It’s getting late (almost midnight here in Belgium) but I still want to treat you all to some images from the awesome wedding of Lieve & Herman. For those among you that are thinking “Hey, we didn’t see any photos from their engagement session” : you are right. Because of an unhealthy amount of rain we had to cancel our gettogether and their wedding date was so close that we didn’t have any time to reschedule … Anyway, I’ll tell you the rest of the story when I post their slideshow

For now, enjoy !

Thomas Bouve threw me, after a short discussion on Twitter, a stick. For you enjoyment, I happily unleash the dog in me and fetch his stick.

What is this all about ? Wel, Thomas is wondering about how other photographers images look like before & after (so straight out of camera vs the finished photograph). You can read his “challenge” here (dutch) , and check out his own before & after shots here (again, in Dutch).

To give you an honest view, I simply chose 4 shots from the engagement session I’m currently working on, that from Sandra & Bart in Aalst. On the left hand side you can see the original image, on the right the finished one.

Almost every finished images receives the folowing beauty treatment :

• Contrast
• Dodge/Burn
• Unsharp Mask

When you receive a stick, there’s also an extra assignment : you have to throw the stick to 3 other photographers. I chose :

Serge “Shadow” Vancauwenberghe
Tom Leuntjens
Jens Daems

Because I’m simply to lazy to completely type the assignment here again, I’ll shamelessly copy it from the original blogpost Thomas made :
De opdracht: kies drie fotografen met de vraag om telkens drie beelden te posten samen met het origineel. Die geven dan op hun beurt de stok door aan drie andere, etc.
Als je drie foto’s uit je portfolio kiest, selecteer dan misschien twee beelden waar je een stapje verdergegaan bent in de nabewerking en één beeld die zo goed als onbewerkt gebleven is. Have fun!

Erpe-Mere, Belgium, Saturday morning 9:30AM. In less then 60 minutes I’ll be heading towards Aalst to shoot the wedding of Lieven & Leentje, but right now I’m sitting behind my keybord, waking up while enjoying a huge bowl of chocolate cereal .

Next week I’ll be shooting the wedding of the amazing Annemie & Sammy (yeah they are both amazing, not just Annemie!). I already shot their civil ceremony a few weeks ago, the results of wich I’ll show you together with the photos of their Christian ceremony & party later on.

But I can already show you their engagement photos . On the beach of Vosseslag (near De Haan), in the rain … Luckily Annemie & Sammy weren’t affraid of some water and they threw themselves at it!

Sammy & Annemie, you were amazing !

Shooting the wedding of a teacher is always something special. There’s always a huge amound of people there & a truckload of kids. The wedding of Anneleen & Tim was no different. There where a lot of people present during the ceremony at the town hall, and even more when we arrived at the church. After talking to some people there I found out that the kids that where in Anneleen’s class had prepared something special : the kids did a little dance at the end of the ceremony and each gave them a beautifull rose. You don’t hear that kind of music in a church that often .

At the end of their Christian ceremony we drove to the nearby “Heide” for their wedding shoot, after wich we said our goodbyes.

Anneleen & Tim, thanks for a very fun afternoon !

Nope, no Collin Farrel that evening, but I had 2 people with me that where even better : Amaryllis & Bart. We started our shoot in downtown Bruges after which we drove towards Damme. The weather was a major pain in the proverbial *ss (go Belgian summers go …) but once we arrived in Damme it stopped raining & we had front row seats to a very spectacular sunset (dark storm clouds mixed with the beautifull deep orange glow of the setting sun peeping through the clouds = BINGO !).

Amaryllis & Bart, I truely had an extremely fun evening, I was looking forward to shooting your engagement session for a long time & now I’m looking forward to your wedding day even harder. I hope 7-8-09 will arrive soon ! It was a pleasure getting to know you guys !

I hope you like the results !