Rangefinder Magazine
November 2004

Behind Mike Moreland's Magic: by CharMaine Beleele
Digital Workflow

The bride and groom relax in the Atlanta, GA-based wedding and commercial studio of Mike Moreland. Images of their wedding flow to music across the 102-inch screen. The music is synchronized to the flowing image.

In the projector’s light, the bride sees the blur of her makeup artist’s hand as she smiles in the background. Etched forever in sharpest black and white, the groom perceives the exquisite boutonniere he had hardly noticed in the excitement of the day. They see their modest church made grand and interesting by the fisheye lens. The image transposes into a fairyland of infrared light as the groom dips his bride in romantic embrace. Next, a close-up shows her expression of joy as the groom slides the ring on her finger. To their surprise the shot is black and white, but the bride’s bouquet is sassy red, the only color in the image. They applaud with delight as they see themselves caught mid-twirl during the first dance.

As the screening ends, the bride embraces her photographer’s neck. The groom, who has something in his eye, shakes Mike’s hand. “You’re magic,” says the bride. Little do they know of the hours of effort demanded by that magic, hours far beyond the wedding day.

Mike Moreland, one of the country’s top wedding and commercial photographers, whose images have been seen often in magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens, Home and Victorian Homes, possesses a blended background of commercial and wedding experience. His balancing each “side” of his studio has necessitated a smoothly running workflow process. From soup to nuts, this is the Moreland fail-safe, high-security, sure-fire digital workflow process. [Editor’s note: Mike Moreland’s workflow, as related here, is primarily a wedding workflow. However, Mike uses many parts of the process for his commercial clients and when shooting large corporate events. The biggest differences between the workflows is that his wedding jobs require a second photographer and many more images than his commercial or advertising jobs. He also shoots in RAW file mode for his commercial assignments. His event photography is handled very much like a wedding, minus the final wedding album.]

1 “My assistant for weddings, Claire Tillery, and I both have Nikon D1x cameras with a wide range of lenses, and we shoot every shot at the highest quality JPEG setting.” There is no compromising about this setting because of the requirements of designer wedding albums: Any image can become the ghosted image behind a two-page spread in an 11x14 album.

2 On the wedding day, Claire and Mike synchronize their camera clocks so that the is an exact chronological order to the images from both cameras. Mike has four 1GB and 12 512MB CompactFlash cards, so no chances are taken by re-using cards.

3 The cards are numbered and shot in order. “We bring a laptop computer with us and two folders will be set up on the desktop,” says Mike. Each of the folders is a parent to subfolders with the number of the card. Each card’s images are put into the card’s numbered folder within the main folder.

4 After downloading the pictures from nine cards, a DVD is burned. At the end of the wedding or event, a second DVD is burned of the other cards. “I will have three copies of all the images when I leave,” Mike explains.

5 Back at the office, Mike transfers the images from the two folders to one in the main desktop PC. He does a rough edit by folder. If any image is missing, he knows exactly which card has a problem, since he still has the cards.

6 He then puts all the images into one folder and views them with ACDSee, sorting them by date.

7 Now it’s time for the final edit. He will delete images he doesn’t need or like and make a list of what he wants to transform with black and white, sepia or hand- colored effects (weddings only). Hundreds of images are transformed into black and white, but he will select about 25 for his creative enhancements so the couple can “get a feel” for what he can do with their images. He believes post-production work should add creative elements, not just the standard corrective enhancements. He might add motion, blur a background, select a tint, modify the image with an infrared effect, or combine images in a designer page style. At this point, Mike might “adjust the color saturation to make an image jump off the page or make it soft and pastel.”

Once the couple has chosen an image, Mike goes into detail work: “removing exit signs, whitening teeth, adding flames to candles, or even adding sunset to the sky.” Mike says, “Most retouching is included in our prices. We do not nickel and dime our customers.” Note: this kind of work is not required for Mike’s commercial or event jobs, but it is at this stage that he will do any color correction or retouching required by the client.

8 He will move some of the images around. “Even though the images are all sorted by time, there are some pictures the second shooter was taking while I was taking others, so I want them to be grouped together.” For example, the shots from the ladies’ dressing room should be coordinated with the shots from the gents’ dressing room, so they are grouped in the same chapter of the storyline.

9 After batch renumbering them, “to lock them into position,” he will burn two copies of a final-edit DVD.

10 Using a Photoshop action, he makes low-res copies of the high-res images and then uses ACDSee to print his image catalogue—eight images to a sheet.

11 He uses FlipAlbum Pro to make proof book CDs for viewing purposes, and “the images are encrypted, so they cannot be copied.” Mike uses this technique for both his wedding and commercial clients.

12 From this point he applies software from a company called Lab Prints (www.labprints.com). “With Lab Prints we make a web site and link it to my web site for people to view and order online. Of course, the traditional or designer album designs are done later once the client picks their images.” He adds, “I also like the fact that the Lab Prints software has a flush page design ability, so I often add a few custom designer pages to my traditional albums.” His office manager can create the album design on her computer, and then Mike can view it from his computer and tweak it.

The fun begins when he invites his clients “to view their design.” The Moreland home theater-style screening room “is networked with my computers so I can pull up the design on my big screen and show them their design or make adjustments with them there.” This method is far superior to the way many photographers have the couple to hang over their shoulder to peer at the monitor. “We upload high-resolution images to Lab Prints so we can pull our high-resolution images off our computer. Lab Prints has a relationship with our lab, Miller’s, so we can order our prints from the web site and they will be FTPed to Miller’s and then drop-shipped to our client directly from the lab.” Of course, the Moreland computer is color managed and calibrated to match the lab’s monitors.

13 For his designer albums, Mike supervises a graphic designer and consults with the bride to create a one-of-a kind magazine-style album. John Garder at www.bookcrafts.com binds each book into a truly custom volume. Leather Craftsmen creates an equally stunning traditional album for Moreland’s more conventional brides. And again, what differentiates the Moreland style from the pack is that even the designer album pages are given a big screen preview. Mike explains, “All of our designer books, and print orders that are given, mailed, or faxed to us will have TIFF files created after they have been retouched and enhanced. These TIFFs are made before anything is sized or sharpened, so these will become our master touched-up files.”

14When all the initial steps of the workflow are fulfilled, the clients first see their images on a 102-inch screen, set to music. Like Mike Colón, Mike Moreland says, “Good images set to music and seen large become great images.” So the slideshows are projected through a CRT projector with three tubes, controlled by its own computer. There is a very important Moreland marketing method here: “When their proofing is ready to be picked up, I call them to set up an appointment and ask them to bring their family or friends because I have put together a slide show of their wedding. I want the first impression of their wedding images to have a wow factor. I do not want the first impression to be low-res images on a web site.”

	Mike Moreland’s Atlanta studio: viewing area for corporate and wedding clients.

Perhaps the most important point about digital workflow is to develop one that is consistent and repeatable, and specific to your needs. Mike says the greatest challenge behind creating his digital workflow was and is “to stay on top of the ever-changing digital world. You cannot come up with a system and then just sit back. You need to constantly experiment with new ways to improve your workflow and find what works best for the way you shoot.”

Mike Moreland has gone to great efforts to educate wedding clients about the effort and hours included in the professional photographer’s fees. He explains what professional photographers do in layman’s terms, under the page title, “Why Is There Such a Price Difference Between Photographers?” There he says, “When a photographer takes 250 images, puts paper proofs in a proof album, fills up your album with proofs and machine prints, and has a non-photographer assistant at the wedding only to carry a camera bag, of course his/her expenses are much less, plus he/she may be only spending 10 hours total after the wedding. We usually spend about 50 hours on a wedding because when you are editing 1000 to 3000 images, retouching, cropping and custom printing the images, this means much more time is needed.” Without a good workflow, Mike would need even more hours to accomplish his high quality standards. For more Moreland magic, go to www.morelandphoto.comor you can email him about your work flow at mmfoto@mindspring.com/.

CharMaine Beleele, with her M.A. in communication arts, owns www.angelkissedphotography.com in Fort Smith AR. where she teaches communication at the University of Arkansas. She is also a regular correspondent for the Arkansas Catholic Newspaper. You can email CharMaine at photoangels@sbcglobal.net/.