I just met a couple today that had such amazing chemistry together that I couldn’t help not shooting non stop and gunning my camera’s 8.5 FPS during our engagement session. Now I have the fun task of going through, sorting, and editing over 500 photos! Haha. Anyways, here is a teaser photo from the session today. Like most of my recent work I’m going for a brighter happier look than my usual fashiony stuff!

Introduction:
A while back I decided to meet up again with Jenny and Brad to do some even more engagement photos for a photo guestbook for their wedding. Because we had already shot a couple times and got some great photos already (here and here), I’d decided to go for some more unique photos in this session. I think after a while you run out of poses for two people to do! Some ideas worked some ideas didn’t. The photos can be found below.

Technique:
I have found for engagement photos it really is all about the interaction and emotions of the couple. If one shot is technically sound (well exposed, sharp, and perfectly composed) but lacks something interesting happening between the couple, I will usually throw it away for a dark, blurry, heavily cropped photo that shows a cute interaction between the couple such as a bright smile, a hand on the shoulder, or a romantic sparkle in their eyes.

So in order to preserve this emotion I find shooting using natural light where there isn’t much need to setup, and using a long telephoto lens like the Canon 70-200mm F2.8L IS helps me to stay further away and give the couple privacy to do their own thing. From their I can just snap away some great candid shots and step in to suggest subtle pose changes as necessary.

Photos:

Introduction:
Erica is a sweet young girl who is interested in starting a career in commercial modeling or acting. We had 30 minutes free in our schedules the other day and decided to do a brief photo session that she would be able to use in her portfolio. The weather that day was really cloudy and dreary but Erica’s big bright smile brought warmth to these images and help show her wonderful personality! Here are a couple that I liked. We did another photo session earlier that showed off more of Erica’s modeling abilities that I have yet to fully edit but keep an eye out for those soon!

Technique:
Because of time constraints I didn’t get to use any off camera lighting. All the light was from the cloudy day. Just position your model in an area where pleasing light hits their face. I used spot metering and metered for her skin tones and just kept shooting concentrating on her posing and expressions rather than worrying about lighting. Looking back I wished I had used some sort of fill flash to create a magical sparkle in her eyes or a reflector to fill in some dark areas around her eyes. Fortunately Photoshop comes to the rescue and I was able to add some magic in post processing. It’s definitely not the same though.

Photos:

I had the opportunity to shoot for the Queen’s University Main Campus Resident’s Council (MCRC) this past weekend and thought I would use this occasion to share not only the photos but some useful flash photography information. First off let met tell you about the event and the venue. The MCRC was celebrating it’s 20th year of operation and for the occasion they decided to celebrate by holding a formal dinner and awards ceremony at Grant Hall (which seems to be the go-to venue for on campus formal events these days). The venue is normally pretty drab and boring but it was beautifully decorated by the MCRC staff. Christmas lights were hung up in the ceiling, long pieces of fabric were stretched across the stage, tables were decorated, and multi-coloured spotlights were used to light the podium.

For people who are new to photography and have yet to purchase or use an external flash you really don’t know what you are missing. Natural light and “fast” lens are great but flash is a necessary tool in any photographers arsenal. Unfortunately most people don’t know how to use flashes properly and their images end up looking like most point and shoot cameras where the subject is brightly lit but the background is pitch black.

The simplest and easiest way to use flash for event photography is to set you camera on Manual Exposure. Generally in poor lighting conditions (most every indoor venue) you will need to dial in a moderately high ISO (800?), reasonable aperture for your needed depth of field (F4?), and a slower than usual shutter speed (1/30th?). The reason why I have question marks beside all those values as their is no one perfect setting for these values that will give you great results. It really depends on the lighting conditions at the time. Basically how this will work is your camera metering settings (ISO, aperture, shutter speed) will determine the overall exposure level of the background which is lit by the ambient light around you. While your subject is lit and hopefully frozen (ie. not blurry) by your flash. The slower the shutter speed the more ambient light you will pick up and the brighter the background will be. Having a larger aperture and higher ISO values will allow your flash to take a break and not have to flash so hard to light your subject. This results in longer battery life and faster recycle times for your flash!

If you take a look at the MCRC photos all of them of people not on the stage are taken with the above technique. For lighting up the people on the stage on camera flash really did not work. The TTL capabilities of the flash would not cut it when shooting from so far away at so many different angles. Luckily for static subjects such as a stage and a podium we can use remote wireless flash techniques! I placed two flashes, one on each side, of the second floor balcony in Grant Hall and fired them using my Elinchrom Skyport remote triggers. I set a power level (1/8th power) on the flashes that would give me fast recycle times and long battery life and dialed in my ISO, aperture, and shutter speed to light each scene accordingly. Easy and the results are much more consistent than using TTL.

This is really just a brief summary of how to use a flash for event photography and hopefully I will get more detailed with other interesting tidbit in posts to come. But for now I leave you with some of the photos from the evening.

This is a pretty techie article, most people coming to look at photography can just skip it but Canon event photographers read on:

I just want to let everyone know I am new to the Canon system and especially new to the Canon ETTL flash system. I’ve been getting by mainly using Nikon strobes in manual mode on and off camera. The only reason I would use a Canon flash is for it’s useful-in-dark-situations AF Assist light. However when using the Canon 580EXII with my Canon 1D Mark II I can never get the bugger to AF assist.

Today I finally had an ephinany and realized that the AF Assist light does’t work when my camera is in AI Focus mode. My camera is normally set with CFn 4 III where the AE lock button (*) becomes my AF button and AI Focus mode on. When I switched my camera to One Shot focusing mode it worked. Previously I had been relying on the available light, L lens AF performance, small apertures/greater DOF, and a pocket flashlight. I can’t wait to finally have access to AF Assist!!!