34:27.548)
It is, yeah.

Steve Vaughan (34:36.315)
Yeah, you can go to it. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (34:42.62)
I used to, I used to sort of go, right, I'm going to count, open your eyes in between my counting. You know, one, open your eyes, two, but now with the A1 I was go, right, open your eyes, three seconds. And then I've got like 20 frames or something. I'll you, we'll just digress this slide. tell you what I did last, bloody wedding. I couldn't work out why the, A7, A7-4 that I use, which is usually the camera with the least images on was nearly full up with a 128.

Nick Church (35:05.606)
Mm.

Steve Vaughan (35:12.2)
gig card or two 128 gig cards in. And it's only when I imported the pictures, for some reason, I must've selected auto dynamic range bracketing on the D pad. So I ended up taking like three of every frame.

Nick Church (35:21.189)
I've done that. So yeah. And I don't even know what it does. They all look exactly the same in Lightroom, don't they?

Steve Vaughan (35:27.56)
Well, it's giant reach for JPEGs, JPEG functions, which is ridiculous. Yeah. I find that, yeah, it's a left button on the D pad. It's very easy to knock it. Like sometimes I put things in the self-timer mode as well. And I wonder why the camera's not doing anything.

Nick Church (35:30.713)
I've done, I've done that. It's a pain. couldn't work out what's going on.

Mm.

Nick Church (35:40.241)
Yeah. Yeah. I change, I change that menu a lot because I might be doing, I often go to bracketing if I'm doing obviously interiors, but, even, even outside, if it's at wedding and there's a quite a nice sky, I'll quite often just do a bracket shot. And I think that's when I try and put it back to the mid or the normal mode I'm in. And I end up leaving it in dynamic range bracketing, which is real pain. And, in terms of deleting your images, cause this is another question that comes up when what's your

Steve Vaughan (35:47.38)
Yes, of course,

Steve Vaughan (35:58.505)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Church (36:08.642)
When do you decide to remove the ones that you definitely aren't going to keep? Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (36:12.606)
The rules, I keep every rule we've taken for a year. Cause I've got enough hard drive space to do so. Only in so far as just occasionally we've had, sorry, granny passed away last week. You've got any more photos of granny. And if I have, I'll happily help. Yeah. But.

Nick Church (36:27.601)
Hmm. yeah. I'm a very, very, strong advocate of doing that and like deleting, basically delete as late as possible because you only need to delete stuff when you run out of space. And, and, and, know, I think Lightroom doesn't help in that sense because it has that reject flag and then you can delete or rejected photos. And it's like almost criminal to remove photos so early in your process, your workflow, because there's loads of reasons that that's one reason that the granny, you know, you know, dead granny reason,

Steve Vaughan (36:38.438)
Exactly. Yeah.

Nick Church (36:56.721)
There's loads of times where you've selected a shot, you go into it and you get to anything. Oh my God. didn't realize the brights dad because the eyes were shut. Let's go back to another one. Oh, can't, I'd reject it more. Or, um, it wasn't quite sharp. And only when you view it in Lightroom, can you see that, you know, if you're viewing it full screen, it might look fine. So you reject them all, get rid of them, delete them, and then you, you wish you had it. So there's loads of reasons why you wish you had all of your files. There's no reasons why you wish you didn't.

Steve Vaughan (37:04.34)
Hmm.

Steve Vaughan (37:10.674)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Steve Vaughan (37:19.828)
Yeah.

Nick Church (37:26.193)
apart from when you run out of space, but that's typically a year away, you know.

Steve Vaughan (37:28.67)
So typically a wedding for us with four cameras is 250 gig raw files, something like that. Yeah. So with two 10 terabyte hard drives, one is the main backup drive and then a backup drive of the backup. then, well, let me finish that first. So I can keep a year's weddings easily that way. And the active weddings that we're working on sit on an SSD, which is then also backed up to drive, which is offsite. It's at my stepson's house.

Nick Church (37:34.577)
Mm. Yeah.

Nick Church (37:49.329)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (37:57.737)
So there's always an offsite backup of those, assuming I've delivered the wedding, we keep those or the raws just in case for a year. Cause I've got the space to do it, you know, why not? You know, if you can help people. But then at the start of the year, then they'll go.

Nick Church (38:06.149)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Church (38:11.473)
Yeah, I'm the same. And I've got request at the moment where somebody wants some extra photos and it was two and a half years ago. I just don't have them. I just need to say that I can't, gone anymore. feel, but it feels bad saying it, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's unreasonable to say I can't keep three years of weddings. That'd be 150 weddings. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (38:19.784)
No, that's-

Steve Vaughan (38:26.162)
No, it's not. No.

Steve Vaughan (38:30.536)
You'd have to have more hard drives than Google Cloud. Yeah, you just couldn't do it now.

Nick Church (38:36.761)
So being that we're talking about Lightroom and we've mentioned rules a couple of times. What about, what's your thoughts on DNG versus rule? This is another topic that I've, I just did a, an article on the Academy website on this. do you convert to DNG?

Steve Vaughan (38:54.404)
No, in a word. I know the theory always was that Sony might fall out with Adobe and if they do, Adobe will stop processing Sony RAW files. How likely is that to happen?

Nick Church (39:09.137)
Well, I think, I think the, the, the history was that it was that that, that was one case. I think the other, the time when they created DNG was like 2004. it was like pre predates Lightroom. It's to do also, so there is, is that I, you know, the fact they got IP and they licensed, they licensed their raw file format and they could, they could stop using it. But it was because the versions of Lightroom, when you had the older versions, you'd buy a version and it wouldn't be updated.

Steve Vaughan (39:18.42)
Hmm.

Nick Church (39:37.743)
Right. So you would buy that version. You might get some updates, but they didn't have just over the air updates, which then watermask the updates. Well, mine doesn't seem to, but, so new, new camera models coming along, you would get to a point where your version had to hit end of life and you, you're at the support loop. And so you couldn't do that. So it was a way to keep compatible with newer, newer things, newer camera models. And because every camera model to be clear, even if it's a Canon 3600 or

Steve Vaughan (39:38.195)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (40:02.09)
Yeah.

Nick Church (40:06.065)
50, 35, 100 versus 30. So they're different raw files that they're not compatible. So if you're like, we've supported 3500 D it won't support that. And that was before 3600 was created. It won't support the new camera. So you convert to DNG and it would protect against that. The other thing of course is this notional idea of that they may fall out and it is unlikely. But it isn't without precedent. There are, there have been cases where people have stopped other people using.

Steve Vaughan (40:09.043)
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (40:15.957)
Yep.

Nick Church (40:35.681)
using code and software. And, every time that happens, it's preceded by everyone thinking that would never happen. Right. So the example I can only think of, I mean, let's, let's look at OM system, right. Olympus went, almost went bust, right. They almost fell away to the wayside. If

Steve Vaughan (40:53.895)
Not to do with photography, it was due to their medical business, but anyway, yeah, yeah.

Nick Church (40:56.569)
Yeah, well, whatever, you know, but, if they, if as a, you, when the administrators were winding up that business, if they decided we don't want anyone to use, let's say the, the administrators were focused on creating new editing platform, may well decide that actually we don't want like them to be editing because we want to be the only people that can edit ORF raw files. And so they may have to make that agreement. So it, isn't impossible. It's unlikely. agree. And I think it's very unlikely the likes of Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Sony.

Steve Vaughan (41:10.89)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Church (41:25.231)
I'm to do that like all the others, all their like issues that records DNGs anyway. Yeah. So, and then the other top, the other angle is in terms of benefits, what are the actual benefits of it? And I think there are some benefits that there's the, the, the fact that they are a bit smaller. So it uses because, because DNG is created part of one like a Rico and DJI products, of course, also record DNG, but they've got.

Steve Vaughan (41:28.553)
DMG anyway, I just Rico actually, yeah.

Steve Vaughan (41:50.953)
yeah, good point here.

Nick Church (41:53.969)
software and hardware that is designed to do that. So cameras are, you know, they're consumer electronic devices. they, they haven't got loads of grunt. So converting to a DNG in real time is quite slow. When it's done on a computer, you've got more time and processing power to actually compress that data a bit more. So DNG files are a little bit smaller. They're about sort of 20 % smaller on average, depends on the raw file and depends on the scene as well. So it's not just one type of raw is going to be shorted. It depends what you're looking at.

Like all image compression, be looking at a load of trees and natural things. It will compress a lot more because that's works really well for all the compression algorithms. Think things like angular buildings and things like that. So it work as well. Very busy, high frequency environments that work. Um, so you do get a slight, a slight, um, reduction in file size. Of course there's the compressed DNG as well. There's C raw.

Steve Vaughan (42:31.807)
Yeah, absolutely.

Nick Church (42:48.997)
sorry. So the equivalent is the C role like for Canon and Sony that support this compressed role. and DNG has a lossless, sorry, lossy version of that as well. So DNG's yeah. So DNG's are lossless typically they're losslessly compressed. you can get uncompressed DNG's, which just massive, but faster to use, lossless compresses. What lossless DNG is what we typically use the lossy versions.

Steve Vaughan (42:53.663)
Yep.

Steve Vaughan (42:59.893)
Yeah, I don't want to go through its lossy though. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (43:09.589)
Hmm.

Nick Church (43:17.781)
there's very little difference. It's really hard to see the difference. And you're looking at a good sort of 50 60%.

Steve Vaughan (43:23.839)
Probably, but then, you know, again, we just said, you know, hard jobs are cheap and plentiful. So it's like, it's the old adage of, you use a WAV file or an MP3 file in audio? You know, I always upload this podcast as a WAV file, even though it gets distributed as an MP3 file. Because if you start with something...

Nick Church (43:39.931)
Yeah.

You actually get a wax cylinder made, you, of the...

Steve Vaughan (43:46.007)
I do, mate. Yeah. Yeah. And the 78, uh, know, 78 RPM turntable. Yeah. Um, but, uh, I forgot what I say though. Uh, yeah. So if you start with something that which is lossy and then JPEG is a lossy format as well. So you, you, you've got two lots of losses going on. I always, I would always rather say it was something which is lossless. Yeah. Before, yeah.

Nick Church (44:05.265)
Yeah. No, I, yeah. Yeah. And I'm the same. Yeah. I'm always going to use a raw, uh, sorry, a RAV, a web file rather than MP3. it's like, if I'm getting a track from soundstripe where I get my music from for videos, I'm going to use the web version of MP3. But I think, I think MP3 is more similar to JPEG in that it's kind of knowingly lossy and, we kind of, you can zoom in and you can tell, can tell it's lossy. We listen to MP3 versus like a 24 bit, um, CD, but you know, well, web file. Yeah. Um,

Steve Vaughan (44:15.146)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, 100%.

Steve Vaughan (44:24.405)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (44:31.722)
Waffle, yeah.

Nick Church (44:34.961)
What was that format? Super audio DVD. Never took off, did it?

Steve Vaughan (44:39.084)
wow, now you're talking super audio. Super audio is a completely different... I've got loads, I've got nothing to play them on. I didn't fully understand the technology, it's a different way to... it's a single bit. I'm not a computer guy, you understand computer skills.

Nick Church (44:43.491)
I was so excited about those formats that we could, yeah, yeah.

Nick Church (44:56.177)
Well, it's just, all it was is just a 24 bit rather than a 16 bit, um, 16 bit, 44 kilohertz. Web file, which is on a, which is on the CD. The, um, it was a 24 bit, um, 192 kilohertz.

Steve Vaughan (45:06.42)
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (45:12.808)
No, that's HD audio. I did, before my hearing started deteriorating, I did buy quite a few high definition audio tracks, but Super Audio is completely, it's a different thing. I'll dig it out after the talk.

Nick Church (45:25.221)
But it has it has the multiple channel doesn't it the multiple surround the stuff is it yeah so it's a support or better I didn't take like like JPEG 2000 it never took off so JPEG 2000 fixes fixes all the problems of JPEG except it except no one ever bloody uses it. is it?

Steve Vaughan (45:28.968)
It can do. Yes, it can. Yeah, I've got a copy of War of the World somewhere. Anyway, we are digressing wildly. yeah, JPEG Excel is the latest. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (45:43.127)
JPEG XL was the one actually. was the, what do call it? The PetaPixel guys did a thing about that a while ago, really. I don't fully understand it. So no, I don't convert to DNG. I accept there is a slight risk of Sony and Adobe might fall out. There's also a risk that a meteorite might hit me right now and obliterate the house or, know, how likely is it? I don't know. It's risking everything we do really.

Nick Church (46:10.043)
But I think the other, the other, the other benefit is of course, which is probably a bit more tangible is that it can DNGs support writing the edit metadata into the file. So if I send you a DNG that I've just edited, you can load it slowly and it's got my edit in it, which, isn't the case with raw, unless you have these sidecar files, these XML files. So, you know, I tend to think there's very small benefits along the way.

Steve Vaughan (46:21.482)
That's very true. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (46:32.937)
Let's hear the sync.

Nick Church (46:37.071)
And the only downside to DNG is of course the conversion time, but because it just converts on import to Lightroom, my computer sits here every night doing that anyway, so it might as well convert them to DNG at the same time.

Steve Vaughan (46:40.713)
And how do you do that?

Steve Vaughan (46:49.12)
So as you bring them into Lightroom, they auto-convert into DNG files. Got you. Okay.

Nick Church (46:51.557)
Yeah. Yeah. So you just select copy as DNG rather than copy. And for anyone that's new to Lightroom, for goodness sake, don't use the add option, which is the default, which, which is, which is the, biggest culprit for most of my, emergency consultancy and Lightroom is that someone's done plugged in their SD drive, added the images to, sorry, but plugged in their SD card, added the images to Lightroom. Yep. They all look fine. Whip the card out, formatted it.

Steve Vaughan (47:03.012)
no.

Nick Church (47:19.153)
Oh, hang on, the images are gone.

Steve Vaughan (47:20.19)
They're there anymore. The only time I did convert files to DNG was back in the days of shooting Fujifilm. I think I mentioned this before to you, but obviously you've got an X-T5 now, we've got the X100. So because of the X-Trans sensor on the Fujifilm's working in a slightly different way to the Bayer sensor, it used to be said, I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be said that Lightroom didn't do a very good job of de-mosaicing those RAF files. So people used to use Capture One instead, which I never...

Nick Church (47:48.902)
Right.

Steve Vaughan (47:49.387)
got my head around. But there was a program, there still is a program called Irradiant X-Converter, which would do the demosaic in for you and then give you a DNG file. So when I used to Fujifilm, I used to use that as like a pre-treatment.

Nick Church (47:54.811)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Church (48:01.295)
It's strange that I'd be really keen to learn more about that because, because DNG is a container format rather it's not file formats, container format. So it contains all of the raw data packaged up, but it must, it obviously takes that big data body from the raw file and it must transcode it, but it does so in a way that it should be completely transparent. It's the same data just kind of packaged differently a bit like all of the like .mov, .mov files or .mp4 or mpeg4.

Steve Vaughan (48:05.875)
of. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (48:30.967)
So I just Googled it while we were talking. So it says here, iridiant, I think I'm saying it right, X-Transformers utility that we use to convert Fujifilm RAM files to D &D format using iridiant digital's high quality raw processing algorithms. Much of the raw processing sharpening, noise reduction and lens corrections featured in this program are shared with iridiant developer as a more fully featured raw process that is only available for Mac OS. Yeah, I would play with it, because I think it's free. See if you can see any difference.

Nick Church (48:31.493)
different container files.

Nick Church (48:58.897)
Because all of that stuff, like noise reduction and things like that, that happens before it gets written to the raw file. Right. So by, by transcoding it and by taking that data repackaging in a different way, I thought you were getting all of that same, the same data. Yeah. I'd be interested to have a look. Um, yeah, the noise is interesting because that that's how, do you remember Rawsy? Rawsy was a, yeah. Um, that they, only work with, um, your lot now, don't they? The scientific devices and things like that. So.

Steve Vaughan (49:22.743)
I do. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (49:28.459)
Yeah, yeah, my lot. Because I was a scientist once, it was a long time ago. It was so long ago we were still writing on chalk and, you know, slates and things. Yeah, but anyway.

Nick Church (49:29.137)
in your white coat.

But they work, suspect in a similar way to compress DNG and C raw in that they re because the problem with compressing a raw, lustlessly is the noise because noises can be random and compression algorithms hate random stuff. want patterns because repeating patterns can be much more easily encoded. So what, what Rawsey did or does still, I guess they're, they're working with other people now. and zero will be to.

Steve Vaughan (49:55.564)
Yeah.

Nick Church (50:09.649)
transform that noise into a more predictable pattern. So it does add, I remember Rossi always said it's like a 100 ISO shot becoming a 125 ISO shot. it's kind of reduced in some ways a little bit because it adds a bit of noise. So it remodels all noise, takes the noise out or remodels it in a way that's better. It's more organized. So it's got more repetition, which means it can be compressed much more heavily.

Steve Vaughan (50:20.599)
So long. So long.

Nick Church (50:37.489)
without any loss of data. that's how those things work. It's quite interesting.

Steve Vaughan (50:41.399)
Just as a from what you're saying, someone's popped into your head by head. What's the highest I say you'd ever shoot at a wedding? On your Sony's.

Nick Church (50:50.481)
Yeah. Good question. Um, I, I have a bit of a thing at 2000. If it's over 2000, I know that I'm going to, um, depending on the scene, because it depends on the scene a lot, but in the main, it's somewhere like a church where it's pretty dark or it's a property or it's a landscape, anything like that, if it gets 2009, unless there's really lovely contrast in the scene, I'm going to struggle with image noise after that. So that's the point.

Steve Vaughan (51:07.607)
That's really interesting.

Steve Vaughan (51:16.651)
But you would you not take the picture then or what? How do you handle it then?

Nick Church (51:20.433)
Well, in a church, you know, in a church, I've never got to that point. I've never got, because it 2000, uh, with a, I might move my 7,200 and start taking more than 35 and try and get me closer at 1.4. So use that, use that to back away from it. But it, in all other scenarios that are non church-related, then it's my, it's basically a put your flash on icon for me 2000 or above.

Steve Vaughan (51:22.935)
You don't. Okay.

Steve Vaughan (51:31.957)
Yeah, interesting.

Steve Vaughan (51:43.576)
Ah, interesting. Interesting. That's where we're different. I'm just editing a wedding now and I've 909 pictures actually in edit right now. won't deliver 909 because back to culling, we do like a secondary cull as we go along really, you know, as we edit. But looking at this 909 pictures, I've got three here that are ISO 12,800, three that are ISO 10,000, three that are ISO 8,000, five that are ISO 6,400.

Nick Church (51:58.704)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (52:12.311)
14 ISO 5000, 40 ISO 4000. So it's a good, probably 10 % of them are really high ISO in your school. Yeah. Interesting. That's got some.

Nick Church (52:21.329)
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. No, I never, I never go that high. Um, helped, helped to course by, I do have, you know, um, Sam uses her 28, 24 to 70, that's two point eight. So that time of that, that kind of time of day where it's not dark enough that you need to flash. but you've lost the good light. I tend to be going towards my 85, 1.4 at that point. Just.

Steve Vaughan (52:32.087)
she does.

Steve Vaughan (52:45.303)
Hmm. I must have been, it never bothers me. The noise reduction, think we as photographers, obsess about noise far more than couples do. The noise reduction on Lightroom is great. And on the very rare occasion when we cock something or put it in really stupid ISO, unless it's a must keep photo, you can lose it. But if it's a must do photo, the latest AI noise reduction in Lightroom actually is pretty good really.

Nick Church (52:52.76)
Absolutely, absolutely yeah.

Nick Church (52:58.011)
Yeah.

Nick Church (53:11.185)
And remembering, of course, that the only people that care about light room, about ISO and image noise is you and me and the people listening to this podcast. No one else cares about it. No one else can even articulate what it is. So what I do find is that it can damage skin tones though, high ISO, that image noise, it can make things a bit yellow and green. So, and you get to a point where you can't, even with the tint slider, you can't quite get it right. that's, that's the thing. That's what, that's when we go, I think a black and white would work nicely here.

Steve Vaughan (53:19.329)
Correct. Yeah. No, exactly. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (53:28.575)
It can do.

Steve Vaughan (53:35.435)
No.

Nick Church (53:41.211)
Ha.

Steve Vaughan (53:41.737)
We shot a wedding once many years ago now before COVID at a village called Oakley, which is near Oxford. And it was a November wedding, cold day, church wedding. And we got to the church and you know, there's red bar heaters, know, they'd like strip, you know, you know, they reflect basically, what's the word I want? Incandescent red. Yeah, basically that's great.

Nick Church (53:56.856)
yeah.

Nick Church (54:02.865)
Like an exposed toaster. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (54:07.82)
The church had about eight of those. although our eyes come and save for it, as soon as I put the camera up to my eye, everything was red. Everything was red, you know, and when I

Nick Church (54:14.267)
Clip in the, yeah. Yeah, you risk clipping the red channel, don't you? Even if it looks, even the exposure meter might be fine. Your reds could be absolutely screwed. Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (54:20.726)
Yeah, that's a good point actually. Yeah. and when I came to edit the photo, I mean, I just couldn't push the white band slide or any further and it was still red. So she dig a load of, a load of black and white photos. Yeah. And I told her why, you know, so, so obviously I couldn't shoot flash or anything. So, yeah, never easy this job is it really? So, yeah.

Nick Church (54:37.777)
That's the great thing about the weddings, isn't it? That everything's outside your control like that. so it, it, yeah, cause you never know what you're coming up to next. It does build in you a massive toolkit of skills to, cope with all of these things that are going on.

Steve Vaughan (54:43.19)
Yeah, that's why it's fun though.

Steve Vaughan (54:53.144)
And think it was probably a hundred weddings in before I felt really, and know, tempted to fake because we've got a wedding tomorrow, which is quite a dog fainting, but without feeling, yeah, okay, I'm in this environment. You know, can cope. I've got the gear for it. You know, I've got the, if I need it, I've got the wide aperture lenses even if Sam isn't using them. Yeah.

Nick Church (55:06.438)
Yeah.

Nick Church (55:09.977)
I think that that's it. It's the confidence in having the skills that you need to get the best out of the kit you've got. And you've got enough kit that you think, well, no other photographer is going to get any better shots than this because this is what this is the best a photographer can get in this environment. And once you, once you know that you think, do you know what is fine? You know, it's like, it's like a rainy wedding day that I used to obsess about when I started out, I terrified of a rainy day because I thought they don't, they're not going to nice shots, but no photographer is going to take a sunny shot on a rainy wedding day. So

Steve Vaughan (55:14.264)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (55:24.79)
Exactly.

Steve Vaughan (55:36.824)
No. Exactly. Exactly right. exactly. In the last five minutes, so we've got left Nick, anything else we want to talk about?

Nick Church (55:37.721)
All you do is take the best shot you can and that's all that can be expected of you.

Nick Church (55:46.385)
No, that's it. I'll tell you what, um, Dawn, can see Dawn's messaging me about traitors, celebrity traitors.

Steve Vaughan (55:53.689)
That'd be great to photographers in traitors, wouldn't it? imagine having a lot of photographers. They'd be all about to be traitors, wouldn't they? Every one of them. Not kidding, mean, the list of you all love each other, really. Just to let you know, did talk a while ago on this podcast about a meetup we were trying to organise and we still want to do that. We did postpone it for November. So the idea was that if you're in the UK, we can meet up in London and play a game of photo monopoly. So basically we'd split up into groups and photograph.

Nick Church (55:55.793)
Nick Church (56:00.389)
There might be actual murders if that was the case.

Steve Vaughan (56:23.384)
different four boards, four sides of the Monopoly board. We still want to do that, it's just we left it a bit too short notice to get it organized really, honestly. So we're trying to organize again something for early 2026. So keep an on the Facebook group if you're in it and we'll definitely do that because it will be a lot of fun, I'm sure.

Nick Church (56:39.865)
And we'll, without making it like a, a cost accounting exercise, we are, we will, we'll do it like a ticketing thing. So we can, we can get like, just, you know, make sure we know who's coming. Cause that's what's the problem with these that we, if people say, yeah, I'm up for that. It's always difficult until the last minute. And then, so that'd be really good. think it's a great idea and it'd be lovely to get together people and a bit more notice. And we'll have a page where people would just say, yeah, I'll have a ticket for that. And it will say where we're going to meet everything else. And it just makes it bit easier for.

Steve Vaughan (56:52.024)
That's a good idea.

Steve Vaughan (57:03.17)
Yeah.

Steve Vaughan (57:09.378)
Super, yeah. And thank you to Andreas Georgiades of Fujifilm who did offer for us to use the HASA photography and we'll still take Andreas up on that I'm sure. So yeah, great stuff. So, all right, well, let's wrap up then. So thank you for listening, dear Lester. I hope you've enjoyed this sort of bit of a chat between Nick and I. If you've got any topics you'd like us to look at or talk about, shall I say, then please drop us a note. You can email us, you can contact messages in the Facebook group. You can send a carrier pigeon, whatever method works for you really.

Nick Church (57:10.033)
It ought to work.

Nick Church (57:14.703)
indeed. Yeah.

Nick Church (57:38.329)
studio, studio at the photography pod.co.uk. So you had send us all your thoughts, feedback, guest suggestions, topic suggestions, anything we've got wrong, like keep it short, keep it short.

Steve Vaughan (57:42.252)
Thank you for remembering that. I never remember that.

Steve Vaughan (57:50.584)
Don't sue us. We have got insurance. I'm not sure he covers this for podcasting, still. Don't forget to give us a review on Spotify or Apple podcast app, because he does help us a lot to win in wonderful ways. We'd really appreciate if you'd just take the time to give us, ideally, a five-star review. We'll be back again in a couple of weeks' time. In the meantime, happy shooting out there, and we'll talk to you soon.

Nick Church (58:13.393)
Bye bye.