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The Green Party: Eco-friendly wedding photography

Read more: PHOTOGRAPHY

The Green Party
Check out how wedding photography can be sustainable.  (Nick Scott/MNN)
 

Read the transcript

 

Danielle: For this week’s installment of our eco-wedding series, we’re gonna talk about photography.  Photography is already in and of itself pretty sustainable, but we’re here with Ron Holtz from Holtz Photography to talk about how you can go even greener with your wedding photography package.  We’ve worked together in the past.  You know when I come to you, you're gonna need to sort of put your sustainable foot forward.  So what is it, if you can just tell our viewers, what it is that you offer that might be a little bit different than sort of a standard traditional photography package, to help the whole process be a little bit more eco-friendly?
Ron:  Part of it, honestly, is that you come to the table sort of as a green photographer.  I think that is 50-60 percent of it.  Where you can sort of trim the fat on the carbon footprint is with producing proof prints.  What I mean by that is that most clients get proofs after let’s say we do a typical wedding, they’ll get 1,000 proofs.  That could be 1,000 4x6 prints in several boxes.  So the option there is to not take the proofs and save the carbon footprint from all that paper being used, plus the inks and the shipping to get the proofs to me, then back to the client.
Danielle:  Right.  So that’s a really big place where they can make a change.
Ron:  That’s the biggest.
Danielle:  So if a client says, “Okay, you know what?  I’m gonna opt out of my proofs in the name of the environment.”  What do you then offer them?  Do you cut the price?  Or what — how do you handle that?
Ron:  In the name of the environment, we make a gift donation to The Nature Conservancy for the equivalent of whatever it would cost me to make the proofs.
Danielle:  So what are other options that you can offer or what are things that you're doing behind the scenes that people may not even know about that are sustainable?
Ron:  So from — for our studio, we have all recycled batteries.  We have all our in-house printing is done on recycled paper.  As well as our office, we try to keep a tight ship on energy output and turning off computers.  And anything else that comes about, you know, we make sure we try not to make too big of a footprint.
Danielle:  One company out there making really beautiful eco-friendly wedding albums is White Glove.  You can actually introduce them to your photographer and work your photos into their books.  Here is one of their sample books.  It’s beautiful.  I mean, it comes wrapped in this really pretty linen paper.  The paper is all FSC certified.  There’s no acids.  There’s no chlorine.  The pigments are all solvent-free.  The papers are all-natural, made of sustainably peeled mulberry bark.  And actually, unlike a lot of them, it really — they really do an incredible job with it.  As you can see, it really feels like a pretty formal album.  The paper is nice and thick and has like a really, a really great weight to it.  So this is just another way to introduce sustainability into your photography package.
 

 
MNN homepage photo: sx70/iStockphoto

 

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anonymous
Julian 06/27/2011 23:52 PM

What - eco-friendly wedding albums wrapped in plastic?! That's ironic. Interesting interview but the paper on the covers of the albums don't seem like they will last a very long time. I would be concerned about this.

anonymous
Brad 01/12/2011 19:29 PM

While sending images electronically is the most eco friendly way, sometimes you have to pass along a burned CD of images. ReBinder has some unique recycled CD sleeves popular with Green Photographers. They are made out of recycled cardboard instead of plastic and look great stamped, labeled or screen printed .... More

anonymous
William Bay 09/16/2009 23:47 PM

Good video.
There are quite a bit more things to think about before I would call someone a Green Photographer though. Namely there are no professional camera manufactures in the United States. That means all the equipment has to be shipped here overseas from Japan, which creates a huge carbon footprint (I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million cars worth of pollution, per ship).
I write more here about ways we can actually create standards and a certification process: .... More

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