Welcome everyone to the new and improved Spencer Fu Photography blog now completely hosted on my own personal servers! What this means is a huge graphical update so you can get a better look at all my pictures and interesting new features like photo slideshows, video playback, and a whole new image viewing option. This update marks a change in direction that my photography is taking as well … I will be changing my focus more towards wedding and lifestyle photography and will be aiming to become one of the best Toronto wedding photographers! Thanks for visiting.

Spencer

Introduction:
Ashley and I met late last year and it has taken almost four long months for our schedules to allow us to photograph together. Ashley is a recent graduate looking to possibly pursue a career in the dramatic arts. She contacted me to shoot a couple recent headshots of her before heading back home to Toronto.

Technique:
For this headshot session I had the wonderful assistance of Chi, a fellow photographer and friend. This allowed me to use a reflector to direct some light on Ashley without having to resort to using off camera flash. This was important as you aren’t limited to the flash sync speed of your camera (in my case 1/250th of a second), and I am able to use fast shutter speeds of over 1/1000th of a second. Why would I want to do this you might be asking? The answer is you want to be able to use a larger aperture (F2.8 in this case) to give you less depth of field and more background blur and bokeh to your images. With flash photography you’re fastest shutter speed is your flash sync and most of the time during bright sunny days this lets in too much light at F2.8 even at your lowest ISO settings. Usually this means having to stop down your aperture to something like F11 which usually means everything will be sharp and focused.

In photos #1 and #2 Ashley is sitting on the steps of a building. She is sitting in the shade created by the building while Chi is excellently holding the white reflector in front and to the side of Ashley’s face. Chi is close enough that even in the shade, the reflected light is enough just to add a bit of brightness to her face and you can even notice a bonus catchlight in her eyes! Below is a diagram of the setup we used for photos #1 and #2 compliments of a new Wacom tablet I bought.

Photos:

Lighting Diagram

Introduction:
After our short initial meeting and mini-engagement shoot last week I had scheduled Lindsay and Scott in for another engagement shoot to get some more cute photos of the two for a possible engagement guestbook. In a span of one week the weather had changed from bright, warm, and sunny back to the cold, windy, winter weather we are used to in Southern Ontario! Regardless we all had a good time shooting in the snow. I’m starting to think that snow adds a unique texture to all the images that you don’t find on a normal sunny day.

Technique:
The last time Lindsay, Scott, and I had shot together I had used flare to play around with the images and give a unique twist on the storytelling. On a snowy day the clouds block out most of the sun and you’re left with a giant softbox in the air. With snow, especially while it is still falling from the sky, it is good to find backgrounds that bring out the snowfall. For example shooting the couple against the bright sky is not so good as the white snow gets lost in the white sky. Try positioning them in front of a dark buildings where the dark red bricks bring out a nice contrast between the light white snow. Other ways you can make the snow pop is using green evergreen trees as they pick up snow nicely and again offer a bright contrast to the snow.

Photos:

More to come! Still editing a bunch of em’…

Introduction:
I was introduced to Lindsay and Scott by Heather another awesome photographer. The weather in Kingston Ontario is finally getting warmer and looking much more like summer and while shooting this session I had the “sunny summer” theme in my mind. After meeting up with them over coffee late in the afternoon and hearing more about their wedding details we really didn’t have much time to take these photos. Luckily we had a little bit of sun left that was able to work it’s magic!

Technique:
The idea behind this shoot was a “sunny summer”. So I tried to incorporate as much of the setting sun as possible. Obviously shooting directly into the sun introduces tons of problems with flare, contrast, sharpness, and metering issues. But as long as you try to meter for the couples skin tones and are comfortable playing with the Curves tool in Photoshop to fix contrast you’re good to go! A wonderful way to use the sun is to position it directly behind the couple and use the golden sunlight as a back/hairlight to outline the couple from the background. Sometimes you might need a reflector or a flash attached to your camera fired at low power to add some fill light in case the flare is too great! Also don’t worry too much about getting bad photos when shooting like this as Photoshop makes a HUGE difference!

Photos:

Here is a photo showing the post processing I use to deal with lens flare from the sun!