For my photo book, I originally photographed my mum and ad’s wedding cards which they sent to each other the day before their wedding, and, coincidentally, they happened to be the same.

I originally photographed these on a white background, raised from the white A2 sheet of card to create a shadow, and although the image turned out well, it didn’t fit the book as I wanted. Because the shade of white of the card did not match that of the white paper I was using for my book, I had to heavily increase the white clipping in the image which affected the look of the cards themselves as these are also white – in-turn, the cards ended up blending into the background because the shadows weren’t harsh enough.

Additionally, I hadn’t photographed the cards at a well enough height so that they looked the same size. One of the cards was also placed higher than the other and it didn’t achieve the affect of “direct replicates” as I wanted – I wanted to make it as symmetrical as possible. Because of this, and after realising that it didn’t fit in the book as I wished, I decided to re-photograph them.

I did photograph them again on the white background hoping I could get a better shot and hoping I could get a more harsh shadow from the sunlight on my window sill – where I had set up a mini studio for photographing the archive material. However, this again did not turn out as planned and once I had imported them into Adobe Lightroom, I was heavily affecting the lighting effects such as brightness, contrast, exposure and black/white clipping so that the image was in-turn becoming more and more low quality. I eventually realised that because of the card’s colour, I wasn’t able to photograph them well against the same coloured background. Because of this, I experimented with using black card, which, as you can, worked much better than that of the effects white card gave. It allowed the cards to stand out much better and I only needed to, once imported into Lightroom, alter the darkness of the black to darken this and increase the contrast of the black lines in the card.

I am very happy with the outcome of my third attempt at photographing my mum and dad’s wedding cards. Because it is the opening image in my book, I wanted it to be of high quality and this is my best edit yet and will be the final image used for the book. I will be using it as a full bleed image to get the full effect of the little details in the cards. I have also found that using black card places more emphasis on the cards and their value than white card did.