While wedding days are filled with exciting candid moments that are fun to capture, sometimes the portraits can be more of a challenge. In this workshop, Michelle Turner and Jamison Wexler will take you through their favorite methods for creating great portraits. With a strong emphasis on composition and posing, workshop attendees will benefit from clear classroom instruction with specific examples and techniques that are proven in the real world.

After the classroom portion, participants will have the chance to work with Jamie, Michelle, and the rest of the ShootStyle team as we head out to photograph models in smaller groups to put the new techniques into practice.

We are limiting the workshop to 16 participants, so don’t miss this opportunity to improve your portraits as the wedding and portrait season shifts into highgear!

Bring cameras, lenses, and flashes if you want, and we encourage you to bring your laptop so that you can follow along with the presentation.

The Portraits with Panache workshop will be held on May 17, 2012 from 1-6 pm in Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

Click here to sign up!

But I’m not going to give you advice on how to raise your prices, sell wall collages, or market to high end planners. No, I want to help you make money the old fashioned way… by selling your crap on eBay!

No joke, that box has been living under my desk for about a year. When I straighten up my office and come across something that I just never use anymore but that is still too nice to throw away, I put it in that box. When the box gets full enough or I’m feeling broke enough it’s time to sell! And truth be told, a lot of the stuff I’m selling isn’t really crap – I just call it that to help motivate myself to get rid of it. My list of things to sell in the next few weeks runs the gamut from a Nikkor 17-55mm 2.8 and 85mm 1.4D, to a D700, D200, and IR modified D70, to old iPhones, print servers, cordless telephones, and even some never used Apple VGA to DVI adapters.

I’m always amazed how much money I get for stuff I sell on eBay, and I have one primary secret for getting the best price – a secret that I’m going to share with you:

Post Great Photos of Your Crap!

It sounds like basic advice but you’d be surprised at how many sellers have really bad photos. I want my photos to be professional looking and well lit. This isn’t the time to get creative with moody side lighting or silhouettes. I want the lighting to be flattering, but more importantly I want my photos to show off every flaw of whatever it is that I’m selling. If there’s a scratch I want to see it. If there’s a blemish I want it to show. I sell clean products but I want the buyer to be able to see every spec of dust I missed. I even link to high res photos of the products so that buyers can zoom in and really inspect them. Why? Because if I go out of my way to show every flaw, a buyer can trust that they’re not going to get a nasty surprise when they open the package. And when you’re selling online, trust is worth money.

I have a basic lighting setup that I use every time I do a batch of eBay selling. It’s easy to set up and I can use whatever gear I have on hand to make it happen.

Here’s my basic lighting setup:

Today I’m using a roll of white seamless paper draped over a table. I’m usually waaaay more ghetto with the background. I typically use a large piece of construction paper taped to the wall. I’ve even used the backside of a really large print. But I’d just set up the seamless for a portrait shoot, so that made the background choice easy. I’m also using a camera (incidentally one that I need to pay off) with a 105mm 2.8 macro. It’s important to use a sharp, close focusing lens so that you can come in on the details.

I’m also using Radio Popper JrX triggers today because I had them out for the aforementioned portrait shoot. Usually though, I’ll just set up one radio trigger (or sometimes just an on camera flash) and have the other flashes triggered using their optical slaves. That method is fast and easy to set up since once I manually set the power of the strobes, I won’t be fiddling with them much.

The lighting instruments are

1. Alien Bee 800 with beauty dish and sock
2. SB-800 in a strip style soft box
3. SB-800 shooting into a large umbrella

The specific lighting instruments don’t really matter too much, what does matter is that the light modifiers (beauty dish, soft box, etc.) that I use are as large as possible. If they are large and have a flat diffused face it’s even better. That’s why I’m using the sock on the beauty dish–it turns it into a round soft box.

Tip: to make my light just a little softer and more even, I use the translucent domes on my strobe even inside a soft box or umbrella.

I position my two flattest faced light sources (numbers 1 and 2 in the photos)  on either side of the object I’m shooting. They can be a little above the object in height, but I try to keep them as low as possible. I also position them so they they are slightly in front of the object I’m shooting. This allows their light to wrap around the object . If I don’t have enough flashes on hand I can replace one of these side lights sources with a large reflector, but I’ll have to get it as close to the object . My third light source is a big umbrella that is right behind the camera. It’s job is to add a tiny bit of fill to the shadows and to make the shiny bits on the object sparkle.

You can see the effect of each individual light source below:

1. The beauty dish and sock is to the left of the D200. Notice how it makes pretty reflected highlights in the grip, prism and other left facing areas of the camera. You’ll also notice that this light is a little pinker than the other flashes. The color temperature of the Alien Bee varies as you lower the power on the flash. For this purpose, I won’t mind it in the final shot.
2. The strip box is to the right of the D200. Notice how it makes pretty reflected highlights in the right facing areas of the camera. The power of lights 1 and 2 are adjusted to be about equal.
3. The large umbrella is right behind the camera I’m using to shoot with and is adjusted to be about a stop below the power of the other strobes. All it is doing is filling in the darkest shadows and making things like the lens mount and AF illuminator sparkle.
4. It all comes together with the three lights. Note that since each strobe is contributing to the exposure, this shot is brighter than the ones showing individual lights. The final exposure was about f/11 at 1/250th with an ISO of 800. I use the blinking over exposure indicator on the camera to set my exposure. Nothing on the background should be blinking.

If a wedding were a movie, the bride and groom would be starring in the leading roles. They’ll get most of the closeups and the camera will linger on them throughout the day. We’ll also see other supporting members of the cast as they interact the couple or react to the unfolding events. Then there are some people in the movie we’ll barely see at all, but they play important visual role of populating the universe of the film. Without them, the feature film wedding would merely be an short subject elopement. That’s why I often go out of my way to create photos that include wedding guests as part of the composition.

As wedding photographers, we all shoot the guests. We often try to get a shot of as many guests’ faces as possible for the bride and groom. Those shots are important but they’re not quite what I’m getting at now. And to be clear, I’m not also talking about shots like this:

Almost every set of wedding photos has establishing shots like the one above, and they often include guests. Overviews like this have their role to play in setting the scene, but they’re not particularly compelling. I want to include guests in the action, without detracting from the stars. I’m talking more of a shot like the one below:

Although you don’t see a single face, the guests are active participants in this scene and amplify the emotion of the best man’s toast. See how much less interesting the shot would be if it were just the cleanly framed shot of the toast-giver:

There is nothing terribly wrong with the shot of the best man alone and I’ll probably take shots with similar framing, but it’s not very cinematic. During the wedding I look for opportunities I can exploit to bring guests into the action. One of the most common times I find these opportunities is during the ceremony.

Getting these guest shots can be a little counter-intuitive as many of us are trained to look for unobstructed angles on the couple at the alter. Invariably, this means we are in the aisle. Let’s face it, the aisle is great for a couple of reasons: it serves up the action perfectly centered, and we’re not blocking anyone’s view. The shot below is a perfect example.

But what if we leave the comfort of the aisle, move a little to the left, and break out the telephoto? We can often get shots like this:

This angle has the same content as the aisle shot but the feeling is different. From this more voyeuristic angle we see the couple as they’re being watched by the guests. For most people, it’s both rare and uncomfortable to do anything front of an audience and this angle make us more aware of that undertone. Shooting just over the top of the guests’ heads mimics the perspective of a guest in the 4th row, giving the viewer the visceral sense that they too are there in the moment. Is there anything better than having a viewer connect with your photography?

And if you can capture the moment of peak action at an angle which puts the viewer into the scene as a guest, then you may just be rewarded with a shot worthy of your portfolio.

Try incorporating the guests into the action in a few shots at your next wedding!

PS: Share your best guest shot over on ShootStyle’s Facebook page. I’d love to see it!

In the good ol’ days, wedding albums were usually made by taking individual photographic prints and slipping them into album pages that had standard size mat openings. That had a couple of implications – every photo needed to be cropped to a standard dimension like 8×10 or 5×7 and every photo appeared with a border around it. As a way to present photos that approach was clean and traditional but somewhat hum drum. And if you shot in 35mm (which has a 2×3 ratio) you ended up cropping out much of your composition.

Today it’s much more common for a wedding album to created as a flush mount book, where one or more images can be placed on the page without restrictions about size or placement. Yet it’s common for contemporary wedding albums to echo their ancestral counterparts by placing images on the page surrounded by large borders. It’s as if these album designs are haunted by the papery ghosts of forgotten album mats that lie mouldering next to dusty enlargers in the basements of photographers who long ago traded film for digital.

If such traditional album designs sound eerily familiar to you, I appeal to you to let your images bleed!

Whenever the edge of an image touches the edge of the page it is on, it is said to be ‘bleeding‘ off the page. An image can bleed off one, two, three or all four sides of the page.

When a photo fills the entire page it is known as a ‘full bleed.’

Nerdy Backgrounder:
The term bleed comes from the printing industry. To get around the limitations printing presses have when printing near the edge of a sheet of paper, pages are printed on oversized sheets. Backgrounds, photos or other graphic elements that need to touch the page’s edge are actually laid out so that they extend a little beyond the edge of the page. After the sheet is printed, the page is trimmed down to it’s finished size. That margin outside the trimmed down page is known as the bleed area. A printer will specify it’s bleed area (often 1/8″ in the US) for designers to use when creating layouts for the press. Few labs and album companies that print photographically refer to a bleed area, but they still trim their prints and will often specify a trim amount that you should keep in mind when designing your album pages.

So why am I imploring to you to let your images bleed? I can sum it up in one word:

Impact!

You busted your backside on the wedding day to take an artfully composed image that captures an emotional moment for your clients. You carefully processed that image in Lightroom or Photoshop to perfect it and make it a shining example of your style. Don’t you want to display it in a way that gives it the impact it deserves?

For example, here’s two page layout featuring a couple of photos from a recessional:

It’s not awful. The page is clean and balanced and I doubt a client would complain about it, but it is drearily static. Both images are nice, but in my opinion a layout like this diminishes them both. Look how much stronger the layout below is we just use one photo and run it full bleed across both pages:

In the full bleed version the image is large enough to really see the expressions of the couple. It encourages the eye to travel from the couple’s faces down along the line of attendants to the site of the ceremony, and then back again taking in the flower beds. This page spread is much more likely to get a client to go ‘Wow!”

Of course, not all images will work full bleed across a two page spread. You can see that even the image above had do be cropped considerably to fit the long, thing layout. If you don’t want to crop your image, consider letting it bleed off three sides like so:

In the example abobe we get to see the entire image full frame and it’s still large enough to have impact.

Of course, I’m not advocating that you limit yourself to one image on every two page spread, nor do I think think there’s no place for white space in your album designs. Albums need variety in their layouts to maximize the viewer’s interest, so mix things up while incorporating more bleeds.

Here are some other examples of layouts with bleeds to prime your imagination.

Make one page a full bleed and run photo on the adjacent page smaller to create a contrast between the two.

Center two horizontals and bleed them off their long sides for a modern take on the diptych.

Similarly, you can center a vertical on each page and bleed them off their long sides.

Try filling the spread with a horizontal and vertical. If you can use photos the have different scales to make the layout more interesting, even better.

Sometimes you need a border, such as when it looks too busy to have the images touching each other. Fine… but consider bleeding the non-adjacent edges of the photos.

Even if you’re going have a more traditional layout, spice it up by letting one edge of some photos bleed.

Here the left page is full bleed and two photos bleed on the right page. In cases like this where a bleed on the right page touches one on the left, you might think it is a looks odd, but I’ve found that it’s rarely an issue since in the final printed album there will be a fold, a seam, or some kind of gutter between the two pages to help visually separate the images.

And don’t forget… every now and then… when it works with your image… go full bleed.

If you’re like me, you shoot your photos in raw format… so there’s also a pretty good chance you use Adobe Lightroom for processing your images. You might even have started using Lightroom because of its reputation for making processing workflow faster. In that vein, this week I’d like to talk about a Lightroom feature that I use every day on every image I shoot. A feature so efficient I’d nearly forgotten I was using it! A feature unexcitingly called Camera Defaults.

You’ve probably noticed that when you open an image in Lightroom’s Develop module, many of the settings are already chosen for you. These are Lightroom’s default settings.

By default the settings for Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, etc. are all set to zero. I guess that makes sense as each photo probably needs a slightly different adjustment to Exposure, Fill Light, etc., depending on the conditions it was shot under and how well it was exposed. But what about settings like Blacks, Brightness and Contrast? They already have values other than zero set. To me the numbers used for some these settings are somewhat arbitrary. Personally, I think a Blacks setting of 5 is too high for the majority of photos I take. At 5 the blacks in my photos get blocked up and muddy. Usually a setting of 2 or 3 is much nicer to my eye. But 5 is Lightroom’s default.

Does that mean I’ll have to move the Black slider down a couple of notches on every photo I process? Of course not! This is Lightroom! I can do these easily and so can you by customizing Lightroom’s Camera Defaults.

To customize your Camera Defaults, select any photo in Lightroom’s Develop module, and then in the Settings menu choose Reset All Settings.

This will remove any changes that you’ve made to the photo, and all the settings back to default. (When you’re done setting your defaults, you can restore all the edits you may have previously made to the photo using Lightroom’s History panel.)

Next, change any settings for which you’d like a different default, for example changing the setting for Blacks from 5 to 3. Only change settings that you want applied to every image you open, so even if the photo is a stop too dark don’t adjust the exposure at this point as you don’t want every photo you open to be brightened by one stop.

Then in the Develop menu, choose Set Default Settings.

The Set Default Develop Settings dialog will appear.

Click Update to Current Settings and you are done! (Note that you can also restore the original Adobe defaults in this dialog as well.)

Another potential benefit to using custom Camera Defaults is that can add consistency to your style. Imagine that the signature look for your images is punchy, with lots of contrast, bright colors, etc.  You find yourself adding vibrance, clarity, contrast, etc. to all of your images. Maybe you even add a vignette to the majority of your images. You can automate much of your signature style simply by creating a custom Camera Default that contains all of those elements:

Now every time you open a photo, it’s already a lot closer to being finished and you’ll have fewer adjustments to make to it look perfect.

There are a couple of other things to know about Lightroom’s Camera Defaults. First, since Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom share the same image processing technology, Camera Defaults customizations made in Lightroom also apply when working with Camera Raw in Photoshop and Bridge as well.

Also, normally customizations made to Camera Defaults apply to every raw file from the same model of camera. If you make a camera default using a raw file from a Nikon D700, those defaults will be applied to every file you open from any D700. If you have another model camera like a Canon 5D Mark II, you need to repeat the process using a file from that camera. This allows you to have a different set of defaults for every kind of camera you own.

If you’d like you can even create more specific customized defaults. Open Lightroom’s Preferences and click on the Presets tab and you’ll see a couple settings that affect how your camera defaults work.

Let’s say that you have three Canon 5D’s and you’ve made a color profile for each of them. You can check off Make defaults specific to camera serial number and create custom defaults that automatically load each camera’s specific profile in Lightroom’s Calibration panel.

You can also make defaults specific to your camera’s ISO setting, which as you can imaging might be useful if you were adding noise reduction to your custom defaults. I leave these two settings unchecked because creating a lot of different defaults is more complex than I need for my workflow.

As I mentioned earlier, customized camera defaults are a feature that I don’t really think about too much, even though I’m using them on ever image I shoot. Who knows how much time I’ve saved over the past few years thanks to it? I encourage you to think about settings you use on nearly every image, and whether customizing your default settings in Lightroom can save you time too.

~Earl

Jamie, Michelle, Zofia, Stacey and Andree each explained how they incorporate posing and composition to create great portraits at weddings and engagement sessions.

After the lecture everyone hit the streets to practice what they’d learned.

To see more photos from the day, check out ShootStyle’s FaceBook page.

We also want to give a big round to applause to our sponsor Ultra Color Lab.

Participants were wowed by the variety of elegant Silk Road albums that Ultra had on display. Thanks to Ultra Color for helping make the workshop possible!

I recently purchased a PocketWizard MiniTT1 to experiment with. For folks unfamiliar with PocketWizard’s new MiniTT1 and FlexTT5 triggers, their main selling point is that they allow you to shoot in TTL Flash mode wirelessly.

That’s a super awesome capability, but I’m not ready to wrestle with the vagaries of TTL flash just yet; I like the control and predictability of using my flashes on manual. Smartly, PocketWizard designed their new triggers to be useful to people like me as these new units can control old style Plus, Plus II and MultiMax triggers, and maybe even breath new life into them.

First some background. Here’s what happens when you push your shutter speed above your camera’s native flash sync speed:

In the exciting example above I was shooting a whiteboard with a Nikon D700. That camera’s native sync speed is 1/250th and as you can see that shutter speed the light from the flash falls evenly across the wall and whiteboard. When I bump the shutter speed up to 1/320th, I get a slight black bar at the bottom of the frame, and the bar gets bigger as I continue to increase my shutter speed.

The black bar is essentially caused by the shutter closing before the the frame is fully exposed. Well, it’s really a smidgen more complicated than that. At shutter speeds above the camera’s flash sync, the shutter is actually never fully open, but instead it’s more of a slit that travels across the sensor. The higher the shutter speed, the smaller the opening of the slit is. That’s why as the shutter speed increases the black portion of the fame that’s not exposed by the flash gets bigger.

So why does this even matter? Let’s say your couple wants you to shoot formals outside at 2pm. (I know, that never happens.) My first thought is to find a large area of open shade to pose the groups in so that they’re not squinting into the sun. If there’s no open shade available, my fall back is to position the groups with the sun at their back. That works but now people’s faces are in shadow, so I have to choose between either correctly exposing for the background and doing a lot of photoshop to bring up their faces, or exposing for their faces and blowing out the background.

Or you could use a fill flash to raise the brightness of their faces to the same level as the sunny background. Sounds simple, but it requires a lot of light. How much? Well, you can estimate the correct exposure for scenery in the daytime using the Sunny 16 rule. That rule says that for direct sunlight set your aperture to f/16 and shutter speed to the same number as your ISO. So if you are shooting at ISO200, your aperture would be f/16 and your shutter speed would be 1/200th.

The challenge with a using speedlight like the SB-800 is that if I have the flash far enough away to cover a group, especially using a shoot-thru umprella, it can only give me an exposure of somewhere between f/5.6 and f/8 at full power. At full power the flash takes longer to recycle than I’m comfortable with for trying to quickly shoot shoot group formals.

If I could shoot at a higher shutter speed, I could shoot at that larger aperture without overexposing the background. Starting at the ISO 200 Sunny 16 example of  f/16 at 1/200th… if I increase the shutter speed 1 stop to 1/400th I can decrease the aperture 1 stop to f/11. If I could go two stops I’d be at f8 at 1/800th.

Of course I could also bring a more powerful flash, like an Alien Bee 1600, but I often work alone so the less gear I can bring with me the better.

Enter the MiniTT1 and a feature that PocketWizard calls HyperSync. HyperSync holds out the promise of being able to balancing strobe with sunlight by shooting at shutter speeds higher than a camera’s native flash syncs. And as a bonus, HyperSync is advertised to work with old style PocketWizards like the PW Plus’s and Plus II’s that I already own.

The way HyperSync works is by triggering the flash a tiny bit before the camera’s shutter actually opens. When that happens the camera’s shutter is now capturing the decaying light of the flash instead of just it’s initial burst. As the decay lasts longer than the initial burst this lets the camera shoot at higher sync speeds without getting the black band that you usually see that the top or bottom of the frame.

Using the software that comes with the MiniTT1, you can adjust the timing or ‘offset’ of the HyperSync feature to control exactly how long before the shutter opens that the flash will fire. I tested this capability using a D700 and  a Nikon SB-800 strobe. My results looked like this:

Click for bigger image

The columns above show the effect of increasing the HyperSync Offset, i.e: making the flash fire longer before the camera’s shutter opens. The first column shows no HyperSync Offset and is similar to what you get when not using the MiniTT1. Each row shows a 1/3 of a stop increase in shutter speed.  As you can see, with an offset of -800 and a shutter speed of 1/400th I still get pretty even light coverage. That’s a full stop improvement over Sunny 16. If I wanted to push things I could even try using an offset of -1600 to get a maximum shutter speed of 1/640th. Not quite two stops, but better .

So while HyperSync helps, and could even do the job for me in overcast or non-direct sun situations, it looks like I’ll still have to bring a big studio light like my Alien Bee 1600 to shoot groups outdoors on sunny days.

Make some pinhole cameras!

The winter is here and if you’re like me, this is the time of year when you revisit your marketing materials. I’m currently looking at my brochures, price lists, web site and blog to see I need to update my branding. In these cold months I even start to wonder if my old logo needs updating. One of the most basic decisions I face when creating a new marketing piece or updating an old one is what typeface to use. Now, this is not to say that the font used is more important the the actual words and ideas expressed in the piece, but to me the font is what gives the message character before someone even reads it.

As you can see below, a weathered, beat-up, grungy typeface might communicate that my marketing piece is (trying to be) hip. A elegant calligraphic script might impart a sense of style and class. A traditional, legible, newsy font could help convey that what I’m saying is authoritative.

Are you tired of the fonts that came with your computer? Do you need some new typefaces for project or rebranding effort you’re working on? I’d like to share a few of the sources I use to research, identify, and obtain new fonts.

First, there are couple of tried and true websites that offer thousands of fonts free to download. If you want to easily experiment with a bunch of new typefaces, take a look at the sites DaFont and FontSpace.

dafont:

FontSpace:

Both these sites offer boatloads of fonts and sometimes they can be a lot to wade through. Even though the quality of many free fonts isn’t the best, browse long enough and you’ll be rewarded with some fabulous fonts. To help people circumvent this quality issue the editors over at Smashing Magazine frequently do round-ups of small collections of high quality free fonts.  Here is a link to some font round-ups on their search page. (Smashing Magazine also features free blog themes, backgrounds and textures too, so poke around there when you’ve got some time.)

After a while you’ll probably notice that the best free fonts tend to turn up in a lot of places. I guess that just makes sense, but it can be a bummer to see another photographer or a random banner ad using your favorite font. If you want to create marketing materials that are more distinctive you’ll probably need to buy some fonts.

My favorite place to research and purchase new fonts is the site MyFonts.

There are number of reasons why MyFonts is my favorite place to research and buy fonts. First, you can browse fonts by bestselling status or look at lists of hot or new fonts. There is even a sale section. Tags are probably the most useful feature of MyFonts. Users can tag any font with words they feel describe it, and then you can search on those tags. Interested in a font that is both vintage and feminine? A quick search and bingo! MyFonts hooks you up with 144 possibilities.

If your find a font is close to what you what, but not quite, (perhaps it’s a little pricey) you can click on a link to quickly see other similar fonts.

You can also explore fonts with related tags by clicking in the tag cloud for each font or search result.

To quickly get a feel for the personality of different typefaces, you can customize the sample text that MyFonts uses with text that you might be using in your work.

Imagine that you’re reading a magazine or browsing a website and you come across a beautiful typeface that you know will be perfect for the project you’re working on. Just scan it or take a screen capture of it and MyFonts has a couple of ways to help you figure out what font they used. First, head on over to the WhatTheFont tool. It will try to identify the font used in a jpg file that you upload. It’s actually kind of amazing. For example, here’s a very small version of my logo that I grabbed off my web site:

I upload the image to WhatTheFont and its first guess at the typeface is correct, Bentwood.

In fact, WhatTheFont’s other guesses are pretty good too and can make a great starting point for finding the perfect typeface for your project. If the WhatTheFont tool doesn’t guess the font, you can also post the image to the WhatTheFont forum where some scary smart folks will help you figure out what font it is and what other fonts may be similar.

So if you want to spruce up your branding or just have a bit of fun with your marketing, check out these sites and find some fonts that are just your type..

For many of us this is the slow season and that usually means we’re feeling cooped up at home, cold from snow shoveling, and dreading the need to get our finances in order for taxes. Well ShootStyle’s here to help you with that.

On January 25th we’re inviting everyone’s to join us for cocktails and fun at Michael’s Harborside in Newburyport. And this time we’re inviting a special guest to start the festivities!

Joe Carreiro is a business consultant who’s been working with small photography studios for over a decade. He’s been helping me with business matters for years. Joe will be giving a quick talk about organizing your accounting for taxes and will do a Q&A about tax prep, accounting, or any other business advice you might have.

When the Q&A is over we’ll all continue to mingle, socialize, and celebrate the start of a new season.

Just what the doctor ordered? Super! RSVP on Facebook then get yourself to Michael’s Harborside, One Tournament Wharf, Newburyport, MA (directions), at 6:30 PM on Tuesday January 25th.

We’d love to see you there!