The world wide web was set ablaze this week by the photography community when Brides.com published an article telling prospective brides which vendors they should and shouldn't be feeding, and this advice strongly suggested photographers should not be fed. Of course, anger ensued.
For wedding photographers and stylists alike, getting published is one of the biggest keys to growing your brand and bringing business to your market. Over the past five years, the emphasis on wedding inspiration blogs from not just the vendor standpoint, but also from the client standpoint has given way to an overwhelming number of wedding blogs.
Getting accurate Autofocus must be one of the most frustrating things an event or wedding photographer deals with on a daily basis.
Over the weekend, while millions along the Northeast were tucked away from Winter Storm Jonas, a photographer and an engaged couple despite the elements, created one attention-grabbing engagement session. The photo shoot has since gone viral and goes to show that taking advantage of unique situations can create beautiful imagery.
Pye Jirsa of Lin & Jersa Photography is back again with another great tip on how to make fantastic images in less than stellar light.
Vogue Magazine recently released a list of 10 things the modern wedding can do without. Along with rings and the first dance, Vogue wants you to say "I don't" to hiring a professional photographer because a wedding is about "true love" and a photographer "detracts from that." Excuse me?
When looking for new creative ideas, it seems like everything has already been done by someone. But there are still people, like Jay Philbrick, that manage to create pictures never seen or even never thought of before.
Say it with me: "Done is better than perfect." I'm positive I'm not the only photographer on this planet that lets perfection get in the way of "good" far too often.
The Game of Life has only a few pivotal moments; graduating college, choosing a career, and getting married. And most people only want to do that last one once in their life. So when a friend asked me to shoot his proposal to his longtime girlfriend, I was both elated and terrified.
When talking about bokeh, the majority of the photography community instantly thinks of those nice creamy out of focus backgrounds. This is because most of the photographs we see only involve a subject and a background.
Portrait and Wedding Photographer Jordan Voth joins me for this month's exclusive chat, in which I ask him about his signature move of taking clients out into some of the most beautifully scenic backdrops I've ever seen.
I remember reading an article here on Fstoppers three year ago about a couple using a GoPro in a bouquet to film their wedding. That might have been a trend back then in 2012, but now in 2015 forget about the bouquet. This couple may just have started a new thing! They hired their dog to film their wedding.
If you spent even a moderate amount of time on Facebook back in late September, you likely saw a viral video and photo about a wedding photographer who captured a genuinely heartwarming moment in which a bride's biological father stopped the wedding procession to grab the step-father from his seat so they could both walk her down the aisle.
Over the years, camera companies have been going head to head in the battle for the best camera sensor. This battle has always focused around the amount of megapixels a camera has to offer, and as of lately, how high the ISO can go.
I love taking ring shots. I usually take them during a slow time on the wedding day when there isn’t a lot going on. I have full control of where I put the ring, how I light it, how I pose it, and how I frame it. This leaves a ton of options to really get creative. So it confuses me when people just place the ring on a bouquet of flowers and call it done.
Rangefinder Magazine has announced the photographers selected for their 4th annual "30 Rising Stars of Wedding Photography." The 30 photographers, who have been shooting for five years or less, were selected from more than 200 portfolios worldwide, including submissions from Croatia, France, England, New Zealand, Scotland, Tahiti, and all over the U.S.
We can argue back and forth for days about if guests should have the right to take photos as they please at weddings, but when it comes down to it, if the happy couple can't experience their special day without a guest interfering, haven't we gone too far? Photographer Thomas Stewart thinks so.
Having the right gear for the job is essential in being able to handle the barrage of lighting scenarios that a wedding photographer will encounter on each outing. I, like many others, am constantly thinking about the next piece of gear.
On September 12th, Matt and Heather Koehler were set to get married in Michigan. Just before they were about to walk down the aisle, they found out that the photographer that they had hired to shoot their wedding was a no-show. With nothing else to do but move forward, they went through the rest of their wedding without a professional photographer.
You have your gear, you have your shot list, so you're ready to go out and shoot the perfect eight-hour wedding, right? Wrong! Being prepared for a wedding day is about more than just having your camera ready to go. Before leaving for your wedding shoot, you need to be prepared to perform at your best.
It is no small thing to know how to pose your clients. In fact I don't feel like it's unreasonable to say that it is the hallmark of a competent, professional photographer. Especially when dealing with couples. Most client take comfort in being directed. It helps remove doubt and awkwardness while yielding a far more professional end product.
The Internet is my biggest hero. I don't think my business would ever have gotten off the ground in the traditional world of phone books, landline telephones, relying on a brick and mortar studio to show your work, and direct mail marketing. I'm most certainly a do-it-yourself type of person and the web has enabled people like me to really take that to the next level.
Capture One has been known amongst high-end retouchers and commercial photographers for quite some time, the main reasons probably being its powerful tethering and color editing tools. Wedding photographers seem to think Capture One is not tailored to suit their needs. At least, that is what I thought.
Could you ever imagine shooting a wedding and having the President of the United States make an appearance? Yeah, me neither, but that’s exactly what happened to The Youngrens.
A few months ago I wrote a two part article on branding for photographers. In this article I will continue with branding for photographers, and why you should keep your brands separated. The most common thing I see are wedding photographers combining their wedding work with their family, baby, senior, and even commercial work.
A little over a year ago, I got to live out one of my worst nightmares. I had a day where the personification of my anxiety sprouted legs and ambled right into the middle of a wedding ceremony that I was photographing. Mr. Anxiety-Incarnate snuck into a church, and like a biblical plague, snuck right back out and took something precious with him.
October in New Orleans means wedding season. This weekend was a double wedding weekend just like most of the next few weeks will be and I just finished what would be considered a timeline disaster, but the marquee images were not missed in large due to experience and meticulous planning.
Are you as stealthy as a fog horn? Do you have all the grace of a dirigible in a sudden windstorm? Certain genres of photography — wedding and wildlife photography in particular — require a certain physical tact, an ability to be unseen. Check out our tips on how to capture the focus of an event without becoming the focus of the event.
In the world of photography, preparation goes a long way. From creating mood boards weeks in advance, communicating with everyone who will be on set, to making sure your gear is in proper working order, there is a lot to do before you even shoot.
I’m sitting at my desk on a Friday and I get a phone call.
Wedding photographers often tell me how annoying it can be to get a consistent white balance across the images of the day. Shooting weddings almost every weekend during the summer myself, I used to have that problem as well. With a white dress for the bride and a white shirt for the groom, it should be easy though. The problem is I like my images to make my couple look good.
When people first get into wedding photography, one of the main pieces of advice they will hear over and over is, “You can’t reshoot a wedding." This instantly leads to photographers asking, “How do I protect my images?" Image backup and cataloging is sort of like baking a cake. Every photographer is going to have a different recipe to how they do things.
Wedding photographers would like to hold their clients — or would-be clients, for that matter — to certain standards. As a collective, we’d love to see them shop for the best vendors, spend good money on photography, and have unplugged weddings with nary an Uncle Bob in sight.
Yesterday, we posted Part 1 from our latest episode of "Critique the Community" on un-posed wedding photos. For this episode we promised to give feedback for every single image that was properly submitted. If you missed the last video, we went through a little over half the images and gave our thoughts. Today, we'll be giving feedback to the rest. Check them out below.
Last week, we asked the community to submit their un-posed wedding images to be critiqued here at Fstoppers. Unlike past episodes, we promised to give feedback to EVERY image that was correctly submitted. Thank you everyone for all for posting your pictures! We had a total of 49 images that we covered in two separate videos.
I came across a web app for scheduling appointments that was a complete game changer for my business! It's by far my favorite productivity tool. Every wedding photographer needs to check this out. It could be the missing link you need in your business to book more wedding photography clients. In my first week I was able to arrange seven meetings and book two clients. Wow!
Have you heard of Drunk History? It started out as a hilarious Youtube series and now it has become an actual show on Comedy Central. Well, this fun couple decided to skip the standard engagement photo session and create their own drunk history video which covers the story of how they met.
Night photography is something that every budding photographer will play around with at some point in their learning process. It’s a great way to get star-filled nighttime landscapes or to capture the light-painting shots in which you write in the air with sparklers.
Through September 13th, you have a chance to submit any un-posed wedding photos to be critiqued by the Fstoppers team in a new episode of "Critique the Community." What do I mean by un-posed?
In B&H's latest episode of "Wedding Photography Tips" wedding photographer Susan Stripling offers up some solid nuggets of advice for you to chew over before taking on your first wedding gig. Susan addresses some really important issues, that a lot of shooters wouldn't even consider, prior to embarking on a career in wedding photography.
Earlier this week, we asked the community to submit their wedding photographs to be critiqued by Lee and Patrick. Thank you everyone for all for posting your pictures! Check out the images we've selected.
Working as a wedding photographer is often an exercise in mutual respect with other vendors who have parallel, yet sometimes different, priorities in serving the bridal couple and their family. Most of time everyone is on the same team, but occasionally we photographers run into rules that don’t serve anyone properly.
Over the course of a wedding day, you can shoot in countless locations with varying difficulties. Most of the time, the locations will be places you have never been before. If you ask around online for advice, you will probably be told to scout out your locations days or even weeks in advance.
Recently I had the distinct honor of being a groomsman in a close friend’s wedding. It’s a lot of hurry and stand while remembering where to look. The pressure really is more on the two people getting married to remember their lines: “I do.” But as part of the wedding party, you also get the full brunt of posing, smiling and cheesing it up for the wedding photographer.
I’m always looking for new and interesting ways to add visual interest to my images. I’m a big fan of the effects you can get with prisms and the like, but it’s always nice to find something a little less used. Last year I went to a Katy Perry concert and they were handing out pairs of 3D glasses, which cause rainbow light streaks to appear all around you.
When you're shooting a wedding, every minute is valuable. There is often a compromise between the amount of time you spend on a shot and the level of quality you can achieve from that shot. That's partly what makes Fstoppers member Paul Keppel's ring shots so great. They take him almost no time to shoot and they look fantastic.
Anyone who has been booked as a wedding photographer knows that this genre of photography can be extremely challenging. Perhaps no other field of photography throws as many variables at you more than those found on a typical wedding day.
Sometimes you need to get rid of that frizzy wind-blown hair but you don’t have the time to mess with cloning and blending. This can be even more difficult and time consuming with more complicated backgrounds that have gradients in them. I’m here to show you my quick and dirty way to get rid of those flyaways.
Much can be said about preparing yourself for photographing a wedding, not the least of which is picking out your kicks. That’s right, finding adequate and stylish footwear to last an 8 to 15-hour workday should be a paramount decision for the successful wedding shooter. For some it's simply about price, fit, or orthopedics.
Now that wedding season is in full swing, I’d like to reflect on a few ways that you can take your current performance and boost it to the next level. I always hear people say that the wedding photography market is too saturated.