Wedding season is upon me, and I am in need of a good assistant!

So what does an assistant do?  The job involves holding lights and reflectors, helping carry equipment, helping pose and adjust during portraits, and a variety of other tasks.

I’m looking for someone with weekend availability for anywhere between 3 to 10 hours.  You must be reliable (no canceling last minute!), punctual, and able to behave yourself at a formal event :)  No photography experience is necessary, but interest in photography is required.  Please note, however, that this is not a shooting position.  There may be some light shooting involved occasionally, but this is primarily an assisting job.  Starting out, this will be strictly for wedding photography, but may expand into other event and portrait work.

I’d prefer to work with someone I know – whether I’ve worked with you before, photographed you before, or just know you personally.  If you are interested, email me to get details about schedules and pay rates, and to discuss if you’re a good fit!

Thinking about becoming a wedding photographer?  The logical first step is to second shoot for another photographer – meaning you shoot alongside them at a wedding to learn the ropes, build your portfolio, and make a little money. 

I’ve been second shooting myself lately just to learn a bit from other photographers and play with new techniques.  As I’ve worked with these photographers, I’ve heard some serious horror stories about other second shooters overstepping their bounds.  It seems most of them simply don’t know any better.  So whether you’ve been second shooting for a while or are just starting out, here are few tips for how to be a great second.

Offer something better than “free labor.” Many photographers receive emails about second shooting weekly if not daily.  A common request I get is the offer to shoot a wedding along side me “without compensation.”  That’s great for you, as you get to build your portfolio and learn a few things.  But for me, it’s less of an asset and more of a distraction.  If you’re new enough that you’re willing to shoot for free, it’s more than likely I’ll be training you while you are shooting, which is not always fun.  Rather than offering to shoot for free, see what else you can bring to the table that might be helpful to the main shooter.

Rent good equipment if you don’t own it.  Be sure to bring good quality equipment to shoot with.  New lenses and cameras are expensive, but important.  If you don’t own them, rent them for the day.

Get out of the shot.  Always be conscious of where the other photographer is shooting.  Try to stay out of their shot as much as possible.  Remember – their shot is probably more important than yours.

Stay in the background. Allow the primary shooter to do all the posing and directing, unless they ask for your help.  They’re running the show, so just stay in the background and try to shoot from a different angle.

Remember who you work for. When hired as a second shooter, you work for the photographer who hired you.  So when people at the wedding ask for a business card, be sure to hand out cards for that photographer (not your own.)  Chances are they want to see the photos from the wedding they are attending anyway, so they should be put in touch with the right person.

Ask before you post. Be sure the couple and the primary shooter are okay with you posting images on your blog or website before you do so.  If they are, wait until the primary shooter has released images to the client and blogged the wedding themselves (if they plan to) before you post your images.  Some photographers don’t mind if you post earlier, but always ask permission.

Never, ever.  Ever. Never contact the vendors from the wedding and provide them with images.  Never contact the bride directly and provide her with digital negatives or prints.  Never use an image you shot as a second shooter in an advertisement.  Never submit a wedding you second shot to a wedding blog or magazine.  All of these roles are reserved for the primary shooter, so be respectful.

I always have other professional photographers second shoot with me, so I’m not currently looking to hire photographers.  However, I am looking for a few good assistants.  If you are interested in learning more about assisting, feel free to contact me.

It may look like a bit of a mess to the untrained eye, but I assure you, my bag is a well-organized machine.  I can pack a lot of equipment into one backpack, and usually don’t need to bring any additional bags (although I’ve always got a few things in the trunk of the car just in case.)  The bag is a Tenba Shootout Medium Backpack, which fits perfectly in the overhead bin of an airplane when I’m traveling for a shoot.

Camera Bodies: 2 Canon 5Ds with battery grips

Lenses: 50mm f/1.4, 50 mm f/2.8 macro, 16-35mm f/2.8, 24-70mm f/2.8, 70-200mm f/2.8, 15mm f/2.8 fisheye

Flashes: 2 Canon 580EXII Speedlights, 1 Quantum flash battery pack, 2 PocketWizard transceivers, ETTL flash cord

Memory: 52GB in Lexar memory cards (plus 10GB of backup memory cards that never leave my bag, just in case), Epson 80GB Multimedia Storage Viewer

Odds and Ends: Shootsac, flash and camera battery chargers, AA batteries, lens cloth, water bottle, almonds.  If I’m traveling, my MacBook Pro, power cords, and card reader also fit into this bag.

Looking for gear of your own?  Try B&H and Amazon for good deals.

The Lady Gaga Pandora station seemed like a good idea.  I turned to Lady Gaga to spice up my editing soundtrack after exhausting my iTunes library and growing tired of the same old Pandora stations I usually listen to.  It was such a drastic change at first that I loved it.  But I could only take it for so long before I started wanting to tear my hair out – a stage I reached last week whilst editing.  No more.  Turns out I could not be romanced, Lady Gaga, thankyouverymuch.

I know I’m not alone on this – I often meet photographers who practically beg for suggestions of what to watch or listen to whilst editing.  So here’s a playlist I’ve been running with some success.  A little old, a little new, a little Bob Marley.  Because Bob Marley makes editing through the family photos just that much easier :)  Maybe one of the songs will inspire you to create a new Pandora station of your own.  I’m hoping someone will share their favorite playlist in return – I still need some new music myself, and I’d like to keep all of my hair intact :)

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.

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.  :)

The last four days were a bit of a blur.  I spent them at a lighting workshop with Cliff Mautner outside Philadelphia.  I drank too much coffee.  I sat in awe of Cliff’s talent.  I learned about light.

Learning to shoot in harsh lighting and creating dramatic light were my main goals for the workshop.  I still have to play around with what I’ve learned, but so far I’m happy with the information I took away from the experience.  These are just a few shots I took of models he hired to help us practice.  They’re all shot on location at some incredible spots in Philly.

Many thanks to Cliff and everyone who attended for making the workshop a success.  I look forward to testing out my new skills at my next shoot!

I wish I’d known how to do this my first year in business.  So in case someone else can benefit from the knowledge, here’s a quick little How To.

You can save LOADS of time editing images by batching them in Photoshop using actions.  There are a few somewhat generic adjustments that I tend to like on particular types of images, so I create custom actions with the exact steps I like built in.  Once I export and image to jpg, all I have to do is run the action on a specific folder and leave to do something else  (like make soup) while my MacPro does all the work.  It’s so easy, and a serious time saver.

Actions can get highly complicated, but for this demonstration I’ll show how to build a simple custom action for converting color images into black and white.   (Click the images to see them larger so you can read text!)

Step One: Select a jpg file to use as a sample image and open it in Photoshop.  Click on the Actions Palette, and select Add New Action.  Name your new action – in this case “Black & White.”

Step Two: Your custom action is now “recording,”  so you can edit the image how you’d like.  For a basic black and white conversion I would play the Totally Rad Action Boring Old Black and White, and lower the opacity of the Contrast Up layer.  Then I’d run the Kevin Kubota Edge Burner action, and adjust opacity. (Yes, you can use actions within your action.)

Step Three: Flatten the image.  Then be sure to hit Save while the action is still “recording.”  This will include the saving step within your action and prevent you from having to click Save on every image.  Close the image.  Only after saving and closing do you hit “stop recording.”  Now the action is complete.

Step Four: To use your new action, arrange the desired files into a folder.  Then go to File -> Automate -> Batch.  Select the action you’ve created and the folder you’d like to use it on.  Check the “Override Save As Commands” box, since we’ve included the saving step within the action.  Either allow the images to save in their current file, or set a new destination folder for the adjusted files.

Now leave your computer and let it do the work.  DO NOT sit and watch Photoshop batch your files.  If you do this you are not taking advantage of the time you are saving!  (Ok, maybe watch it once ’cause its kinda cool.  But only once.)  Go make dinner, do push ups, pay bills, whatever.  Enjoy time away from your Mac :)

Ever wonder what an image looks like before I beautify it for a client or the website?  I’ve decided to start showing some of my behind the scenes work -  from raw camera format all the way through blog post.  You know, like, “Before They Were Stars” for images…Ok that was lame, but you get the idea.  To start it off here’s the behind the scenes of one of my favorite travel images.  I took this image last February at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.  So here we go:

Step One: This is how it looks straight out of the camera, shot in RAW format ISO640, f7.1 at 1/400 at 35mm.

Step Two: I used Lightroom to adjust the exposure, and up the contrast and black clipping a bit.

Step Three: In Photoshop, I applied the following Actions (I like Totally Rad Actions (TRA) and the Kevin Kubota Actions (KKA)) : TRA Prettyizer at 100% Opacity; KKA Edge Burner at 100% opacity, KKA 300esque 25% opacity

Step Four: To balance the top and bottom of the image I used KKA Digital Fill Flash on the bottom of the image – from the edge of the lake down – at 50% opacity.  On the top of the image – from the edge of the lake up – I applied KKA Smokeless burn at 75% opacity.

And that leads to the final image, ready to be printed and hung on my wall, which it is :)  Hope that was at least a little informative and/or interesting!