Rangefinder Magazine
May 2002

Profile: Heidi Mauracher by PJ Heller
Creating Visual Treasures

Heidi Mauracher describes herself as a “warm and fuzzy” kind of person. She also wants her wedding photography to be seen that way, too.

So you normally won’t find cliché poses of a bride and groom or members of the wedding party in her hand-made albums.

Instead, you’ll find a story-telling quality to the photos, from casual engagement images to elegant wedding coverage. In between, you’ll discover a sprinkling of candid moments in black and white, capturing the often overlooked details of the wedding day.

“I would like to get away from the standard formula because it’s so predictable,” says the Santa Barbara, California-based photographer. Heidi observes that today’s client tends to be looking for a more artistic style and with a unique flavor. Each wedding story that Heidi creates is signed and treated as commissioned art, as no two weddings are alike.

That’s not to say Mauracher won’t include the more traditional photos expected in an album. It’s just that she believes in going beyond the tried and true to create what she calls “visual treasures.”

The goal at Heidi Mauracher Photography, she explains, is to “combine candid work with traditional portraits so that each finished album can become a treasured heirloom filled with emotion.”

To promote that commissioned-artist approach, Mauracher charges a “commissioned art fee” for her services but then sells prints and enlargements to her clients at cost.

She does not offer any “packages” as they do not apply to her approach. Basically, the client now has the opportunity to own whatever they desire without high reprint pricing. It is with this concept, that Heidi can better serve her clients.

As far as being a “commissioned artist,” Mauracher says it is her attempt to improve the image of the wedding photographer.

“We have to change the consumer’s perceived value of professional photography,” she insists. “That’s why I went with a commissioned art fee. So often people think of the photographer as an order taker or just an operator, just someone operating the camera. We need to encourage consumers to think about their wedding story and to know that they pay one fee for the artistry.

“We are not operators, we are artists,” she adds emphatically. “And the artist is what people pay for.”

Mauracher admits she sort of fell into professional photography after working at a color lab printing other people’s pictures.

“After seeing a great volume of wedding photography, I grew increasingly disturbed,” she notes. “I could not understand why the subjects looked so uncomfortable. They simply appeared contrived and unbelievable. “I never saw a glow of anticipation or even a hint of romance or fantasy among the subjects,” she recalls. Figuring that she could do better, she decided to learn photography. In 1987, she assisted a photographer for whom

she had printed and on May 9, 1989, obtained her business license and opened a small home-based studio. She has since studied with Monte Zucker, David Ziser and Hanson Fong, among others. Today, she shoots about 15 to 20 weddings a year and attracts work largely through word-of-mouth referrals. She estimates she spends between 40 to 50 hours on each wedding. That includes time spent meeting with the clients, shooting and designing each custom album from the Leather Craftsmen company.

She designs the photo layouts for each album page in Adobe Photoshop—sometimes combining multiple images on a page or adding text prepared by the wedding couple—before having prints made at Pro Color Lab West (PCL West) in Gardena, California, a lab she often refers to as “the Nordstroms of color labs.” We discuss every detail so that the end product is perfect.

“I am the motivator and the director,” she says of her role with her clients. “They are the recipients of all my energy.”

Mauracher also wants her clients to enjoy the process from start to finish.

“The whole idea is to have fun,” she says. “When it comes to the finished image, when the clients sit down and they look at the photographs, I want them to say to themselves, ‘We had a great experience.’

“That’s what makes the difference in my photography,” she says. “It’s the experience of working together to find out what is the ultimate dream collection of images that they want.”

To facilitate the design process, Mauracher has created a series of templates. Similar templates are also available from PCL West, Inc. The design is simple. All you do is drag and drop your images into the pre-designed templates which match the pre-designed Leather Craftsmen album mattes.

“We’re trying to create new ways for a customer to sell their wedding albums,” she says. “We want to create new excitement in the album-design concept and get more people to invest in stories.”

Mauracher shoots weddings using Hasselblad cameras and lenses ranging from 30–250mm. Her films of choice are Kodak Portra 160VC or NC, Portra 400 black-and-white film, TCN 400, T-Max 3200 rated at E.I. 1600 and Ilford Delta 3200 rated at E.I. 1600.

“I use all of these films on a wedding,” she notes. “I think the more variety you have helps you to sell. Plus it makes it easier for the viewer. It’s more interesting.”

For candids, she relies on a Canon EOS camera loaded with Ilford Delta 3200 black-and-white film, which she rates at E.I. 1600 and has processed normally. All of her candid work is shot using available light; lighting for her wedding work is either available light or supplemented by a bare bulb flash, which is set just below the ambient light level to keep a more natural (one-light) look.

After shooting a wedding, Mauracher has PCL West process the film and scan the images to disk as TIFF files. She then uses the images to create her album pages, some of which involve multiple layers created in Photoshop 6.0. She will also do some minor corrections for contrast and tweaks in levels and curves in Photoshop. Those images are subsequently burned to a CD and returned to the lab, which handles the color calibration and printing.

The lab produces 10x10 final images, which are ready to mount into a Leather Craftsmen album.

Considering that she has been doing weddings for only little over a decade, Mauracher has racked up some major achievements. In addition to presenting seminars worldwide, she has won numerous state and national awards for her work, including the 1994 and 1997 Grand Award and Grand Prize from Wedding and Portrait Photographers International (WPPI). She has achieved all the levels of the WPPI Accolades program, as well. Most recently, she was awarded the fellowship with the American Society of Photographers (ASP). She also was named the Overseas Master Photographer of the year in the United Kingdom.

“To achieve high honors and degrees is rewarding, but my ultimate goal is to touch people’s lives with ‘visual treasures’ of photographic imagery,” she says. “My joy is to provide insightfully fresh, vivid and creative photography that illustrates a living record of life’s magic.”

Mauracher’s work can be seen on her web site at www.heidimauracher.com and she can be reached via e-mail at hmstarlite@aol.com.

The images reproduced in this article are from Heidi Mauracher’s most recent album submission to the WPPI Awards of Excellence Album competition. The album scored a perfect 100 in competition and was shown in its entirety at the awards presentation on the final night of WPPI 2002 in Las Vegas. Coincidentally, it was given the Grand Award in the Wedding division of the album competition. The wedding included only a handful of guests, but Heidi photographed it as if it were a much larger event. She also added multiple portrait sessions, both before the wedding and afterwards, to expand the scope of the wedding album. When she showed the couple their album, they were overcome with emotion.

P.J. Heller operates Dateline: a free-lance photojournalism service based in Santa Barbara, Calif. He can be reached via e-mail at pjheller@west.net.