QUESTION: If you are shooting with digital cameras, why cannot I have my photos at the end of the reception? ANSWER: There is a lot of work that has to take place after the pictures are taken. I shoot in RAW format – it preserves more information than JPEG and gives me more options when it comes to editing. RAW formats are proprietary to each camera manufacturer and camera model and cannot be viewed/edited without specialized software such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture. I usually walk away from a wedding with well over 1000 photographs. When I get home, I back up all the pictures to two external hard drives – I keep one at home and another one at the office. Once the photographs are backed up, I go through them in Adobe Bridge and delete the ones that don’t quite make the cut. After that first cleanup pass, I load the RAW files into Adobe Lightroom. I color-correct the photos (adjust white balance, contrast, saturation) and fix minor exposure errors. When all photographs are color-corrected, I convert them to JPEG format and start going through them in Adobe Bridge again. From Adobe Bridge, I open photographs in Adobe Photoshop where I clean up blemishes, remove exit signs, power outlets and other distracting elements. I convert some photographs to black and white, run Photoshop actions on others. The entire process usually takes about 15-30 hours, depending on how many photographs I took at an event. Just look at the difference that little touches make. The photograph below is straight out of my camera. It is a little underexposed, there is part of a chair in the right corner and you can see cables along the edges of the floor. This is what it looks like after about 10 minutes in Photoshop: