SLR Lounge: Natural Light Couples Photography Workshop

I am proud to introduce the 2 DVD Natural Light Couples Photography Workshop by SLR Lounge. When we approached Couples Photography, commonly referred to as Engagement Photography, we wanted to start by helping both beginners and professional develop and enhance a strong overall foundation in couples portraiture. So, the Natural Light Couples Photography Workshop has been designed from the ground up to teach photographers a simple and systematic approach to capturing professional natural light couples photography. In this workshop, we show you that professional results can be achieved with just your camera, a simple reflector and your photographic eye.

We split this Workshop into 2 DVDs totalling nearly 8 hours of professional SLR Lounge quality education that you have come to know and expect. The first DVD covers the planning and the actual shooting of the couples photography session while the Second DVD includes all of the post production to turn our raw files into beautifully produced images.

Let’s discuss what we will be covering in each part of this comprehensive workshop.

DVD 1 – The Workshop DVD

Chapter 1 – Introduction and Preparation
In Chapter 1, we start with preparing for the shoot. We talk through why it is important to convince wedding clients to do a pre-wedding portrait session, we talk about recommendations on professional makeup and styling for the shoot, optimal shoot lengths and planning for the potential what-could-go-wrongs. But the meat of this chapter is in discussing and planning the client’s vision for their portraits. We show a planning session with an actual client where we discuss the style and concept for the shoot, cover potential locations and discuss appropriate wardrobe considerations.

Chapter 2 – Gear, Camera Settings and Advice
In Chapter 2, we move on to discuss our favorite gear and camera settings for couples photography. We discuss necessary equipment, shooting and metering modes, as well as go over a “pre-click checklist” to think through prior to snapping each photo.

Chapter 3 – Lighting Techniques
Chapter 3 introduces the basic lighting techniques that we will be using throughout the workshop. Throughout the entire workshop, we will be showing you how to create amazing imagery with just a simple reflector and the natural light around you. We will show examples of using the reflector as a key light, fill light, gobo and scrim.

Chapter 4 – Posing and Communication
Posing and Communication is such a huge part of any portrait session and any successful portrait photographers skill set. So when we get to Chapter 4, we demonstrate how we pose and guide our male and female subjects individually prior to each shoot. Most portrait photographers are shooting clients that don’t have previous modeling experience. Rather than using professional models, for this entire workshop we are demonstrating these techniques with Ryan and Jackie, our actual clients who have no modeling experience prior to this shoot. Knowing how to quickly and confidently communicate and guide your subjects into different poses is crucial to the portrait photographer’s success.

Chapter 5 – Foundation Posing
Shooting begins in Chapter 5 as we teach you our system for posing couples which we refer to as “Foundation Posing.” Foundation Posing is a framework we created that enables photographers to quickly move clients in and out of various poses within just seconds. After learning the Foundation Posing framework, you will find that you can shoot 10-20 different looks and poses within 1-2 minutes. More importantly, you will never be on a shoot pausing trying to come up with “new poses”

Chapter 6 – 9 – The Shoots
After Foundation Posing, you will be able to tag along through our entire portrait session with Ryan and Jackie. In Chapter 6, we start off the session at the Willow Tree location where we do a basic set of sitting portraits. After our mini-portrait session, we move into creating a Picnic scene from our moodboard. We then end this location with one of my favorite types of shots we refer to as the “Peeping Tom.” In Chapter 7, we hop to our next location where we shoot an entire tandem biking scene. We instruct and guide Ryan and Jackie in order to help us capture fun and natural biking shots. We finish up this location with a few prop driven portraits featuring our tandem bike. In Chapter 8 we take a short hike to our Grassy Hill location where we proceed to capture a large variety of images. Here we took advantage of the scene and lighting to create beautifully fun and candid walking shots, a wonderful set of soft portraits of Ryan and Jackie sitting in the grass, and ended the location with a hilariously goofy set of piggy backing and frame-it shots. Finally, in Chapter 9 we conclude our couples photography session with dramatic environmental portraits at Sunset Ridge. In total, we end up with nearly 200 amazing images to wow our clients. All shot within just a few hours, at a single location here at a local park in Orange County, California.

BONUS DVD 2 – The Post Production DVD

All purchase options (both digital and physical) include the Bonus DVD. This includes over 190 Full Resolution 5D Mark III RAW exercise files and all of the post production video tutorials to take our RAW files and turn them into breathtaking images. From culling to basic developing to advanced vintage and black and white processing and effects, this 5 hour DVD covers all of the post production from start to finish.

Product Versions and Combinations

As with all of our products, we want everything at SLR Lounge to be an incredible value. You all spoke, we have been listening. So, here is what we are going to do. For those of you that just want the shooting portion of this workshop, it can be purchased at a lower price and available via Digital Download at the SLR Lounge store.

Recommended Software

The Natural Light Couples Photography Workshop on DVD focuses on teaching techniques rather than the specifics of software. Below is the software that we will be using throughout the DVD, but keep in mind that the “alternatives” are also great options that will work just fine in most situations. In either case, if you are more familiar with one of the “alternative” software options, those will be the better choice since you can follow the techniques and processes at a good speed.

Recommended RAW Processing – Lightroom 4

RAW Processing Alternatives – Lightroom 3, Adobe Camera RAW, Aperture, Capture One

Playback Format

The video files are mp4 files and can be played from any device that plays such files (a Computer, iPad, iPhone, Android Devices, etc). It cannot be played on a DVD player. We chose this format for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is that we wanted our users to follow along in the post processing section. So we included all of the RAW files as well as the Lightroom Catalog. The second reason is the quality. In order to fully see the differences in the quality of light and the overall quality from image to image, we required large, high-quality video files.