Senior Portraits

Senior portraits are some of the most fun photographs to take. The main idea of a senior portrait is to take a PORTRAIT, which means the photograph focuses on the senior. I can't tell you how many times I've seen senior photographs and I think, "Wheres the senior?" because the photographer is so caught up in the background. It's always good to keep the photograph simple yet beautiful. Brick walls are great backgrounds for senior portraits because they're simple and beautiful.

Another major part of senior portraits are the clothes. Almost all girls love to dress up and of course they want to look their best for their portraits. Don't forget to include full length photographs that show off their clothing.

Obviously, I love framing my subject with doors. It looks adorable!

Don't forget to be creative too. Have fun with your subject and think of unique poses!



Weddings

Weddings are the most stressful things to take photographs of. Everything is important and it only happens once, which means you've got to be doing your best the entire night. Weddings are complicated and overwhelming, but you have to remember to stay calm and collected. Theres plenty of planning that needs to go on before you photograph a wedding.
First things first, you need to make a list of things that you need. Heres a few things you absolutely have to have:
-Batteries (And I mean like five packs. Literally.)
-Your flash
-ALL of your lenses (Just in case)
-If you have more than one camera, bring both
-At least three unused SD cards (we don't want old photos taking up space)
-A tripod and your camera remote (you never know)
-Any other special equipment you may need

Before the wedding, you need to meet up with the couple and their closest family or friends at least once at the location of the wedding and go over some photo ideas. You also need to have a look around the place and see if theres any special spots that are perfect for photographs. You need to make sure you know what they want, and that you have plenty ideas and space to make the best photographs possible.

When you get there, you start immediatly. Take photographs of everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. It will all be important. Make sure you get phtogoraphs of her getting ready. That is just as important as the wedding itself. Make sure you take as many photographs as possible. You can always delete the bad ones later.

During the wedding, don't be afraid to get up close and personal... as long as you're not in the way. Remember, you are there to take photographs so you need to be doing your job, even if you feel like you're being a bother to the guests. Feel free to take photographs of everyone, especially when they're being emotional. It doesn't matter if you know who they are or not, the bride and groom may want to see a photograph of them. Everyone who is in the wedding needs to be photographed by themselves at least once. That includes all the bridesmaids, flower girl, parents of the bride and groom, and so on.

When that song starts and people start walking in, you need to be photographing almost continuously. You should be taking as many photographs as humanly possible, but don't just worry about amount, you're there to take quality photographs and that is even more important.

The most important thing to photograph is the kiss. Thats the most important part of the entire wedding and you can't have them do it again. Make sure that the bride and groom understand that they have to take their time and be slow about things, because you're trying to get the best photograph that you can in that single instant.

If you do mess up, don't worry too much, mistakes do happen. It's always good to bring a back up photographer there so that you can get everything you need. I always go with a friend as her back up photographer. It helps me learn the ropes without having to take on an entire wedding by myself.
(I wouldv'e added photographs to this post, but my computer won't let me at the moment. I will try to upload them as soon as possible)

Working with Toddlers

The most hardest portraits to accomplish... the ones of a tempered toddler. For the longest time I refused to take photographs of little kids, they continuously frustrated me. They get bored easily, and a bored subject makes for a boring photograph. The biggest idea is to work with them, don't push them. I can't tell you how often I've gotten into fights with my baby sister and it just ended up ruining the entire photoshoot. You have to work with them.
If its nice outside, then you have the greatest advantage on your side. I don't think I've ever seen a kid who doesn't just love to go outside. So take them outside and play games with them. I always play the "I'm gonna get you!" game to make them want to run and laugh. Let them have full rein of the world around them, and just simply photograph them in their element. You can also coax them into playing in spots or on things that you want to use in your photograph. In the photo below I got Ella and Alena to play on an old pick up truck. It made a cute best friend photo.

Another great thing that keeps kids occupied are props. Like in the photo above, Alena loved playing with the baloon, which are always an awesome prop. Don't forget to let them dress up, little girls just love to dress up and play pretend.

Using Lenses

The other day some stranger noticed my camera, (I had my 200 mm with a F/ 2.8 so of course my camera was hard to miss) and as we were chatting about it, i started telling him about my lens. He said "Can take photos really far away?" and I said "Well no I have smaller lenses than this that have more zoom." The man was completely confused. Sometimes, amertures have trouble figuring out the use of different lenses, when really it's very simple.

When you look at a lens, you'll notice a bunch of confusing numbers on it. Believe it or not, but these numbers really mean something! If you look at the end of your lens closest to your camera, you'll see some strange numbers, normally followed with millimeters. That is your focal length, a lot of people refer to that as the zoom. This one happens to be 18-135mm. That means, that as you move the ring closest to it, your camera can zoom anywhere from the smallest number to the largest. Those numbers above it, the ones on the line? That is the number you are using. In the picture below, it is set on 18mm (indicated by the little white line). The larger the number is, the farther you can zoom.

 So automatically you think that a lens that is 75-300mm is going to be bigger than a 70-200mm lens right? Well that isn't always a case. Remember when we talked about aperture? That is the ring that allows so much light into your camera.

Well that ring is located inside your lens (as shown to the left), and the larger your aperture is, the larger your lens is. Most lenses nowadays have a changing aperture, which means you can change it from F/30 to an F/5.6 (remember: the smaller the aperture value, the bigger the aperture hole) without changing your lens. Most cameras have an aperture of F/5.6 and it can get smaller (which means your aperture hole is BIGGER), but sometimes you need even more light than that, so they use a lens with an aperture of F/2.8

This lens is only 200mm... but its got an aperture of F/2.8

 (thats a HUGE aperture!)

And this little guy, is a 300mm lens, though its got a longer zoom, it is really really short and skinny.

Lenses also help control your Depth of Field. If you read my depth of field blog, then you remember there are three things that control your depth... Aperture, distance from subject, and FOCAL LENGTH. Now that you are more aware about what focal length is and how to find it on your lens, you will be able to control your depth of field better. Knowing your lenses apertures and focal length help you decided what type of lenses you want to buy for your favorite type of photography.

Creative Photographs

A lot of people who take photographs have trouble with creating interesting photographs. I've seen copy after copy after copy of a couple making a heart with their hands or a girl on railroad tracks. More people will be attracted to your photographs if you use your imagination and do fun photographs.
Props are the greatest way to seperate your photos from the others. I can't tell you how many times I've dragged a ragged old chair out into the middle of the boondocks just to take a cool photograph. If I could, I'd use couches and beds, but I don't think I could fit them in my car. The idea is to use props that look natural and beautiful. Seriously, you can use anything.

Old cameras (polaroid)

Another old camera (Holga)

Cute outfits! Feather Boa and Hat

Costumes

Beaches toys

Now theres a lot of "props" in this photograph that add to the mood. The chair, the cigarette, and the junk on the floor. It makes for a real good story inside the photo.

old trunks are the greatest. You can sit, lay, stand, basically do anything on them and theres like a million different places to use them.

Use things that go along with the season. The winter coats, the fur hood, and the gloves make the mood. Obviously it makes you think its winter.



Another great idea that A lot of people don't think of are live props. Pets are the perfect props. Dogs, rabbits, and especially horses. They are great to use to make little kids smile. When you take pictures of people, invite them to bring along their pets, they'll go crazy over the photos.

Using horses are always fun and cute

Don't forget the bloppers! I always save the mess ups, the strange, and the not-so- pretty photographs, they could possible make fun photographs and turn out to be pretty good ideas.

Me and my cousin were joking around about how strange it looks when people take photographs with trees, and then while she was making fun of it I snapped a photograph and instead of laughing at it later... we actually liked it.

This was another blopper I didn't think would come out looking good, but it turned out pretty cute. Reminds me of a miny Michael Jackson.

This girl has an obsession with mustaches, and I took some super funny photographs of her playing with her fake mustache... and I actually liked them!

Simple outdoor lighting

Sometimes it doesn't matter how good your camera is, if you don't know how to use it and your environment correctly then you won't be able to achieve good photographs. The biggest different between most regular photographs and the photographs taken by professionals is the way the lighting is handled. Just like a regular person, a lot of photographers use natural lighting, but there are tricks to how and when to use it.
The biggest problem that people have with using the sun as lighting is they don't understand that the sun causes shadows. These shadows look bad and they will single handedly ruin your photograph. When you photograph in direct light,  you often get harsh shadows and black marks under your subject's eyes (racoon eyes). To eliminate these shadows, simply photograph in a shadowy area. alleys and large walls allow a lot of shadow to cover your subject. All you have to do is stand your subject under the shade of a wall and... instant perfect lighting!

Direct sunlight.

Note the harsh shadows across her face

Under a shadowy wall.

Note no shadows on her face.

Another very important thing you need to consider when photographing outside is the position of the sun. If the sun is way over head like during noon, then you have really dark racoon eyes and all types of harsh shadows. Its also very hard for your subject to open their eyes during this time. Though you can take photographs at this time, its much more easier to wait until the "Golden Hour". This the time, two hours before sunset or sunrise, where the sun is directly behind you and your subject, and is lighting up their faces and its warm, yellow, bright, and it just looks beautiful.

A more advanced approach is to use fill lights. A fill light is the light that you create to literally fill in the shadows. A lot of times you can use reflectors to bounce the light from the sun onto a persons face, but there are also more natural things you can use. Some people set white sheets on the ground out of the camera's view so that it bounces light onto their subject, well the snow can also do the same thing. Its a very simple and natural fill light that just automatically bounces bright light onto your subject's face. There are other things you can use, such as light colored concrete floors and walls or water sources. Anything bright that can reflect light onto your subjects face is considered a fill light, rather its a technical piece of equipment or simply the light off a snow. Knowing little things like what type of things bounce light and what time to take photographs can make a huge difference in your photos. Little tips like these can take any regular photograph and change it into a professional photograph just like that.

Using Snow as a fill light

Oh! I almost forgot the most important tip of all. Overcast is a photographers best friend, because without the sun that means no shadows... at all! On overcasted days you can photograph anywhere without having to worry about racoon eyes. I take 99.99% of my photographs on overcast days because I myself am still having trouble manipulating direct light. So don't forget, overcast is the best lighting that the world has to offer you, so use it as much as humanly possible.

Newborn photography

Newborn photography is very fun, but it needs to be handled with lots of care. A newborn child is very vulerable and needs to be handled carefully at all times. While some photographers hang their baby models in nets and stand them up in baskets, I choose not to do that because I find it very dangerous and when I look at the phographs I can't help but imagine the millions of things that could go wrong. I prefer to keep my newborn photographs simple.

The types of poses that you see below are performed by proffesionals. Do not attemp this at home. Seriously.

(I would use my own photographs, but i lost them when my computer crashed)

When you take photos of newborns you need to focus on one thing and one thing only: the comfort of the baby. Babies are very fragile and if you don't feel 100 % comfortable with the pose you want to do, then don't do it. NEVER force a baby into a pose, it has to be natural and comfortable for the baby. In a newborn photograph, it is very popular for the baby to be asleep, and cuddled in small cute positions. Your baby should be under fourteen days old for you to be able to successfully achieve this position. They should also be over five days old though, because they are normally very red when theyre this young. Of course, babies sleep a lot, so it shouldn't be that hard to photograph a sleeping baby, but the best time is to do it early in the morning when babies are normally in their best mood and sleep the most soundly. You also should make sure that the room your photographing in is very warm. Babies have a hard time keeping their body temperture up, especially with no clothes. If your sweating then it is perfect temperture for the baby. Don't use heaters that could burn the babies skin though.

Another important thing when dealing with newborns photograph is props. Ever newborn photograph out there now adays contains some form of knitted hat or antique box. Let me give you a tip: never buy the proffesional props because they are always overpriced. I have an old coke crate that I got from a garage sale for five bucks and they sell the same one on a photography prop site for sixty dollars. Save yourself the money and go to a garage sale, having the proffesional label isn't worth it. Anything can be used as a prop. I can make a huge list of simple things that can make great props. One extremely simple set up is to use a bean bag with a blanket or faux fur.

bean bag with faux fur

Be creative, there are a ton of things you can use as props. Heres a list of a few:

-wooden crates

-dresser drawers

-barrels (be careful!)

-baby wraps

-knitted hats/diaper covers/blankets

-headbands

-suitcases

-washtubs

-hatboxs

-baskets

-pillows

-baskets

-chairs

-blocks

-carriages

-flower pots

-blankets, blankets, and more blankets

every single prop that you use should include some type of blanket or faux fur. It is very important that your babies skin never comes in contact with hard sufaces like the ones in wooden boxes or metal washtubs. Remember, a simple picture of a baby sleeping soundly on a beautiful baby blanket can be just as pretty as an intricate photograph.   

Lenses & Depth of Field

Unblurred background



Blurred Background



 

Sometimes when you take a photograph the background appears blurry, but other times its crystal clear. Sometimes you want a completely unblurry photograph, but it comes out blurry and sometimes it’s the other way around. Do you wonder why this happens? Well this is called depth of field, which basically means the amount of blur your photograph has. Depth of field is affected by three important things, the space between you and your subject, the length of your camera lens, and the aperture. To describe this simply, if you are very close to your subject (like the flower shown above) then you tend to get more blur. If you stand farther away, then you will have less blur. The length of your lens is extremely important. You see, the photograph of the flower was taken with a 30-700mm lens and the one of the girl was taken with a 15-55mm lens. This means that the 700mm lens is a larger lens than the 55mm lens, so there is more blur. Your blur is also affected by your aperture.  The larger the aperture number is, then the less blur there is. This means that if your aperture is f/8.0 then there will be less blur than if you have it set to f/2.8. When you control these three elements, then you can control your depth of field. Of course it can be a lot more complicated than this, but this is as far into the subject as I dare go. Your depth of field also helps you gain the “bokeh” effect that everyone loves. Bokehs are the square-like lights that show up in your picture when it’s blurry. When you make your background very blurry, then you can achieve bokeh.  

 Bokeh

Positioning your subject

 One of the biggest problems that beginner photographers have when taking photographs of people is positioning. When your trying to position your subject you should always try for something that looks natural, not forced. As you see in the photographs to the right, the most natural pose is always the best. The top photograph was a pose that my subject sugested we try. The bottom one was a photo of her while she was caught off guard. The bottom one appears more natural and effortless while the top looks forced and uncomfortable. Using props always seems like a fun idea, but if that prop doesn't look like it belongs there (like the truck mirror for instance) than it can ruin the entire photograph. My advice is to go as simple as possible when you start out. Try doing photographs of only the subject and do as many simple poses as possible.

 When working with people you have to worry about their comfort levels. When your subject isn't comfortable with their pose, then you will see that in the photograph. As you can see, the girl on the right in the red pants looks very unconfortable as opposed to the girl on the left. Paige (the girl in the red) looks uncomfortable because, like a lot of people that beginners work with, she has had no experiance with being a photo subject and is nervous. As the photographer it is your job to make the subject feel comfortable with their poses or to change the pose if they simply can't do it. There is more than one reason that she looks more uncomfortable though. Not only was Paige not liking that pose, but the pose also looks more uncomfortable because she was closer to the camera. In Kendra's photograph shes very far away and being shot from above, while Paige is being shot from a straight on view which is really never a flattering view. Which brings us to our next position, which is close ups. The first rule of a close up, is to always keep the subject's chin down. As you can see in the center photograph, Paige's chin is pointed slightly upward (and she refuses to smile) which doesn't flatter the shape of her face. But, in the photograph on the left Addy Kaye's face looks dainty and pretty. Remember tilting the head slightly always looks good, but as Addy Kaye demonstrates in the photograph on the right, theres a limit to how far you should tilt.

Small things to remember:

-Don't chop off limbs when photographing and cropping

-Don't have your subject stare off dramatically into the corner of their eyes

-Don't add blur in photoshop

-Don't over saturate

-Don't let them slouch

-Make your subject smile naturally

-Don't stop taking photos until you've reached 200

-Try using cross processing

-Have fun & be creative

more good examples (or in my opinion good)

 

 Note: These last photographs were taken with cross processing. I would do a blog on it, but its simply a setting that only selected cameras have. You can create cross processing on photoshop by using color balance.

How To Use A Reflector

When your outside on a hot Summer day, taking pictures of a person, you may notice that there are a lot of shadows on their face. You may wonder how professionals remove these shadows and make their subjects face look bright. While there are many different techniques out there and some do work better than other, I think that all photographers would agree that using a reflector is the easiest and lcheapest way to remove shadows.

Reflectors are a flexible circle that can be used to reflect sunlight onto your subjects face.

When a reflector is held under your subject's face, towards the sun, it can project the sunlight back onto the subject's face, removing all shadows. As shown in the example below.

(not my photograph)

A real reflector is really cheap and can also be easily made at home. An ever cheaper version of a reflector that a lot of photographers use is a car sunshield. These have the same reflective properties of a reflector, and they even come in small circles and look exactly like a reflector.

Reflectors are a compact and easy way for anyone to lighten up their photograph and give it a little proffesional touch.