Michele Stapleton, a Maine wedding photojournalist, started out as journalism major following the pre-law path her mother wanted her to pursue. She took all of the standard journalism classes and the single photojournalism class the school offered. This class changed everything for her. She bought her first Nikon for her last semester and says “I went crazy. I joined the yearbook staff. I joined the newspaper, I took any assignment they would give me.”

She lugged her camera with her everywhere while interning at a small newspaper and was more excited about the photography than the writing.

In the meantime, she applied to law school. “The only school I had applied to was the University of Alabama because it was the only one that didn’t have an essay on why you wanted to go to law school. I didn’t want go to law school, and I didn’t want to lie on an essay. I got accepted in December after I finished my internship.”

In the interim she applied for a summer job as a “girl” for a wedding photographer, doing office work, carrying bags, schlepping. “I told my mom ‘I know what I want to do’, my mother said ‘No way.’”  So instead Michele packed her cameras away and got a job as a runner for a law firm.

She did well in law school and got a job with a law firm.  “At this point I brought the camera stuff back out, I was one of the lawyers with the nice Nikons. I had really nice stuff but I was really unhappy.” She took an Adult Ed photography class taught by a local newspaper photographer. Each week she would shoot ten rolls of film in the Mississippi Delta, pick out the best 36 images and show them to the class.  “I was like ‘This is what makes me happy’. I spent a year hanging around the newspaper.

“I’d shoot alongside a newspaper person, I’d go to a football game and I would shoot with them. I’d pay for my own film and I’d put it in the processor and I’d lay it down next to the [staff photographers photos] and I’d go ‘Oh my god, my stuff is so bad, and their stuff is so good’. There were two guys there that were good with interns that would really give constructive criticism. I did it for a year and a half until I had worked up a portfolio of what a newspaper photographer should have.”

During this time, Michele won the grand prize in a national Nikon contest for a little league game she’d photographed. The prize was a two-week trip for four to Washington, New York, the Grand Canyon and L.A.

“That was my two-weeks vacation. I got back, and the Republican National Convention that year was in New Orleans. AP was looking for not shooters, but total runner-wannabes. AP needed volunteers to go around to the photographers and get their film and take it to the lab. That’s all you did, but it got you into the building and into the convention. I thought ‘I want to do that’, but I didn’t have any more vacation, so I walked in [to the law firm] and I quit.”

She took a job at a small paper in Alabama and then she got a staff position at the Clarion-Ledger where she shot for seven years. She took a workshop at the Maine Photographic Workshops with Jay Maisel, fell in love with the state, and grabbed a position at the Bangor Daily News when it became available.

Her transition to weddings coincided with an increase in popularity of wedding photojournalism. The new photojournalists rejected the notion that a wedding was just a series of opportunities to pose people.

“People who came from newspapers made such a big impression because we rejected all these rules.  At first people just thought the difference was that we weren’t posing people. We recognized that moments were happening already, that you didn’t have to make-up moments. I don’t think they realized all those other things we were doing: pushing film, dragging the shutter and not shooting everything at f8 at 250 on 100-speed film. The only thing they noticed the difference in was the moments. They didn’t notice all the other things.”

Michele has great respect for photographers who pose people and encourage their clients in scenarios, but it’s not something she’s comfortable doing. She says: “I’ve seen some fabulous shots and thought ‘oh my gosh, I wish my brides would do that’ and the photographer will say ‘Oh I suggested that’. It‘s executed so well that it looks spontaneous. It’s a hard thing for me to cross over to encouraging people to do stuff. I’m somewhat of a purist; if they don’t do it, I don’t encourage it.”

“I attract people that are a little nervous about the posed stuff and don’t want to do a lot of posed photos. I get the couples who say, “We don’t want to miss our cocktail hour, we want to spend twenty minutes max on posed photos. And that’s okay with me. ”

She prefers to get to the cocktail hour herself. “To me, the cocktail party is a great opportunity.  I don’t want to be the photographer where you open up the album and it’s the bride, groom and preacher, maybe one picture of the bridal party, maybe one picture of the family and pages and pages of posed photos of the bride and the groom.”

Michele explains, “My attitude is that anyone that you’ve invited and has made the trouble to come to your wedding in Maine is fair game. I want to take pictures of the bridesmaids and groomsmen other than when they are walking down the aisle. I want to get pictures of the family other than when they are being seated. The cocktail hour is a great time, they are on a patio, they’re seated on a rock wall, they are spread out and mixed around “

“I feel like that’s what makes me different. I’m taking more pictures than of just the bride and the groom. I want them to have pictures of as many people as possible, because it’s their family and their best friends and the people that are most important to them in their life. I want them to have pictures of everybody.”

“The best advice I got was to join the professional associations and trade groups for your profession; you network with other people who do what you do, you get online classes, you get workshops and you become friends. ASMP, PPA, WPPI, Maine PPA, I join a lot of them, I spend a lot of money on dues. The national organizations do a lot to support things that are important to photographers and they provide educational opportunities. You can’t beat the DWF, especially since we are in Maine– it’s so far way from everything– people [on the DWF] are really generous, it’s an incredible opportunity to learn everything.”

Check out her wedding work at : http://www.maineweddingphotographer.com/

and her editorial work at: http://www.michelestapleton.com/

We spend hours bent over our computers crafting the perfect image before sending it off to a lab or album company, only to see it butchered in the final print. So, how do your get your prints to exactly match what you see on your screen?

You can’t.

All right, that would be a really short article. So, lets talk about getting color that is pretty darn close from screen to print to album.

Why is this so hard anyway? That can be a complicated question to answer. In part, because when you look at a photographic or inkjet print or press printed album you are seeing the effect of light reflecting off of colored dyes or ink sitting on paper. When you look at an LCD monitor, the light you see is being transmitted directly through red, green, and blue filters. To make matters worse, every monitor and printer is capable of displaying a different range of colors. The hardware, software and workflow used to describe colors and get them to display and print as accurately as possible is called color management.

The subject of color management is so complex, you could write a book about it. In fact, a number of people have. One book I recommend is Color Management for Photographers by Andrew Rodney. His Web site is also very useful for learning about color management. Since resources like these can teach you almost everything you need to know about color management, I’m going to try to simplify the process and cover only the 5 most essential steps to getting your monitor to match your prints.

Step 1: Get a Good Monitor

Not all displays are created equal. At the time I wrote this, one could buy

• a 22″ EIZO ColorEdge display for around $4,400
• a 24″ NEC Multisync Monitor for about $1,150
• a 24″ Apple Display for around $900
• a 24″ Acer Display for about $330.

All of these monitors are LCD panels and they are nearly the same size, so why the enormous price disparity? A couple of important reasons are that the more expensive monitors can display larger range of colors (gamut and they are more uniform in how they render color across the screen.

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but your monitor–yes, the one that came bundled with the computer at Costco–probably stinks for judging color. If you didn’t spend $500 or more on your monitor, you could probably do a LOT better.

Look at reviews and get recommendations from other photographers when buying your monitor. Your display is the window that you are going to be judging all of your work on, so it makes sense to get the best one that you can afford. Right now, NEC’s SpectraViewII monitors are getting high marks from photographers. They have a wide gamut and come with hardware and software that does an excellent job of calibrating and profiling the monitor.

What if you work off a laptop? Bad news! Laptop screens are generally designed to be lightweight and low power rather than to have accurate color. The good news is that it is usually easy to attach a more accurate (and larger) monitor to your laptop. I know, I know, you got the laptop so that you could do your color correcting on the couch. OK, you can still follow all of the steps below and work off your laptop screen. The accuracy of your color may suffer somewhat, but will be better than before.

Step 2: Use a Hardware Based Calibrating and Profiling Tool

Keep that checkbook out. Now that you’ve got a decent monitor, you need to make sure it is outputting the most accurate color that it’s capable of. In the old-timey days of digital (like 2005), a lab would send you a print and tell you to adjust your monitor to match it. If that happens to you now, run, don’t walk, to another lab.

You may also have a software-only calibration tool like Apple’s Display Calibrator Assistant or Adobe Gamma. These programs walk you through calibrating your monitor by eye. Unfortunately they aren’t sufficient for your needs as a professional photographer. Please, don’t go there.

The only accurate way calibrate a monitor is by using a hardware based calibration tool. This is basically a little puck that you put on your monitor while you run the software it came with. The calibration software will walk you through two basic tasks:

Calibrating – here you tweak your monitor’s brightness, contrast, and perhaps even red, green, and blue channels to bring the display as close as possible to a state of showing perfect color.

The software will probably ask you what to use for a gamma value. I recommend using 2.2 as your gamma.

It will also ask you what to use for your monitor’s white-point or color temperature. Here you can use either 6500K or “Native”, which is the displays native white-point.

Finally, and pretty importantly, you need to set a luminance value for the calibration. Luminance is a value of how bright the monitor is. I recommend a setting of somewhere between 90 and 120 cd/m2. That will make your monitor look very dim until your eyes get used to it. But if you remember that we are trying to get your monitor to emulate a piece of paper, you can understand why it needs to be that dim. Straight from the factory many monitors have a luminance of 200 cd/m2 or more. If you adjust your images on a monitor with that kind of brightness, you’ll probably see that they seem too dark when you get them printed.

Some displays, notably Apple’s, don’t really give you much ability to change anything except the brightness. That’s OK, as you’ll be profiling the display in the next step.

Profiling – now that your monitor is calibrated as closely as possible to showing perfect color, we want to know how far off from true color it is. During the profiling step of the process, the calibration software will display a series of solid colors underneath the puck that is attached to the monitor. The puck precisely measures the colors displayed on the monitor and notes how far off each color is from what the true color should be. The software then creates a ‘monitor profile‘, which is a file that describes how the monitor deviates from true colors. The software asks you to name the profile and automatically saves it in the correct place on your computer.

Software that is color management aware, such as Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, automatically uses this monitor profile to compensate for that monitor’s differences when it displays an image on screen.

Some good monitor calibration devices are the i1 Display 2 and mirthfully named ColorMunki from X-Rite and the Spyder3 from DataColor

Step 3: Set Your Working Space

Now that the monitor is set up and profiled, the next step is to adjust your Color Settings in the software you use. Here we will briefly discuss Color Settings for Photoshop, but the same general principles will apply in any professional photo editing software.

The Working Space is the default color space that Photoshop will use when you are editing images with it. It also is the default color space that will be used if you create a new image. There is a different color space setting for RGB, CMYK, Grayscale, and Spot color images. For images that you send to a lab, or even many press printers, you should be primarily concerned with the RGB working space. The two most popular RGB color spaces for photographers to work in are sRGB (often labeled sRGB IEC 61966-2.1) or Adobe RGB (often referred to as Adobe 1998).

Which working space should you use? It’s up to you, but in general, Adobe RGB will give you a larger color gamut which is great, especially if you have a high end inkjet printer in your studio. Just remember that your lab or press book provider won’t be able to print all those colors. And if you put a photo on the web, you’ll need to convert it to sRGB first, or it will look odd in most web browsers.

If you’re new to color management and you typically get prints at a lab rather than printing in-house and want the most consistency in the photos that you print, give to clients, and post on the web, you might want to use sRGB.

It is important to note that you should NOT set your RGB working space to be the same as the monitor profile you created in the last step, or the same as your printer profile. Doing this will severely limit the number of gamut colors that appear in your images.

Step 4: Embed your Color Profile Into Your Images

It is also critical that the files you send out for printing have a valid ICC profile embedded. Without an embedded profile, the recipient of the file won’t know which color space your files were created in, and will not be able to accurately print them. When you save a file from within Photoshop, you will see the checkbox for Embed Color Profile. Always leave it checked.

At this point, having followed the preceding four steps, your monitor will show a pretty good match to the output that you get from your lab. Send out a few test prints and instruct your lab not to adjust them in any way. You’ll probably be very pleased at how closely they match your monitor when you get them back.

There is one last step you can take though to get from being ‘in the ballpark’ to really, really close, and that is…

Step 5: Soft Proof Your Images

Photoshop has the ability to simulate what an image will look like when printed on various output devices. In order to use this feature, you need Photoshop version 7 or higher, a high quality profile for your display (like you created in Step 2) and a high quality profile for the printer (and paper) you’ll be printing on. Many labs and press printers can provide you with a profile for their printer and paper combination. If you are printing in-house, your printer manufacturer or paper manufacturer should be able to provide you with a printing profile for your specific printer/paper combination.

Once you have obtained a profile for the printer you are using, you can install it on a Windows PC by right clicking on the file and selecting “Install Profile” from the menu that pop’s up:

You can also install the profile on the PC by moving them into the C:\WINNT [OR WINDOWS]\system32\spool\drivers\color directory.

On the Mac, you can install the profile by moving into into /Library/ColorSync/Profiles folder.

Open an image in Photoshop and in the View menu, select Proof Setup->Custom.

This will open the Customize Proof Condition, or “soft proofing” dialog as shown below. Initially, configure the soft proofing settings as follows:

Device to Simulate: Choose the name of the color profile you just installed.

Rendering Intent: Relative Colormetric

Black Point Compensation: Checked.

With these settings, Photoshop will attempt to emulate what your image’s colors will look like when it is  printed. If you click the Preview checkbox on and off, you can quickly toggle between the image and the soft proof.

To get a even better idea of what the image will look like when printed, you might want to take into account the brightness and tint of the paper that the photograph will be printed on. Photoshop lets you to simulate this by clicking on the Simulate Paper Color checkbox.

When you do this, your image will appear to get dim and its color may look drab. This effect is so pronounced that many Photoshop experts actually recommend that you look away while clicking the Simulate Paper Color button. After a few minutes, you eyes will adjust to the new brightness level.

Click OK to dismiss the soft proof dialog. You can still toggle proofing on and off by selecting Proof Colors from the View menu, or using the keyboard shortcut [Command/Control]+Y.

I like bright, saturated colors in may images, but I know that they won’t always make it to print. The image below gives a flavor of the differences you might see between your original on-screen image, and a soft proof simulation.

See how the red in truck and the blue in the sky lose a lot of their vibrance? These colors just can’t be reproduced on photographic paper. Other colors like the hand and the jacket are less affected because they fall within the printer’s color gamut. Even though the more vibrant colors won’t match what I see on the monitor, they will still probably look good in prints because our brains adjust to whatever medium we are looking at.

Bear in mind that soft proofing does not alter the original image at all, nor does it change the image’s profile. It just simulates the final output onscreen. You can use this simulated state to make changes to the color, brightness or contrast of the image before sending it off to be printed.

Hopefully, after following these steps, you’ll be well on your way to feeling in control of your color. Still, like I said up front, there are a lot of variables to color management, and I’ve only touched on some of the basics here. If you have more questions on this topic, please feel free to ask them in the comments.

As someone who customizes blogs and websites, I’ve seen some bad moves. Here are my pet peeves, and how to change them for the prettier.

Let’s start with the basic, run of the mill, standard template. Chances are you have a header image or text in a box, you have a couple columns, a body with smallish images, and maybe a background image. If along the way you don’t know how to easily change any one of the elements of your blog, simply Google it!

• Your header image does NOT need to be in that double lined box. Remove it.

• If you don’t have/want an image in your header, how about your logo? You have a logo, right?

• Your blog logo, colors, and font should match or compliment your website. I mean it.

• A slideshow in your header can do a couple things. 1) It can slow down loading time. 2) It can show people a blank box while they move on and scroll down. 3) It can show lower res images that look yuck. Is that what you really want?

• Your images should fit nicely within the body of your blog. If they are too small, find a way to make them bigger. If you’re a photographer and you’re just showcasing tiny images that my good eyes can’t make out, what’s the point?

• If you’re using a background image, please oh please make it static. Scroll down and see what that background does to someone who’s not even mildly epileptic. The only thing scrolling should be the body, not the background.

• You have a profile pic on your blog. Great. Personality goes a long way, but be sure this doesn’t scare away clients. You want them to know what you look like, that you’re a real person, cool. Just make sure this pic isn’t intimidating or unflattering. Camera in hand is not necessary, unless you really do sleep with it, in which case, by all means. Or unless it’s while actually shooting a la Michelle and Stacey, of course.

• A blog that opens full screen? Really? Pourquoi?

~Zofia

Lighting is the key to creating great photographs.  As professional photographers, we have been taught to look for the best light in any setting and take advantage of it to make great photographs.  For most of the average wedding day we typically have the freedom to utilize the available light to the best effect.

But what about when we get to the reception and the available light is too low?  Or just plain ugly?  In settings like this we have to create the best light for our photos.  For most of us, creating light begins with an on-camera flash.

In my first years I just used an on-camera light, bounced when possible, even in the darkest of receptions. I achieved a look that I see over and over: well lit subjects with black hole (or worse, ugly orangy tungsten) backgrounds.

Photographs like this:

In the above photo, the subject is well lit, with flattering, diffused light from my flash, but the background is dark and orange.

So one day, for kicks, I arrived at the reception site early and set up a battery powered monolight that I kept in the car for formals. I didn’t replace the light from my on-camera flash, but used it in conjunction with the flash. The monolight lifted the ambient levels in the room while my on-camera flash still lit the subject. Processing that wedding was a revelation. Instead of dark hole or ugly orange backgrounds, I had well lit backgrounds that showed off the rest of the room.

Photographs like this:

To better illustrate the difference, here are a couple of photos that I took in quick succession.  In the first of each of these photos, I only used an on-camera flash, in the second I used the on-camera flash plus an off-camera flash:

On-camera + off-camera:

Just on-camera:

On-camera + off-camera:

Just on-camera:

As you can see, the advantage of using off-camera lights during the reception is the ability to create lighting which allows you to see what is going on in the background and also to get rid of the ugly orange!

Now that you know the advantages of off-camera reception lighting, let’s take a look at how I do it.
1) I start by finding the optimal location for my light placement. For most rooms, I like to place my lights in two opposite corners of the room.

2) I set the power on the light to a level that I think will be correct based on the size of the room. For the average ballroom I typically find it to be 1/8 to 1/4 power. Keep in mind that I don’t mind shooting at ISO 800-1600 all evening. My goal is to have an exposure of f4 in the middle of the room.

3) I take a couple of test shots to determine the correct exposure at various places in the room. By breaking the room into exposure “zones”, I can quickly adjust my exposure based on where the person I am aiming the camera at is standing in relation to the lights. If the subject is closer to the lights, I use a smaller aperture…farther away from the lights, I use a bigger aperture. So if I am at f4 in the middle of the room, as the subject moves closer to the lights in either direction, I might change to f5.6, then to f8, etc.

In my head the room looks something like this (NOT to scale):

That’s it! Since both the flash power and the camera are set to manual, the only variable is the distance of the subject to the light. Much easier than fighting your TTL all night!

Here are a couple of examples from weddings this year:

This room was gorgeous but it was also a lighting nightmare!  It had 30 foot ceilings of dark wood, dark wood paneling on the walls, and dark lighting. A friend of mine compared it to the elevator in the Haunted Mansion at Disney World – and he was spot on!

Here’s a photo with just the ambient light (f1.4, 1/50, ISO3200)!

So given how we’ve been taught to bounce to avoid direct flash, I bounced over my shoulder off of the granite part of the wall above the wood. FEC at +2, 1/25, f4 ISO3200. Here’s the most my on-camera flash could give me:

Note the video light from the videographer lighting the speaker’s face. Not exactly album material.

Luckily I had arrived at the venue early, had scoped out the room, and had taken a couple of minutes to devise a lighting strategy. Here’s what I came up with:

I lit the room from both sides with small Sunpak flashes (a 383 on the left, and a 120j on the right), both set to 1/4 power. I fired them with my skyport trigger plugged into the PC socket of my camera, with my on-camera 580ex bounced off the flip-up card providing fill.

Here’s what the same scene looked like straight out of camera with the lights (1/60, f4, ISO1600):

And a couple of finished images from receptions at this venue:

So my strategy is to use the off-camera flashes to light the room and my on-camera flash to light what I am shooting.

I had a very similar room the week before.  It was an old barn converted to a reception hall. It was dark with a dark wood ceiling. There were balconies to get the flashes up high, but beams running throughout the room, so I had to be careful of shadows. My solution was to place the flashes on the balcony at a level that was below the ceiling beams, aimed straight at the support beams. This ensured that any shadow cast by the beam fell on the next beam over, instead of on a person in my photo.

Here are a couple of images with the setup:

and here’s the diagram of that room.

Every room is different, but with a little experimentation, it’s easy to devise a lighting strategy that will add a little extra pep to your reception images.

~Jamie Wexler

One of the questions that I am frequently asked by other photographers and hobbyists is how to take a shot that has sun flare in it.  I love the look of the sun’s rays shooting through the frame and wrapping around my subjects.  Contrary to what most people believe, it’s not a Photoshop trick- it’s done in camera and it’s actually a fun technique to master (although you should be careful of your eyes when photographing straight into the sun).

First, be aware that some lenses flare more easily than others, and some produce better flare than others.  For example, I am a Nikon shooter (the D3), and I dislike the flare from my 50 1.4.  For the purposes of my work I steer clear of that lens when I am trying to produce flare in camera because I dislike the look of the flare that it produces (unless I am silhouetting my subject, in which case I don’t mind using it).  The rays are less defined and will often be punctuated by bright green bubbles in the most unfortunate spots.  On the other hand, I love the flare that my 28 1.4 produces and I don’t mind the flare that my 35 2.0 is capable of producing.  So, if I am going after nice, intentional flare, I will choose a lens that provides me with the most pleasing flare that I can get.  Whether your flare shot succeeds or fails (according to the vision that you have in your mind) can often be determined by something as simple and immediate as your choice of lens.  If you have chosen poorly, then you could be dooming your flare shot from the start.  How can you find out if your lens produces beautiful or ugly flare?  Usually a google search can help you out, but if all else fails and you are choosing between lenses that you already own, simply test them out in the same conditions with the same subjects within minutes of one another.  You may not see the difference through the lens, but I guarantee that you will see the difference in the results.

I absolutely love shooting with a very shallow depth of field- I like to shoot my lenses close to wide open, and I am usually shooting at an aperture of 1.4 to 2.8.   One of the only times that I stop down (if you don’t know what that means, “stop down” is what we say when moving to a smaller aperture/higher number) in camera is when I want to take a flare shot.  If I want less-defined flare, I might keep it at f/5.6, but if I really want prominent flare, I might take it to f/13 and beyond.  What happens to my flare shot if I forget to change my aperture and I leave it at 1.8, for example?  I will still see the flare, but it will show up as a haze rather than defined rays of light across my frame.  This is the type of flare that can be replicated in Photoshop- the Boutwells (creators of the Totally Rad Action Set) have a few actions that will add this hazy type of flare to your shot.  As pretty as that can be, most of the time when I am after a shot with flare, what I really want to do is capture the defined rays.  Therefore, it is important to be cognizant of the fact that your camera settings will definitely affect the type of flare that you are capturing in your frame.

After I have chosen my lens and changed my camera settings, I frame my subject.  The flare that you will get in your frame is affected by the angle of your lens relative to the sun as well as the angle of the light relative to your subject.  It is really easy to overdo the amount of light coming into the frame and completely blow your shot.  Play around with it, moving around the light and around your subject.  Flare will often work best if the sun is wrapping around your subject or another object — if you keep your subject or that other object in between you and the sun, it is easy to change the look of your shot by moving an inch in one direction or the other.  Flare also works well when it enters the shot from the edge of the frame; you can achieve some beautiful rays of sun shooting across you image even when you aren’t shooting directly into the sun.  Once you have set up your subject, shoot a dozen (or more!) frames so that you have different flare patterns to choose from.  Often the difference between a shot that you love and a shot that you simply like can be a matter of inches.

Keep in mind (if you don’t shoot on manual) that the camera will want to underexpose your subject because of the amount of light entering the frame. That will work if you are going for a silhouette effect, but if you want detail in your subject then it will be important to shoot in manual, spot meter or use exposure compensation when shooting into the sun.

I have included some examples of shots that I have taken that have varying degrees of flare.  When looking at these flare shots, notice that the shots with the longest rays are those that have been taken with the smaller apertures (higher numbers).

~Michelle

Everyone has preferences. Some like Nikon, others like Canon. Some choose Mac, others PC. Some love sweet, some spicy. Differences keep things interesting!

When shooting, my preference is to use prime lenses.

When I first started shooting, my camera was the Nikon FM2, black body, all manual bay-bee! Yeah, even the focusing was manual!  At that time, primes were easier and faster for me for me to adjust exposure and focus. If I had added zooms to the mix, I’m sure a hand cramp would have prevented me from pressing the shutter as that award-winning moment unfolded in front of me!

I like to keep things simple. When I over-complicate, I over-think. When I over-think, I forget to see.  When I stop feeling a scene, I start dissecting it.  For me, that just doesn’t work.

Primes are lighter than zooms, so it’s easy for me to carry around my tried and true arsenal. Typically I shoot with two lenses on two separate bodies: the 24mm 2.8 (though recently it’s been the 28 1.4 for Nikon) and the 85mm 1.8.  I typically switch to the 50 1.4 during the first dance to capture the available light and bokeh the background.  I also use the 105 macro while the bride is getting ready to capture the details of the dress, shoes, and makeup application and then again while capturing the details of the reception. Those lenses combined with a few flashes, pocket wizards and a light stand are all that I carry.

Zooms make me feel like I am all thumbs. Half the time when I’ve tried a zoom, I space out and it stays at the same focal length the whole day.

I am not nor will I ever be a highly technical person. Folks can sit around and start talking iso, frames per second, or crop factors and my mind will just start to wander. Of course I know it– knowing your gear is essential to creating the images you want. But it’s not something I find very interesting to talk about or delve into for long periods of time. I’d talk about the things + moments that inspire you + ignite that fire that drives you to create.

I know some out there may have all sorts of technical reasons why zooms are highly advanced and exceptional pieces of glass. I don’t doubt that for one minute.

What I do know is that they aren’t for me. Primes work for me. They are simple and they are light, and I value that over all else.

Use what you know best. Shoot with what feels right to you. There is no wrong or right– there is only getting the shot or missing it!

~Stacey

On January 4th, Michelle Turner + I got up in front of the crowd attending Mystic 5 in Mystic CT to give a talk about two different photographers approaching the same subject matter, in this case, weddings. We went over our two different styles + showcased numerous examples, including a wedding we shot together in Puerto Vallarta Mexico in December.

Below is a brief re-cap from my portion of the talk. You can see Michelle’s posing tips + techniques here.

Documenting an event isn’t just aiming your camera at a few choice moments and snapping away. There are certain approaches you should take to create a clean and inviting image, even in the midst of a fast moving scene.

As you learn to hone these tips, they will eventually become second nature, so that when a moment strikes, you will be prepared, not only to capture the action but also create a clutter free image that doesn’t compete for the viewers attention.

Below I have touched on a few of the ways in which you can approach a scene and certain rules you can incorporate while shooting.

Pay close attention to what is going on behind and around your subject.
Are there other people or objects that will add or detract from the scene?
Choosing to include or exclude particular elements can make or break an image.

What’s going on in the four corners of your image? Is it clean or is it pulling your eye away from your subject?
The eye tends to stray to the brightest part of an image, so watch that you haven’t got a large glowing light or bright hot spot in one of the corners of your image. If so, the viewer will be distracted and leave the scene.

While shooting, constantly be aware of what is around your subject’s body. Watch for objects sticking out of some ones head or body. If you can use your subject to block out something distracting, do it!

As you are shooting, keep moving. As you are moving, keep shooting. Continuing to adjust while shooting will help bring you closer to a cleaner, more eye pleasing image.

Eye level:

Constantly vary the height of your camera while you’re shooting. There are a few reasons for this. Staying out of the line of sight of
your subject means they will be less likely to focus on you, helping to make you ‘invisible’. This can help you to create images without the subject being camera aware.

Another reason to change up your eye level is most clients with cameras tend to shoot as seen, meaning they are creating average images with out any interest.

Cropping:

Most, if not all, images can be cropped. Remember about clean backgrounds and removing distracting elements from images? Well when you are shooting, things are happening fast.
When all else fails, get the shot!

You may end up with some clutter in the background or a composition that could be cleaned up by just cropping a bit of non-information out of the image.

Take a few of your images and play with them in PS. Hit the ‘Front Image’ button when in crop mode to retain your dimensions, and play with the cropping.See how much better your image could be if you crop out some of the distracting elements that may be exhausting your eye.

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After:

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Framing:

Sometimes using objects or people within a scene can draw the eye into the action while simultaneously cropping out distracting elements. It’s
a great way to create interest within the frame. You can shoot through a crook of an arm, or a chair back.

Another method of framing is  to place a subject within a frame, like a bright window, in order to make that element stand out.

Layering:

Layering is using multiple elements within the frame to draw the eye in and keep it moving within the scene.

It creates depth and is used to add to the story within the image. When done properly, it is not seen as clutter, but as a flowing part of the visual narrative.

If you have any tips, tricks or would like to elaborate on anything above, please feel free to use the comments section. And of course, any questions, by all means, ask away!

A large portion of my learning is due, in large part, to the caring + sharing of communities and workshops such as these:

FWF Forum

Art of the moment workshop by Tyler Wirken + Brooks Whittington

Foundation Workshops

Any questions on the above, please feel free to touch base. I would love to share my experiences!

Ciao + Love ~ Stacey D

For those of you who couldn’t make it to Mystic this year, here is an excerpt from my section on posing from my Mystic5 seminar with Stacey Doyle (who will be posting some excerpts of her own).  If you want to see the detailed/complete version with the step-by-step process outlined you can purchase the pdf or you can come to the ShootStyle Mini-Seminar and model shoot in March 28, 2010 in southern Maine and receive the pdf free of charge!  The Mini-Seminar is $40 and includes posing instruction followed by a model shoot- email me for more details or to sign up!

Excerpt from “Basic Elements for a Successful Environmental Portrait”:

…

Step Three: Body Position

Now it’s time to put the couple into the photograph- before you give them direction on what you want them to do in the photograph, you need to get them into the spot that you want them and in the appropriate position relative to one another.  This step is all about their connection with one another (not their emotional connection, but their physical connection relative to the camera).  There are several different positions that you can put them in- obviously your options will be limited by the choices you have made in step two and from their comfort level with you/the camera and with each other, but you should have at least several options from this list to draw from in every environment and situation.

1) Chest to Chest.  This position implies a certain level of intimacy and depending on the couple you may have to refine the pose a bit.  The important thing to remember is that this is a “joined” position- really make sure that they are touching.  If there is confusion, ask them to hug (and not the butt-out hug that you might give an acquaintance) and then refine the position from there.

2) Back to Chest.  This position is a safe one to start with if you have clients that are having difficulty warming up to the camera.  Either person can be in front- you do not necessarily need to put the shorter person in front as long as you choose an appropriate interaction from Step Four.  Some people will automatically go into this pose if you say “cheesy prom photo!”, but this position will become anything but that depending on the action/interaction that you end up choosing.

3) Sitting On or Between the Legs.  There are two options with this position- the chest to chest version and the back to chest version.  Obviously the chest to chest version is a more intimate position and can take more coaxing and explanation.  Be sure to refine this position if the legs of either person are too far apart or if there is too much slouching (or, for that matter, not enough slouching).  This position also works well on stairs.

4) Sitting Side by Side. Whether on chairs, on a wall, on stairs, or on the ground, this pose works well with almost all couples.  You may have to refine their positions and/or give them more direction so that they couple is more connected to one another since they can appear very detached from one another depending on their body language.  You may want to correct their sitting positions and connect their hands in some way.

5) Standing Side by Side. This is another simple position although you will want to be very aware of their body language and will want to refine the pose if they look too detached from one another.

6) In the Same Frame, Separated.  There are many ways that you could position them here- perhaps you want to put one person in each door frame or hanging out of different windows.  This can be a very fun pose that allows a ton of creativity, although it does limit your action/interaction options in step four.

7) One Sitting, One Standing.  This can be a very sexy, fashion-forward pose depending on how you connect the couple and the action/interaction that you choose in step four.

8 ) Lying Down.  Whether they are lying with their feet in the same direction or in opposite directions, this position can be a very intimate one to photograph.

Of course, there are plenty of other body positions and ways that you can connect your couple, but these are common positions that are extremely easy to explain and accomplish.  Now that you have positioned your couple, it’s time to move on to the piece that sets the mood of the photograph– Step Four: Action/Interaction.

…

If you’re a photographer, you know there are a zillion seminars and workshops out there. I’ve been to a ton of them. Workshops are fun; they get you away from your daily routine and surround you with photographers. In the past, I’ve been satisfied to learn even one new thing I could use in my business. But this past year I wanted to dramatically improve my shooting, so ‘just one new thing’ wasn’t going to cut it. I needed something more intense. These were my criteria:

1) I had to admire the instructors’ work.

2) There had to be daily shooting and critiques.

3) The workshop had to scare the pants off me.

I settled on three workshops. Two focused on documentary shooting, which I specialize in for my weddings, and the third was a radical departure from what I usually shoot. I’ll talk about that one first.

One on One with AC Ellis

Boudoir photography has been growing in popularity over the past few years and one of my favorite boudoir photographers is Cory Ann Ellis. To me, her style is characterized by a stripped-down elegance free of the frilly clichés often associated with the genre. Regardless of how much they bare, her subjects are portrayed as powerful and provocative rather than coy and flirty. She accomplishes this by making her subjects comfortable and by utilizing fantastic posing and scrumptious lighting.

Why would I want to study with someone known for boudoir when my business is weddings? Because posed photos were a weak spot for me. Despite shooting in a documentary style, at almost every wedding I also shoot posed group photos and portraits. My clients hire me for my ability to capture natural, candid moments, but I need to deliver posed portraits of the same caliber.

The rapport Cory Ann builds with her subjects is impressive. From the moment they walk in the door, she’s treating them like an old friend, taking a keen interest in their lives, asking questions about work, school or family, and all the while distracting them from the fact that they are disrobing in front of her camera. I saw how she encourages her subjects to be active in the creative process, collaborating with them about wardrobe, hair and their goals for the session. In fact, it became a three-way collaboration when I was there.

Another way Cory Ann makes her subjects comfortable is by working fast. Needing to explain things to me handicapped her, but she still moved from pose to pose quickly, never giving the person modeling a chance to get bored. Quite the opposite, in fact- every subject we worked with while I was studying with Cory Ann ended their session commenting on how much fun they had.

Cory Ann has a knack for guiding her subjects into natural looking poses. She demonstrated how sometimes the bend of limb looks normal in person but awkward in the camera frame. She also showed how a subtle shift of weight, or a shift in the hips can make a person’s line more flattering. Now, I’d probably heard or read some of these tips before, but Cory Ann’s direct illustrations made them real.

During the rush of a wedding, I don’t often have time to work with more than a bare flash or an umbrella. At my One on One session Cory Ann introduced me to a range of other lighting instruments and modifiers. She taught me how to use the light that comes from the edge of a softbox rather than pointing it straight at my subject. We worked with using shadows to reveal a subject’s form. I saw examples of hard, contrasty light and soft gentle light. She also demonstrated the strengths of different light sources: strobes that give you enormous light output, continuous lights that allow you to immediately see how your lighting looks, and natural light, which is plentiful and free!

Probably the most valuable lesson I learned from Cory Ann was how to find that sweet spot where light transitions from being bright and sparkly to dull and drab as it falls off. I knew of that sweet spot from other photographers, but she helped me actually see if for the first time.

So at One on One with AC Ellis, I learned how to interact with my subjects to increase their comfort and confidence in front of the camera, explored how to pose people to accentuate or minimize aspects of their appearance, and gained experience with a range of lights and light. There were other lessons in marketing, workflow and post processing as well, but it is the insights from the hands-on shooting that I treasure the most.

Roots Workshop

Roots is a week-long shooting workshop where participants get assignments and endure nightly critiques. A cute little compound by the sea served as home base for participants and instructors alike, but assignments took shooters all over the Cape and even to a boat offshore.

The Roots instructors were seasoned news photographers who have transitioned into the wedding industry. My team was led by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Greg Gibson, and Rachel Lacour Neisen of Lacour Photography was our team’s mentor.

The week began with a day of lectures and presentations, a fast paced shooting exercise and an evening shooting excursion at a county fair. Based on these exercises, the team leaders handed out the week’s story assignments. My assignment was a Cape Cod League baseball team.

The first lesson I learned at Roots was to expect the unexpected.

After a morning of shooting the baseball team warming up, the weather turned sour and the baseball game was cancelled. My next assignment of shooting a barbershop also didn’t pan out. I was given a third assignment– riding along in a cop car for the night shift– so I hit the sack in the late afternoon. An hour or so later I was awakened and told I had to leave in ten minutes for my new assignment: a Monster Truck Rally! Sweet!

I drove across Cape Cod to the Monster truck rally only to learn that there was only going to be one monster truck, and it was only going to be doing its thing for a few minutes interspersed throughout the main event. But that main event was a demolition derby. Hello, new assignment!

I’d never been to a demo derby, so it was all new to me. There was a lot of action, smoke, and excitement. I thought I did a great job shooting. But during that night’s review session, my team leader Greg Gibson pointed out that I had a boatload of images but not enough content. I did have great shots of crumpled cars, but I had no story. I needed shots conveying the personalities of the drivers or the crowd. I had loads of medium shots and was lacking in imagery establishing the setting and texture of the event.

I had no worry about getting interesting detail shots and establishing images, I do that all the time at weddings. It was capturing the personalities that concerned me. I’m not exactly what you’d call a car guy. I’ll happily rebuild a computer, but I’ve never so much as changed the oil in my car.

The next day I showed up before most of the drivers. After poking around a while, I started asking them about their cars. I confessed to the guys (and gals) that last night had been my first demolition derby, and honestly told how cool I thought it was. Soon they were introducing me to their wives, girlfriends and other drivers.

They showed me where their grandkids had helped paint the cars. They made predictions about which cars they thought had the best chances that night. I became part of the gang for one night.

At a wedding, I have a built-in level of access; the couple has hired me to be there. Since the Roots Workshop, I’ve worked harder at connecting with everyone around me at a wedding. The more my subjects let their guard down, the more natural my images become.

At Roots, when possible, your team leader or mentor will meet up with you at your assignment to check out the images you have already shot, explain parts of the story you might be missing, and suggest different approaches you might not have considered. I found this to be an extremely valuable part of my Roots experience.

The week culminated in a night filled with presentations of each participant’s assignment. Participants had a chance to share what their obstacles were and we celebrated each other’s breakthroughs. Here is my final presentation from Roots: http://vimeo.com/5912283

Mountain Workshops

Western Kentucky University’s Mountain Workshop was the scariest of the workshops I attended this year, in part because the goal at the Mountain Workshops is to train people to be straight-up journalists; it is not geared towards wedding photographers at all.

Perhaps the scariest thing about the Mountain Workshops is that you’re only allowed to take 600 frames over the course of 4 to 5 days of shooting. 600 frames! That might sound like a lot to some folks, but in the course of shooting a wedding I can take 5000+ frames over the course of eight hours. I easily blow through 1000 frames at a portrait shoot.

Story assignments were pulled from a hat the first night. This time I was to shoot the coach of the local girls high school basketball team. The first night I shot 40 frames at basketball practice and thought I did okay considering how terrified I was of pushing the shutter.

Like Roots, a Mountain Workshop day ends with each team getting together so that the team leader can review their work. The team leaders also had a daily opportunity to critique a handful of those images in front of everyone attending the workshop. My team leader, Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Cheryl Diaz Meyer, presented a half dozen images demonstrating pitfalls to avoid while shooting. Five of them were mine. Gulp!

When sizing up a shoot Cheryl wants you to “find the subject of the situation and nail it, then look for other details to add to it in the frame” and to “crop out anything that is extraneous.” She doesn’t want you to use a wide angle to show overviews, but rather to direct the viewer’s focus by taking advantage of how a wide angle make close objects much larger in the frame than distant objects.

Not all of Cheryl’s advice was so cut and dry, though. She tells students to try to “actively dream as you shoot. Dream about what the picture could be. Think of the possibilities that might happen.”

In my wedding work, I try to be discrete and not interrupt the scene that unfolds in front of me. At the workshop, I was shooting the coach during class, at home, at practice, and I was concerned about disrupting things, so I often found myself hanging back and shooting with a longer lens.

I can still hear Cheryl’s refrain “Earl, you’re killing me!” as she pulled apart my work, pointing out how I was not getting close enough into the action and not nailing moments between the coach and the kids. Cheryl wanted the subject’s face to be large in the frame for impact. She suggested that I should tell my subject that I would be going in very close and then I should actually do it.

The next morning, I tried out her suggestion. Right before class I let the coach know that I’d be shooting really close that day. As soon as the students filed in and he began to address them from the front of the classroom, I began shooting a few inches from his face. The kids got a kick out of it and it was established that I pretty much had carte blanche to shoot from anywhere in the room.

Having the freedom to be at the front of the class and to move up and down the rows of desks enabled me to get interactions between the coach and his students. At basketball practice, I had been getting the backs of peoples heads from my vantage point near the sidelines. After following Cheryl’s advice, when the team ran their drills, I followed, running up and down the middle of the court. I was able to get clear shots of faces from a vantage point within the action rather than outside of it.

By the end of the workshop, it was taking me fewer frames to work out a shot, and the results had more impact. In fact, I ended up with 12 frames to spare.

This was my final story from Mountain Workshops: http://stories.mountainworkshops.org/workshop/2009/slideshow/1273/earl-christie-hoopster-force/

Looking back at all three workshops, I see a common lesson and it wasn’t about focal length or angle or light. What makes a great photo has less to do with the nuts and bolts of photographic technique and it has everything to do with access. To really tell a story, your subjects need to be comfortable with you, to like you, and to trust you. Once people know that you’re on their side, you can stick a camera an inch away from their face, shoot them in their underwear, climb under the hood with them, and run up to them when they win… or lose.

~Earl