Are you tired of looking at images of soup?  Yeah.  Me too.  How about some behind the scenes Photoshop work?

This is one of my favorite family photos from the Adkins family session that I shot last fall in St. Louis.  Here’s the behind the scenes of what was done to the image before it was blogged:

Step One: Straight out of the camera, shot in RAW format at ISO 200, 38mm, 1/250 second at f/4.0

Step Two: Minor tweaks to increase brightness and contrast in Lightroom

Step Three: Totally Rad Actions Prettyizer at 60%;  Oh Snap 60%,  Yin Yang 15% on the dad.

While it may feel like a hassle to get everyone together for family portraits at a wedding, this may be the first time in years that your whole family has been together in the same room, dressed nicely, with someone around to take a good photo of them.  It’s important to document your family.

The good news is that you don’t have to spend hours locked in a church to get all of the formal photos your mom wants – we can get nearly everything you need in just seven quick photos.  You could spend hours taking 20 different permutations of family photos, but these are the top seven that most people want.  Anything extra that is requested gets done as well, but these are the staples I shoot at every wedding, no matter what. » Continue reading “The 7 photos Mom can’t live without”

It’s one of those “Doh!” moments for photographers.  You’ve uploaded your cards, and your second shooter’s cards.  You’ve arrange everything by date in your Lightroom catalog.  You’re sitting down to cull or edit the photos when you notice that somehow everything is just a little…off.  You’ve forgotten to sync the time on your cameras.  DOH!

Fortunately, Lighroom has made an easy fix for this.  Another photographer mentioned to me about a month back that she was fixing this issue manually, and I think she was a little heartbroken to hear it could be done with just the click of a button.  In case that sounds all too familiar, here’s how to fix it next time in about 30 seconds.

Open Lightroom and go to the Library view.  In the righthand menu, scroll down through the meta data until you reach the capture time.  Click on the little icon to the right of the time setting.  Here you can see what your camera was set on for the selected image, and input what the correct time was.  I suggest looking at the difference between your correctly shot images and the ones appearing at the incorrect time, select all the images in the incorrect time category and adjust by the hours or minutes necessary to have everything line up correctly.  It’s that easy.  Quit tearing your hair out about syncing your cameras.  :)

Art galleries make excellent wedding venues.  They have a very unique and nontraditional vibe to them, and the art often creates excellent conversation pieces during the reception.  We researched loads of galleries as potential venues for our wedding for that very reason.  Galleries also have incredible flexibility because you can bring in any outside vendor you like to create exactly the event you desire.  For us, that was a little more decision making than we wanted, so we opted to book here instead.  But if you’re looking for a nontraditional wedding venue with a little creative flair, here’s a list of the spaces I thought were tops. » Continue reading “Venue Hunt: Art gallery weddings”

So I seriously considered doing a portrait marathon day in St. Louis – one of those long days where everyone gets 30 minutes of  my time, and hardly any of my attention.  But let’s be real – how much can you really get out of a 30 minute session?  If nothing else, I want to be able to talk to all of my favorite St. Louis people for more than 30 minutes and catch up on life!  So instead, I’m offering a week of full sessions!

A limited number of appointments will be scheduled during the week of June 9 – June 14th.  We’ll go anywhere you want to have your picture taken and do a full session (none of this mini business!)  You’ll also get a DVD with a high resolution copy of every photo from your session, with no copyright restrictions. I’ve raised prices in Denver to $350 for this kind of session, but for this week in St. Louis it’s only $250!  (You save $100 just ’cause I like you :) ).

These sessions will likely fill up quickly, so please contact me as soon as possible to set up your time!  I’m so excited to shoot in St. Louis!