Green Wedding Tip: Hire a Digital Photographer

There are so many simple ways to have a ‘Green’ marriage and hiring a digital cameraman is one of the simplest techniques of all! Why go digital? Well, there are at least 3 truly good reasons:

Cost…. When you receive your marriage footage on DVD and/or CD ROM ; you save yourself the expense of paying for up to several hundred outlined pictures you will never even use.

Environmental impact… It has been renowned for years that the chemicals it takes to develop and print photos are toxic. So is the method for making the paper to print them on. That paper is chemically treated in a number of tactics and photo-paper is unknown for being reusable or recycled.

Film itself is responsible for a large contribution to environmental pollution. Most particularly due to the emissions of methylene chloride, which is a solvent employed in the making of photographic film.

Then there’s the processing. For every roll of 24 film prints, at least 4 ounces of chemicals get poured down the drain in the processing. Down the drain means in our water systems and leaching out into the soil.

Silver is also employed in the processing of film. As an interesting point, around 40% of all the silver consumed in North America has been used to make photographic materials. Silver is discharged from film processors, for example photograph laboratories and surgery xray units, in the form of sewer sludge. Silver ions can be more toxic to water organisms than mercury.

Of course everyone wants to have some special prints made up for framing. That’s understandable. But when you have selected to go digital, all you must do is have just a couple of shots to be professionally revealed, instead of dozens. Or you can even do your own printing at home.

Long lasting photograph quality…. Another truly great thing about having your photographs in digital format is that they’ll last forever. While film photographs will deteriorate over the years, digital photographs can be safely archived indefinitely without ever losing quality.

So does digital photography actually make that much of a positive difference to the environment? You bet it does! A recent study by the Stockholm Water Authority in Sweden spotted that the upward thrust of digital photography was a major reason why silver pollution had lessened by half in the town’s sewers in just five years… Explanation that selecting a digital photographer really does have help us have a greener planet!