Wedding season is almost upon me, and I’m starting it with a BANG this year – two weddings back-to-back on Friday, March 23 and Saturday, March 24! I’m super, super stoked for this year’s wedding season! I have a new camera, a Canon 5D Mark IV that I’ve had my eyes on for well over two years now. I caved in and bought it in January as a Christmas present to myself. These first weddings of the season will be my first opportunity to shoot professionally with my new camera, and I can't wait! Imaging USA this year really got me pumped up about using off-camera flash more creatively and I came away with all sorts of ideas on how to pose large groups (read…FAMILY and BRIDAL PARTY), thanks to Michele Celentano and the Canon Live Learning Stage. Michele gave me a totally new perspective on how to pose families and bridal parties. She teaches you to treat heads and shoulders of individuals as puzzle pieces and to utilize sitting, standing and kneeling postures to create depth in the photo (and fit all those lovely people in the picture!). I can't wait to try out these ideas at the end of the month!
I’ve also been reading Roberto Valenzuela’s Picture Perfect Lighting, in which he discusses the five properties of light and the ten circumstantial light elements (CLEs). Many of the 10 CLEs deal with using your environment to manipulate the light in such a way that your photos are amazingly lit. I’ll definitely be using more reflective surfaces (walls, sidewalks, streets, fences, etc.) to bounce beautiful light toward my subjects. I’m already thinking of the lovely bright yellow outside walls of the bridal suite at The Wildflower Barn venue! I also have a really nice set of reflectors that I purchased last fall that I haven’t had a chance to really play with so I’ll be incorporating these into future shoots as well.
This past week I was invited by a friend to join Booray Perry’s Take Better Pix group on Facebook. Booray was another amazing speaker at Imaging USA this year and I took a ton of notes on his recommended camera settings for different lighting situations. Although his Take Better Pix group is geared more toward beginner photographers, I really enjoy his approach to learning/teaching. You can post photos in the group and he will give up-front, honest advice on what is missing, what you could improve, sometimes what is just plain bad. It’s a great group to join, even if you just take pictures with your phone (I mean, who doesn’t?). Just be open to constructive criticism – others will also jump in with suggestions and it’s all to help you become better at taking pictures.
It’s a little silly now when I think about it, but it was terrible at the time - I had the WORST nightmare Thursday night. I dreamed that I was photographing a wedding but I either completely forgot how to operate my camera, or it completely stopped functioning - none of the buttons or knobs were doing what I thought they were supposed to do and I was missing all the important pictures – the first look, the procession, the vows, the first kiss. I was in panic mode and almost in tears! Not cool. I can tell wedding season is almost here!