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As I promised on my other blog, here’s a quick post about an engagement session I did with a couple the other day. Steph and I had booked this couple for a wedding a few months back and they decided they wanted the engagement session at that time too. We had actually planned to do them a few weeks ago, when the weather turned nice, but rain during the weekend wouldn’t go away. Luckily we picked one of the nicest days of the week to shoot and the photos turned out really nice.
In all, we spent about an hour and a half shooting, but I learned more in an hour and a half that I have all winter long.
Here’s a small list of things I’ve learned.
1. I’m smarter than I give myself credit for.
2. Having an assistant is one of the most helpful things and is more than worth the money you pay out for it.
3. Not every picture turns out the way you want.
4. Letting a couple relax and be themselves is much better than forcing poses on them.
5. Having a vision for photos can yield great results.
We started the shoot around 4:30 p.m. A decent time for some afternoon light. The biggest problem with the day, it was extremely windy. I took them to a nice area downtown that I use frequently. I hired an assistant for this shoot because Steph wasn’t able to make it to the shoot. This move was probably the most important thing I could have done for the shoot. Not only was he able to hold the reflectors and light stands, but I really feel many of the shots woulnd’t have been successful without him.
As I said before, it was windy. Bobby, my assistant, acted as a counter weight to hold the light stands. Something critical for a few of the shots. It made the difference between completely backlit photos and nicely balanced photos. This is an example of one.
The keylight for this photo was an SB80DX with a 48 in. shoot through on camera left. I can’t even remember the approximate settings on the flash, but I remember it was pretty strong originally. I had to taper it back slightly. I was originally shooting at 1/250 @ f?? and ISO 100. The photo was neat looking, but I wasn’t happy with it. It just looked too faked. (Kind of like there was a strobe and umbrella right in the middle of a grass field?!?!)
The solution was actually pretty easy. drag the shutter. By dragging the shutter, I was able to bring in some natural fill light from the sun balancing everything very nicely. I had kind of wished I had brought a gel or two along to balance with the sun, but I was shooting Raw so I didn’t need to worry so much. In the end I ended up loving this photo and a few others from this field.
Here’s one that just didn’t work in my opinion. I still edited it for the couple, but it’s just not my favorite photo. I’m sure if I spent some more time at this bridge I could make some really interesting photos with some couples, but I was really trying to force it the other day. I really like her expression, which is why I kept it in with the other photos. I think it really shows their personalities even though you can’t really see his face.
I also like that the wind was taking her hair a bit in this shot. It worked for some shots and not others. I think it’s always important to utilize little things like this to your advantage rather than complain about them.
I also tried something a little different with this photo. I’m not sure yet if they liked this photo or not. I’ll get some feedback later, but I thought it was interesting if nothing else. I’ve seen it done before, but wanted to try it myself. I think I actually like this color version of the black and white version here.
At the end of the day I think we got a great mix of traditional and non-traditional photos. And again, the client was happy. In fact, here’s a quote from her email response:
“Thank you very much Danny, you did a great job with the pictures~it makes me that more excited for our wedding pictures!”
I’ve been a bit obsessed with Facebook lately, from a personal aspect and a business perspective too. From the personal aspect, I’m just learning about all the newer applications available throughout the site and things you can get to interconnect with FB. From a business perspective I’m amazed at the advertising possibilities available through the site. Everything from paid advertising to the possibilities of creating group and fan pages for you business.
As a business owner I find it important to stay on top of media trends. Knowing what potential clients do and look at is helpful to any business and I think it’s fair to say that FB is really taking off. Mostly because of the baby boomer generation. Any average user has probably noticed a spike in older people adding him or her as their ‘friend’ and laughed about it. Let’s face it, I couldn’t help laugh when my wife’s grandma said she had been using Facebook. After thinking about it though, I realized this is a significant turn of events. No longer are social networking sites a place for high school and college-aged students to post ridiculous (and most the time inappropriate) photos of themselves on the internet. It’s actually become a tool for people of all ages to reconnect with old friends, classmates and coworkers.
What this means is that as more and more people find their way to FB, it increases the potential to reach customers on another plane. Customers with money. Before, FB was primarily known as a sophomoric social networking tool allowing students to share photos and update their relationship status while giving their friends a ‘poke’ every once in awhile. And let’s face it, they were all broke for the most part. Most high schoolers and college students are. It no longer fits this demographic though. It’s evolved into a beast of its own, showing potential for entrepreneurs of any kind, but photographers especially.
Not only can someone be friends with me by searching my name, they can also now be in a group called ‘Lifeworks Imaging’, they can become a ‘Fan’ of the page and I can mass email these groups to let them know about specials, events or updates. I can also upload a series of photos and with a few clicks of a button, search for a few names and tag anyone in my friends list that might be in that photo. Something that comes in very helpful for sports photography. All I have to do is add my own watermark before uploading and I’ve created a relatively safe way to share photos with players and fans without actually giving them away. Sure, some people will still nab the photo and save it to their computer. **cough, cough** Shane…. 
but that’s okay.
A link that Stephen Haas shared on FB the other day, “Why Your Blog Sucks,” made a great point. When you’re using the internet, most of the people using it with you aren’t working by ‘your rules.’ In other words, they’re going to take your photos, tag themselves, change them, possibly even print them. If someone really wants to print off one of those photos with my company name watermarked across it, let them. Why, because it’s some of the best advertising you can get. Feel honored someone likes your photo so much. That just means when it comes time for senior portraits, one of the first names they might think of is you.
I certainly don’t try to hide the fact that I’m advertising to clients by doing this. I’m also not insincere toward my customers either though. I think the fans and players appreciate showing off these photos to their friends and family. With FB, they no longer have to print them off and then show the photo to grandma, grandpa, Uncle Louie and Aunt Sally. Instead, next time Uncle Louie wants to look at his FB account, there’s a little wall update that says “Timmy Thompson was tagged in 5 photo from the album Baseball Game 5.”
And when Louie pulls up that picture, there in the corner will by my company name. Just a little reminder that we’re still in town and still do quality work. Plus, if they really want the photo with no watermark, it tells them right where to go and what password to enter to buy it.
For those of you that may not have a FB account, I suggest getting one. It’s really not as painful as you might think, just don’t blame me if you waste an entire day on it. It’s a lot easier to do than one might think.
I’ve been meaning to get this set of photos from my 24-hour project up since Monday, but I’ve been a little busy between subbing and shooting. Also, I was just plain lazy on Monday. It must’ve been the weather or something, but I slept on the couch for about 2.5 hours. Enough about my laziness though.
My 9th assignment for the 24-hour project was from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the bike shop in downtown Rochelle. Charlie and Kit Nygaard let me follow Charlie while he assembled a new bike in the shop that morning.
Charlie doubles up as a third-shift worker at an aviation facility as well as repairman extraordinaire in their shop along Lincoln Highway. I wouldn’t say there is anyting too fancy with my shoot, but I did enjoy being in the shop and talking with a couple who owns their own business.
This might seem a little selfish, but I never miss the chance to take advice from current entrepreneurs. I feel their information is invaluable. It’s nothing you can read in a book. It gives you an idea of how things work in your own community and I definitely learned a lot.
This kind of shoot was really easy to converse with the subjects too as they’re not doing anything extremely strenuous and I wasn’t worried he’d lop off a limb if I distracted him too much. You can’t really distract someone who is working with heavy equipment when shooting.
The Nygaards also gave me some cool ideas for a other assignments for this project too. Some that I’ll be pursuing in the next week or so. We have spring break coming in another week so I need to get on the ball right now. If you’ve got any other ideas, please let me know. I’d be happy to consider them.
I’ve really been itching at the chance of getting outside to try some creative portraits over the past couple of days, and I finally took my chance this evening. Bobby and I went across the park with my camera, two strobes and a beauty dish modifier.
I wasn’t looking to make anything overly spectacular tonight. Just to try out some stuff I’ll use in the future. The photos I got turned out much better than I hoped. Especially since Bobby and I were both freezing.
The lighting setup is pretty simple when broke down. I took an SB80DX with a homemade beauty dish and place it just camera right. I then moved my 550EX on a modified hotshoe slave unit with a pocket wizard to camera left and aimed it directly at the hoop.
My first aim was to find the correct ambient exposure for the sky. Somewhere around ISO 100 1/30 @ F4. From there, I dialed my sky down a few stops by setting my shutter to 1/100. Next, I turned on my 550 strobe. Set it to what I though would be ‘okay.’ I think somewhere around 1/4 power. Next I grabbed the SB80DX/beauty dish and pumped up to 1/8 power. Aimed it right at Bobby and tested everything.
I didn’t really care for the power on the 550, so I backed it down to 1/8. Next I looked at the key light. It was lighter than I hoped, so I bumped it up to 1/2 power. I shot a few more test shots and finally got exactly the look I wanted.
I then just shot around a little and let personality come through a little bit in the poses. Easy enough with Bobby. This worked until all my equipment started to get just a little too wet. Then my cords started shorting out and couldn’t get everything to cohesively work.
Time to pack it in.
The whole shoot lasted about 15 minutes, but it was a long 15 minutes. I’ll definitely be using Bobby as a model a little more for some other shots I’d like to shoot. I’m also going to be buying one, maybe two more Strobes so I can get some rim lighting going on too.
Post Production: I used Photoshop for all my post production on these shots. Everything was shot in Raw and opened in the PS Raw Converter. From there I made minor adjustments in exposure settings, so the levels popped a bit more. I boosted the contrast and the black levels until I got the look I was going for and then added a vignette on the final image.
After that, I officially opened the image. I duplicated the background layer, desaturated it, and added a High Pass Filter with a 100 radius setting. I then changed the layer mixing to Hard Light. This gave me about the look I was going for, but I just wasn’t as happy with the way it made the background pop. I added a mask and then masked out the areas that stuck out too much. I was pretty happy with the outcome. Everthing together took me about 45 minutes for all these photos.
I’ll most likely be making a Photoshop action that does the High Pass action, but I want to play with the different radius settings before I do it. I’ll put it here if you’re interested when I get it done though.
Just a quick update on what’s been going on. Yes, I’ve still been working on my 24-hour project. I haven’t posted the last two shoots for two reasons. The first being I wasn’t very happy with my stuff from my cop ridealong. The department was fantastic and the officer I rode with was a really cool guy, but I only got one image worth even attempting to use and then I got an email on Sunday.
It was from the department telling me that the fire department, which showed up during one of our calls, wasn’t comfortable with the photos because it might violate someone’s patient rights. I don’t think legally that holds up, but I’m not here to argue any points. Besides, it wasn’t even that good of a photo anyway.
This is probably going to be the first and hopefully last assignment that I go back and reshoot. There’s always extenuating circumstances I guess. At least I know what to plan for next time.
I also did another shoot at Kelly’s School of Ballet. She requested I not use the photos of the girls on the internet, so I’m honoring that request. Overall I was fairly pleased with those photos. She did agree to let me use the photos in a final slideshow that will be available at the end of the project though.
I’m extremely grateful to everyone who has helped me and let me follow them so far.
Monday I will be following a bike shop repairman, so I’m very excited about that. Hopefully I’ll be able to post those photos and finally show you how things are progressing.
Maybe I’ll even post my next cop ride along.
Last, but not least, I have some business details to update in the next week, but I’m waiting until all my meetings are done and things are actually in place. Thanks for reading.
I don’t want to jinx anything or attract any bad karma, but I wanted to let everyone know we will have an official studio in downtown Rochelle beginning April 15. Over the past couple of weeks Steph and I searched out potential studio locations and agreed on a place in the downtown area.
It’s slightly out of the way, so we’ll forgive you if you don’t see us the first time around. As soon as all the contracts and payments are made I’ll announce the official location. That should be just about any day now. (I’ll also post a photo or two when everything’s confirmed.)
We’re very excited to join the other businesses there and we’re sure Rochelle will be great to us.
Over the weekend we went shopping at IKEA for ideas in the studio. Everything will start pretty simple, but as business grows we will be adding to our area.
I think one of the best ideas we’ve had is to convert the ‘office’ area into a viewing room and meeting room rather than an office. I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re in a business setting there. I want it relaxed and comfortable because that’s how I’d like to meet with a photographer.
And as long as we don’t go broke at IKEA, we’ll hopefully be getting new backdrops and props. Thanks for looking everyone and we look forward to a new beginning.
