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.

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“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.

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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!):

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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.

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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:

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by Andree Kehn

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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In this installment of our ever-popular assignment series, we bring you the phrase “Mirror Mirror!”

Your assignment is to show us your best Reflection images. 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!!

We have our amazing sponsor Gamut Prints back along hooking us up with a fantastic Grand Prize of a 16×24 mounted print and for our runners-up, a set of sample prints for 2nd and 3rd place.

Our assignment series is open to everyone. We’re hoping you’ll wanna play along.

The most creative entry wins!

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.

www.facebook.com/ShootStyle

The deadline is June 10th!

Let’s have fun doing this together!! Assignment series: “Mirror Mirrror!”

I photograph approximately forty weddings per year, and almost all of them are destination weddings for the couple (the couple is traveling at least a few hundred miles from where they live to get married).  However, at least half of them are destination weddings for me, too- and I find myself flying over 100,000 miles per year and spending a great deal of time in airports, bus stations, and rental cars on my way to and from gorgeous weddings.  Over the years I have fielded many questions about destination weddings, from marketing to travel, so I thought I would address them in a blog series on destination weddings.  Welcome to Part 1: Pack Your Bags!
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Photography…After Dark

Being a photographer here in New England, we have to face the onset of night a lot earlier than other parts of the country…especially in the fall when the wedding season starts to come into full swing. Learning to take fun and creative portraits in the dark becomes a necessity. And that’s how it started for me – trying to find creative places to take portraits at the end of October, when it was dark by the end of the ceremony. But somewhere along the line, I found that I really liked the different aesthetic of creating portraits without any natural light. Now I do it at every wedding I shoot (even the weddings in July, when it doesn’t get dark until well into the reception). There’s something romantic and mysterious about the night, and I want to try and capture that in my night-time shots. This article discusses some tips and tricks that I use for creating portraits in the dark.

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Warning, today’s blog post is for flash nerds. If charts and talk of flash gear and sync speeds doesn’t appeal to you, I invite you to read last week’s post about a boudoir shoot ShootStyle hosted.  :-)

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.

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