I am a professional photographer based in New York City. My work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Forbes, BusinessWeek, Kiplinger’s, US News, and many other publications and galleries. I have photographed weddings for other Pulitzer Prize and Wolrld Press Award winning photographers.

In 2002, I was part of a team of photographers with The New York Times that won the paper a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and I was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News.

I have been photographing weddings for over 10 years. I have photographed weddings in Belgium, California, Canada, Chicago, Conniticut, Georgia, Mexico, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. As a photojournalist, I know how to work unobtrusively and intimately to get spontaneous and beautiful photographs.

Every couple is unique and has different requirements for their wedding photography, that is why I offer custom packages for my wedding photography services. I enjoy working with each couple individually to customize a package that best suits their needs. Couples can also choose from a few package options that I have created.

I believe that it is important for the couples to maintain ownership of the negatives or high resolution digital files of their weddings so that they can make all the prints that they want. Therefore all of my film packages include giving the film back to the couple in an archival binder, and all my digital packages include giving the couple high resolution digital files on a disk.

For couples, being able to choose from a lot of photographs from your wedding is important. Therefore, I generally only make very rough edits before showing couples the photographs from their wedding. In most cases this means that couples will get to see nearly 1,500 photographs from their wedding day. I am always happy to help couples edit these photographs down, but I believe that it is important for couples to have the oppornity to choose their favorite photos as well before I make an edit. I decided this years ago when I noticed the edits that couples were making of their wedding photos and in many cases chose photographs for their albums that I would have never put in my edits. You can see samples of unedited wedding galleries from other couples weddings on my website at http://aaronleefineman.com/weddings/full.html I also believe that it is important for couples to look at 1000's of photographs from any photographer before they decide to hire them for their wedding. This is something that I only became firm about this year when I was trying to help my brother find a photographer for his wedding in Atlanta.

I started using Digital SLR's for my professional work in 2001. However, until recently I tried to talk couples out of digital capture for their wedding photographs. 2007 was the first year that I felt that professional digital photographs finally got to the point where they equaled and sometimes bettered that of traditional film capture. I will still use whatever the couple prefers, film or digital, but now I am confident that digital is finally good enough for weddings and can even save the couple some money on prints and albums.

For digital wedding photos I use current high end digital cameras and I always shoot in a RAW format, not JPG's. This takes more of my time in post production but with the RAW files I am able to provide each couple with the highest quality digital photographs of their wedding day.

I offer custom made leather and paper wedding albums. Or couples can make their own albums with prints from the high resolution digital files or the negatives that they will own.

Also, since I only photograph between 8 to 10 wedding each year, I encourage couples to look at my other website of my professional portrait and documentary work http://aaronleefineman.com. That way, couples can get a larger sense and feel for my style of photography apart from my wedding work.

One more thing to add about my wedding photography is that like most professional documentary photographers, I stayed away from weddings for a long time until I finally photographed one and realized that weddings are an excellent way for an artistic photographer to get his/her vision out to the world. In my years of working as a freelance photographer for The New York Times I have been beaten by the police and nearly arrested as well simply for doing my job. At weddings everyone is happy and wants their picture taken, so I can focus on making beautiful photographs that will become family heirlooms and be treasured on their walls and in albums. Whereas most newspapers and magazines go in the recycling within a few days and will never be seen again.