Rangefinder Magazine
Features

The Wedding CD by Greg Rice
Bridging the Digital Divide

Harvey Huff has been shooting weddings in the Niagara Falls area for 30 years. And he’s learned to change with the times. He just launched a new web site www.photohuff.com. And now, when customers ask about getting digital files of their wedding photos, he’s quick to oblige.

The Kodak Wedding CD can be ordered with the studio’s name and the couple’s names and wedding date silkscreened on the disc.

“Some people have asked if I shoot with a digital camera, and I say ‘no… but I can put your best images on a CD if you like.’ That catches their attention,” he says. “They think that sounds pretty good.”

The Kodak Wedding CD he uses contains 100 images and software for viewing, e-mailing, printing and more. It’s silk-screened with Huff’s studio name, Artistique Photo, and the bride and groom’s names. The Wedding CD resembles a virtual wedding album.

The best part is, it’s no extra trouble for Huff. He just orders it from his lab, Candid 2000, which produces the standard Kodak Wedding CD as part of his print order.

“It’s an easy process,” Huff says. “I have the couple select the 100 images they want on the CD at the same time they’re selecting their album prints. The rest is up to the lab.”

	Using a Kodak Wedding CD is a simple, straightforward process. Users simply load the CD, and the Wedding CD software brings up its own, album-like interface.

Huff codes the selected images on the lab’s order form, just as he would to order an additional print. The lab arranges to scan all the images, orient them (if the originals are shot in rectangular rather than square format) and write them to the Wedding CD as part of the normal workflow, without any increase in turnaround time. If Huff wants the images to be viewed chronologically or in a special order, his lab keeps them in that order so that the CD tells a visual story.

The Wedding CD contains medium-resolution images, so there’s little risk of a customer choosing to make hard copy on an inkjet printer in place of traditional photographic prints. “There’s really no comparison with the quality of the print they can get from me,” Huff says.

But the digital files, which range in size from 2–5 megabytes when uncompressed, are plenty big enough to produce impressive screen displays. The files are written to disk in JPEG/EXIF format.

Users can elect to present a “slide show” of selected images on their computer monitor, using from 1 to all 100 images on the Kodak Wedding CD.

Huff shoots up to 190 images using Kodak Portra 400NC and Portra 800NC film in 120/220 format for a typical wedding. His clients receive 150 5x5-inch prints in a Renaissance leather album, along with multiple folios. Additional enlargements are offered a la carte. The Wedding CD is also an a la carte item that runs $179. Huff has considered offering it as part of a standard package, but thus far, he says, “I’m still running across a lot of people who don’t have a computer.”

Still, he believes that the CD will be an important element in his future weddings.

“I think it’s going to help a lot in attracting some couples,” he says. “CDs are going to appeal to people who are heavily computer literate. I want to be able to offer the digital generation a product that speaks to them, and this seems to work well. I’ve even had past customers come back to me and say they wanted to have one made from their old negatives.”

Huff understands that the Wedding CD is a premium item that won’t appeal to everyone. Even so, more than half of his wedding customers—a total of seven—ordered a CD during his first three months of offering the product. Huff also runs a wedding chapel, Rainbow House Bed & Breakfast and Wedding Chapel, with scaled down photographic service. He normally shoots just two rolls and charges $149. For chapel customers, he offers the CD with fewer images, at the reduced cost of $79.

	The menus on the Wedding CD provide a clear, intuitive user interface for various functions. The “Modify"”function lets users trim or rotate an image, create a black-and-white version, or a mosaic.

The software included on the CD gives users the tools to do many things with the photos. They can modify their images (by cropping, rotating, producing black-and-white versions, or mosaics), print them out on an inkjet printer, e-mail them to friends, create a computer-generated slide show, or even custom computer wallpaper. Images can be accessed in six different sizes for e-mailing and web sharing, from a thumbnail to the largest size that’s suitable for printing.

Advanced computer users access the images and modify them further with other image editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe PhotoDeluxe, and save the modified images to their hard drives.

The Wedding CD requires a Windows 95/98/NT computer with a Pentium 166 MHz processor, 32 megabytes of RAM and 100 MB of available hard disk space. A Macintosh version is expected early in 2001. Customers should be made aware of the system requirements before they order the CD.

Some photographers have begun exploring other uses for the Wedding CD. One, for example, plans to post images from weddings on his website for electronic ordering. Another plans to keep Wedding CDs on hand in his studio as a medium for showing weddings he has shot previously. Huff prefers to offer it as an optional addition to his standard packages.

The Table of Contents screen lists all the features Wedding CD users can access, from Modify and Print to e-mail, Slideshow, Wallpaper, and Save As (to export images for use in other imaging applications).

“So far, clients who have gotten the Wedding CD have loved it,” he says. “It’s a nice addition that’s easy to order and offer to customers. And for the couple that’s always looking for something different, it can be the little extra that closes the deal.”

Greg Rice is a writer/photographer based in Cloverdale, IN.