About Verde Valley Wedding Photography

This is the site of Verde Valley Wedding Photography, professional photographers who photograph weddings in central Arizona’s Verde Valley, which includes the towns of Sedona, Cottonwood, Clarkdale, Jerome, Camp Verde, Cornville, Page Springs, and Rimrock.

The Wedding Photographer

Ed Bustya

Ed is an award-winning nature photographer from Clarkdale who first started photographing weddings in 1982. His wedding photography style is to take a combination of traditional posed images along with photojournalistic (candid) images of the day’s activities. As a nature photographer, he’s used to hiking into the backcountry with a load of camera gear on his back, so if you’d like some interesting scenic shots Sedona’s red rocks as a background to some romantic images before the wedding, he can take you to some interesting places.

I was still going to college, studying geology, when I was asked to be a groomsman for a fellow geology student. I was so impressed with the skill of the photographer who photographed his wedding, that I gave him a call and asked if he needed an apprentice assistant. It turned out he did, but only after looking at my portfolio to see if I was any good at photographing people. So I worked with him on the weekends, learning from a pro, and eventually he started sending me out to do some of his wedding shoots for him. Word got around in the geology department, and I soon became the unofficial wedding photographer for the Arizona State University geology department. Since then I’ve done quite a few weddings.

Things have changed a lot since I first started. I used to shoot only with film using a medium format camera. I’d take enough film to shoot 200 or so photos per wedding. I had to fumble with film backs and making sure I had enough shots left in the camera for critical moments (each roll only held 12 or 24 exposures). It would take a week or two to get the film developed and proofs printed, then I’d have to assemble it all in proof books, numbering each negative and proof, so that the married couple could pass it around among the relatives who would order from the proof book. Nowadays, most couples prefer an online proof book that anybody can order from, or a DVD slide show to play on their TV. Of course, it’s more work for me, because with digital I take hundreds more photos than before and have to sort through ALL of them myself, plus I do all the “developing” (color correcting, cropping, and resizing) in PhotoShop, which is very time consuming. Most people don’t realize that after I’ve put in a “few” hours photographing their wedding, I still have many more hours of work to put in, usually a couple days or more, to prepare their wedding photos, upload to an online photo printing service, prepare the DVD’s containing their “negatives,” and prepare custom prints, slideshows, or print books that have been ordered.