August 10th, 2011 | by Michelle Turner | published in Featured, Shoot
In honor of the ShootStyle assignment series this month (and this is the last day to enter, so pull out your silhouette images!), I wanted to post about how I create silhouette images for my clients. There are several different ways to go about it, but today I will be sharing my method.
August 3rd, 2011 | by Jamison Wexler | published in Shoot
My primary goal during the time I have allotted for portraits at a wedding is to get a great variety for backgrounds and poses for the bride and groom. My secondary goal, is to get a great portrait or three of the bridal party together. And I don’t mean a photo of them all lined up together (though I take that shot every wedding), or the shot of the bridesmaids scrunched together, or the groomsmen holding the bride, or the wedding party jumping together…those have all been done before by many thousands of wedding photographers more qualified to shoot them than I. I’m talking about groups shots like you see on the cover of the fashion magazines, when all of the most popular young starlets of the day get together for a cover shoot. It is often THIS shot that gets me the most positive comments from the participants…and many of those participants are young women that are approaching the wedding planning process themselves!
This shot can be done with the bridesmaids, groomsmen, and both (time permitting).
The Bridesmaids:
I most often get a shot like this with the bridesmaids. In the planning stage with the bride, I typically suggest that everyone be dressed and ready 30 minutes prior to the time when they have to leave for the ceremony. That gives me time to take some bridal portraits, and some time to set up a bridesmaid “magazine” shot. When it comes to the ladies, posing is something that they are usually pretty good at naturally, whether they know it or not. They’ve been looking at fashion magazines from the time they were little girls, and all of those images leave an impression.
Since this is the first time I’m describing setting up the shot, let me step out of the bridal portion for a moment, and say that I follow this process whether I am setting up bridesmaids, groomsmen, or both. Fits off, I find the space that the shot should take place in. It could be a couch or a pair of chairs in the hotel suite, or the lobby of a hotel…or it could be the laundry room across the hall, or the cool car that they will be riding to the wedding in. Once I have the space, I begin to set up the participants. In my mind, I have visualized the entire scene, but I have to build the scene one piece at a time. So I start to grab the participants, and put them into place. I have found that the fastest way to get someone into a pose, is to demonstrate the pose myself. With the bridesmaids, I really play it up, assume the pose, and challenge the bridesmaid that will be filling the place “try to look this sexy”. As each participant is placed, I take a step back to see how the entire scene is coming together adjusting as needed. Once everyone is in place, I tell the bridesmaids, “Give me your best (rhymes with witchy), look” and take the shot. All in all, it takes about 5 minutes to set the shot up, and 15 seconds to actually capture it!
The Groomsmen:
Compared to the bridesmaids, the groomsmen shot usually comes together a bit easier. For one thing, I usually have less time to set up the groomsmen shot, since I typically have to set it up at the end of the family portrait time. Most often with groomsmen, I will do a “Reservoir Dogs” shot, where I tell them to line up staggered, about 75 feet from me, and walk towards me, interacting with one another. When I don’t have open space to set this up, I will arrange them similar to the ladies – minus the “try to look this sexy” comments. With guys, I tend to set up the shot at the bar – which is usually where they are hanging out in the first place!
The Wedding Party:
Arranging the entire wedding party is the most challenging of the shots, and the most time consuming, so I rarely get a chance to do it. When I do, however, I ask the members of the wedding party to pair up with the person that they escorted down the aisle. I then ask if any of them are actually “together”, to see if I can make their pose a little more romantic. From this point I build the shot, just as described in the bridesmaids section, but with each couple instead of each individual. Again, I place them in the pose then stand back to see how it affects the scene. I am looking for balance and to avoid duplicating poses as much as possible.
One last piece of advice for those wanting to venture into the “magazine style” pose. Study magazines! Especially the issues of Vanity Fair that feature the group photos that the magazine is famous for. Study the poses and the relationships between the poses to understand how and why each participant was placed in that spot in the frame. Then sit back and start adding some PARTY back into the bridal party!
August 1st, 2011 | by Andree | published in Featured, Shoot
In this installment of our ever-popular assignment series, we bring you the phrase “Silhouette!”
Your assignment is to illustrate the phrase “Silhouette”. This might be a photojournalistic exercise or an artistic construction. We leave it up to you to define the phrase and how you will interpret it.
You are more than welcome to comb through your files for a photo that illustrates the term, but we would absolutely love it if you shot something for the assignment, special!!
Our assignment series is open to everyone. We’re hoping you’ll wanna play along.
The most creative entry wins! And WHAT, you may be asking, will you win? A FABULOUS $150 gift certificate from ProDPI!
We will post all of the entries on our Facebook page, and post a few of our favorites on our blog, complete with a link back to your blog or website.
How to enter!
Images should be sized to 590 pixels on the long side. If you need help figuring that out, ask your favorite Shootstyler! And by all means, slap that logo on there if you have one! You can enter up to one photo a day for the duration of the assignment. Email your entry to:
assignment@shootstyle.com
We have an album on our Facebook fan page. When the entries start coming in, we’ll post them there first. Check in with us at Facebook if you are looking for some inspiration.
The deadline is August 10th!
Let’s have fun doing this together!! Assignment series: “Silhouette!”
July 27th, 2011 | by Earl Christie | published in Featured, Shoot
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.
July 20th, 2011 | by Andree | published in Featured, Shoot
Some of my favorite photos are from the moments before the ceremony between the father and the bride. The hustle and bustle has come and gone – the father peeks over at his daughter, about to walk down the aisle to her new life.
In order to get those last moments, when nobody remains but the father and daughter, I have to let go of the shot of the bridal party walking, one by one, down the aisle. I have to sacrifice the photo from the front of the father and bride walking down the aisle.
July 13th, 2011 | by zofia | published in Featured, Shoot
“How tight are you with your wedding clients and vendors?” This is the BIG question that I’ve been asking myself when hearing about struggling businesses.
The not so surprising answer has been a resounding – “Not so tight. I don’t like to mix business with pleasure. Once the contract is up, I’m on to the next one. It takes too much time. They live too far away to matter for referrals. They were difficult, why would I keep contact? They don’t scratch MY back, why should I do them any favors? I can’t waste the money.” Etc…. etc…. Not one of those sound valid enough to excuse the loss of referrals that these businesses are losing out on.
My #1, hands down, absolute favorite way to get new clients is through people I have already worked for, whether they are current clients or vendors. They know what to expect! *Note how I don’t call them PAST clients, because that finalizes our relationship. They’re not “past” if they come back for portraits, or if I photograph the bride again as the bridesmaid in another wedding. Many of my wedding clients come return with their little ones on vacation, and book a session every summer. I WANT them to come back.
July 6th, 2011 | by Michelle Turner | published in Featured, Shoot
We have important jobs. No, we’re not saving the world, but we are creating images that will be treasured forever from a once-in-a-lifetime event. Hopefully you all have a wonderful backup solution for your files at home. But with all of the natural disasters in the news, do you have an off-site backup? And what if you are traveling? How will you backup your files while you are on the road, especially if shipping the images somewhere is impossible or undesirable? May is the end of my destination wedding season and I’m on the road again this month (on vacation this time– hiking in the Alps!), so this issue is buzzing around my brain more than usual. It would be devastating to lose the thousand or so (yes, you read that number correctly) family photographs that I have taken (so far!) from theft, computer damage, camera damage, etc, and I don’t want to lose any changes that I have made to my clients’ images, either (although those are safely archived at home).
Here is my strategy for dealing with backups and storage while photographing destination weddings (or while I’m on vacation!):
June 29th, 2011 | by Stacey Doyle | published in Featured, Shoot
first off, documentary/pj photographers do shoot portraits. they do. i promise.
however, i’m here to talk about how i let my couples know how i’ll approach the majority of their day–mainly, by not choreographing or staging moments.
most important to me is the real, the true, the emotional, the un-staged moments that happen at every event. i want to capture that storyline, that thread that connects everyone at that wedding, one to another. i believe the only true way to do this is through creating images that naturally unfold in front of me. sure i may coax the viewer’s eye to go where I want by the way i choose to frame the image and the lens i opt to use to snag that shot … but i am not asking anyone or anything to stop in order to make any image happen. i do not make things happen.
June 22nd, 2011 | by Jamison Wexler | published in Featured, Shoot
The number one question I got from the awesome participants at last week’s Portraits with Panache seminar during the hands on shoot was: Why do you have your flash on? And it was a good question. It was a cloudy day, and conventional wisdom is that cloudy days are wonderful for portraits because of the soft, even light. So with all of that soft, even light to be had, why on earth would I use a flash?
The reason is in the pictures. All of these photos are images I captured during the hands-on portion of the workshop. And all of them are straight out of Canon DPP with no Photoshop enhancements whatsoever.
In this first image, I didn’t have my flash on (silly me), and this is what it looked like:
A quick chimp revealed my mistake, and for the 2nd image I turned the flash on:
June 8th, 2011 | by Andree | published in Featured, Shoot
I brand myself as a wedding photojournalist. To my clients that means that I deliver images of genuine interactions and moments. Composition, framing, layering all add to the art, but my primary goal is capturing natural unscripted moments.
My first job is getting people to feel comfortable and “forget I’m there”. I doubt anyone truly forgets I am there, when I am two feet away from them with a wide angle lens click click clicking, but I can help them surrender to the process. I want them as close to feeling like I am a piece of furniture as possible. I don’t spend much time chatting with them, especially at the beginning, I just wander around and get in close and shoot.
I keep the camera up to my eye. A perfect facial expression, gesture or moment is fleeting; keeping the camera up increases the likelihood of grabbing that perfect frame. It also creates a physical barrier between me and my subjects, making them less likely to engage with me.
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