Today’s Tips and Tricks blog is about the newest addition to the family here at the Gray house. After lots of nudging from me (Zach) to my lovely but unfortunately penny pinching but financially smart wife ;),  we finally broke down and bought this bad boy about a month or so ago.  Welcome to the Gray family, my little 85mm sweetie pie. No, I have not let her into bed with us.

Pretty!

After being a zoom shooter for a long time because of how practical they are, Jody and I have really started seeing how much it can add to your look if you invest in a lens like this. Today we want to show you some of the pluses and minuses of shooting with an 85mmL 1.2. We love this lens a ton and have noticed its strengths, and also want talk about the possible problems one can encounter while using it.

The Good:

This lens has the most beautiful color and really great looking bokeh (which is how the blur looks that the lens produces). The lens also focuses really well (although the speed of the focusing is fairly slow compared to many other lenses) and is very accurate, especially considering that the lens opens up so big on the inside and is as heavy as it is.  Check out some background blur and color on this puppy!

All these are shot at f/1.2

The colors are so rich and everything looks so crisp and smooth. Also you notice that the background has a very nice blur that is textured very nicely.

This lens is also really great for cutting your subject out of a shot because the depth of field at 1.2 is soooo shallow. This can be a really good thing, or a really bad thing depending on the story your telling and the camera your using.

It also helps make your subjects skin look smoother since it is slightly out of focus.

The Bad:

So the problem you can run into with this lens when shooting at 1.2, is that you have to be very careful on how and on what you focus. You’ll notice in the shot above, that there are three eyes in focus (which is fine) but any time someone is looking at the camera, you always want the eyes to be in focus. It works in this shot since the bride is the focal point and we do have the right eye of the groom in focus, but you really have to watch that closely when shooting.

The other problem you can have is that you have to be super careful when you focus on something and then recompose your shot, because what you initially focused on will now be out of focus. That means that you have to rely on all of your other focus points in your camera, and depending on what camera you have, that can be a major problem. My biggest complaint with Canon is that the only cameras that have really good focusing on all the focus points is the 1D  series bodies. The Canon 5D series (which is what we use) only have one focus point (the center one) that uses vertical and horizontal lines of contrast to focus. All the rest of the focus points (the ones you actually need most of the time to shoot creatively) only use one line of contrast and are therefore very weak and are hit and miss when trying to focus even if you are in bright light. So either become a Nikon shooter or send emails to Canon until they produce a mid-level camera that has some serious focusing power!

The last thing to be careful of with shooting shallow depth of field, is there seems to be a tendency to love the look so much, that you end up shooting EVERYTHING at 1.2. While it looks neato to shoot that way, if you are a wedding photographer, you need to keep in mind that you are telling a story of the wedding day. If you shoot every single shot at 1.2 and the bride walk down the isle and you frame her half way down and then have mom in the foreground tearing up in the front row, then you will miss the story. One of them will be so out of focus that you will not see the entire story unfolding in your images. That shot may need to be taken at f/8 even though it does not have that super shallow depth that you love. You need to know when to shoot shallow and when to shoot with depth to help tell the story properly. Something to think about, especially for those photojournalist shooters out there.

This lens can also shoot some cool details, but you can’t focus any closer than 37.4 inches so don’t plan on getting too close to anything.

This lens is also really great for group shots, but you have to get WAY back to get em. When you can though it does look really great.

This lens also creates a very intimate feeling and is great for those up-close moments between the bride and groom.

This lens is really awesome for portraits and the length of the lens being at 85mm is considered one of the traditional portrait lengths. Any length over 50mm starts to compress an image and make your shots feel like they are all about your subject, and around 85mm is where you sort of hit the sweet spot. Lots of shooters use the 50mm 1.2 for shooting portraits maybe because it is light and focuses faster, but that lens really is not a portrait lens. That lens makes everything look much more natural (like what your eye sees) and this 85mm lens makes everything more compressed and is much better suited for portrait shots.

Well, we hope that you have enjoyed our little journey with our new baby!

Is there something that you want us to blog about in our Tips and Tricks? Is there a question you want us to talk about? Send us an email at tips@grayphotograph.com and we may just blog about it!

There are some marketing ideas out there that work for some people, some that don’t work for others, and some that simply aren’t great ideas.  However, what we are about to share with you today on the latest installment of our Tuesday Tips and Tricks post WILL benefit your business and is a sure way to amp things up and get your momentum going (or keep it going) and the return is invaluable!  This has worked awesomely for us and is in part one of the reasons that we do not spend any $$$ on advertising.

Today we are going to be talking about Wedding Slideshows! Some of you may have heard of doing sideshows at weddings and for some of you, this may be a brand new idea, so we’re gonna break it down!

We first  heard of this idea from a photographer and entrepreneur who we respect and admire, David Jay, and since we began doing this back in January 2008 it has brought us tons of amazing clients and got our name out to many more!

What are wedding slideshows?

- This is when you set up your laptop/iPad/small viewing screen, and display in slideshow form pictures taken earlier that day at the wedding

Why does this work?

We cannot stress enough how amazing doing these slideshows can be for your business.  How many times have you gone and shot a wedding and people come up to you saying, “Man, you are AWESOME – you did such a great job,” but you’re thinking to yourself, “You haven’t even seen the pictures yet.  They could stink for all you know!”  What’s great about doing wedding slideshows is, 1) it’s not only a fantastic and unexpected surprise for the bride and groom but, 2) wedding guests actually get to SEE your final product.  Not only do they see your professionalism and your awesomeness, but then they actually see the work RIGHT then and there.  How many times have you attended a wedding and even remembered who the photographer was much less seen any of the images from the day?  That’s what we thought. :) Producing a slideshow at a wedding gives the client and potential clients the entire package. They see you shooting, interacting with the guests and bridal party, and then they get to see your work first hand. We have booked countless weddings and gained tons of momentum (remember that word) with our brides by doing this.

Here are a few tips for doing a wedding day slideshow that have worked really well for us:

1) Shoot in RAW + SM JPEG

2) When you have some down time (normally during dinner), copy all of the small JPEGs off your cards onto your computer.  Small JPG’s barely take up any extra space and are plenty big for running a slideshow that looks fantastic on your laptop.  (Then feel free to turn your camera off RAW + SM JPEG)

3) Pick out your favorites, anywhere from 10 + (we tend to pull 35-50 images), and do whatever you need to do to them. (*Additional tip – make sure to not only just pull cool images but real moments too.  The moments are what really relate to people and bring out the emotional response that your looking for).  We do all of our image picking and the slideshow through Lightroom 3 which makes it really simple and easy.  (If you’re worried that you can’t pull out 30 images, at least do SOME – even FIVE images if that’s all you can do – your bride and groom and guests will still LOVE it.  Don’t let it stop you!).

4) Don’t over edit your shots. These don’t have to be final images, they just need to be great moments. Nobody will know if their are some blown highlights or if an image needs a little more contrast. Just get them up there. The average client does not see what you see because they don’t edit photos every day!

5) Once your images are ready, run them on a continuous slideshow (Lightroom lets you do this) and you’re ready to go!

6) Put the slideshow near a higher traffic area (DJ likes to say if you set the slideshow up near the bar one of the perks is the images look better and better to everyone as the night goes on! :)

7) Never put your images on anything bigger than a laptop and NEVER force anyone to look at them. You don’t want any part of the reception to be about you and you definitely don’t want to directly market yourself by making someone look at them (like by having the lights turned down and doing a slideshow that everyone thinks they are supposed to watch). Instead, let it be a cool surprise for the bride and groom and their guest that they can look at if they want to. If they like it, then they will tell their friends about you, and that is the type of marketing you want. You always want someone ELSE to sell you.

8) Make sure to include your branding in the slideshow – either have your logo be one of the slides or with Lightroom, you can let it always be at the top or at the bottom of the show.

9) You want to take advantage of having your work out in front of everyone and let them know who you are, but you also don’t want it to seem like you are just there to market yourself – you’re there for the bride and groom, sooooo we have found instead of laying out business cards, what works really well is to create an Event Card for guests to grab.

Event Card = a wallet sized print that has instructions for guests to find the couple’s wedding gallery when the images become available online. If you shot an engagement session of the couple, put one of their images on the event card.  More cards get taken if wedding guests see their friends on the card (*Additional tip – make sure the shot you use is more of a close up shot as opposed to a far away shot.  That way, in dim reception lighting guests can easily see that it’s the bride and groom).  If you did not shoot an engagement session of the couple, use a generic image. We get these printed at a local lab and they look awesome.

Generic Example:

10) Have a Call to Action in the actual slideshow.  Yes, the event cards may be laying there, and yes, the couple’s photo may be on the event cards, but oftentimes guests need a little assistance in knowing that the cards are there and that they can actually take one.  After the last slideshow image, the next slide they see instructs them to grab a card below, and THEN the next slide they see is our logo. (*Additional tip – we found that if we put our logo before the “Call to Action” slide, people would see our logo, and then look away totally missing the instructions to grab one of the event cards.  Put the Call to Action first and then your logo).

This is our call to action image we created and put in the slideshow:

11) Just a reminder that the most powerful marketing is when other people sell you, NOT when you sell yourself.  That is why wedding slideshows can work so well! Try to refrain from running around telling the  guests that your images are up for people to look at…  also, don’t run to the DJ table and have him make an announcement.  Guests will see the slideshow and organically they will head on back to their table  and say, “Oh my gosh, did you see the wedding images from today that are up already?? I’ve never seen that before – it’s Soooooooo cool!  You have to go and check it out.”  That is the beauty of the slideshow  – people start selling you… you don’t have to do a thing.

The Social Proof Theory starts coming into play here (aw yeah, look at me using my Communications degree!)… The Social Proof Theory essentially states that people will do what they see other people doing.  So a wedding guest is walking by and they notice a group of people huddled around looking at something, more than likely they will do the same. Pretty soon, in a really cool and organic way, the whole reception will start buzzing about YOU and your awesome photography (and of course how FAB the bride and groom look)!

IN SUMMARY

The great thing about this is as your work is put in front of the wedding guests (many who may be getting engaged, are engaged or at least know someone engaged) they see your work, know who you are now, and will be drawn to your business even more once they go to your site and get  hooked on your blog as they are getting to the client’s gallery.  Clients tend to breed more clients just like themselves, so if you are doing weddings with awesome clients, chances are, more clients just like them will come out of it.

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Below we have for you the wedding images that we put on display at this past weekend’s wedding for the sweet couple – Ryan & Sarah Addison.  (Disclaimer – this is not the Lightroom slideshow that we showed at the wedding.  We do not put music to the slideshows.  We built this slideshow through an online slideshow building program for blog purposes.  As mentioned above, we use Lightroom to display our slideshows at the wedding and keep them on continuous play.)

Here are the wedding guests and bride & groom Sarah and Ryan looking at the wedding images!

Are these tips and tricks blogs helping to take your business to the next level?  We are holding 2 business & marketing classes – in Nashville & San Francisco.  Don’t miss out and sign up now before the seats fill up!

Who else out there has done slideshows at the wedding and how has the response been for you?

Today’s tips and tricks is a very simple technique that I learned back in the early part of 2008 when I (Zach) had been shooting for just under a year professionally. Back then, me and another great Nashville photographer Evan Baines used to send our favorite few images from our recent shoots back and forth for critique from each other. It was cool how he would see things in my shots that I did not and vice-versa. I highly recommend this between photographers because it will help you grow tons faster if you have someone you respect looking at your images from an outside perspective!

So after one particular shoot that I had done, I sent over a few shots and got some amazing advice from Evan. I showed him this image and was sure he was going to love it (because I was sooo excited about it myself).

Evan did love the shot, but he noticed one major flaw in the image that I did not. He told me to either, “Shoot it straight, or shoot it purposely crooked. Never shoot it a little bit crooked like you did.”

So, I went in, cropped the shot slightly, and re-sent it over.

And I was like “Whoa! I never noticed that!”  Images that are purposely straight as an arrow or purposely crooked leave your audience feeling a certain way about the shot. If your shot is straight, it looks like it is balanced and even and makes you feel that way. If a shot is purposely crooked it gives you a sense of movement, or can even make you feel like you are off balance if pushed too far. Next time you watch a movie and it gets scary or intense, you might just notice that the camera will start to get very crooked and off axis in order to make you feel the same way.

The above image from the same shoot is shot purposely crooked which gives you a feeling of movement. That is why it works so well with this shot of the bride and groom running, even though there is no camera blur in the shot.

So, shoot em straight or shoot em’ crooked and your images will go to the next level!

Today’s tips and tricks photography blog is about a simple, yet effective way to get a big impact out of your portrait shoots. Every photographer wants to have images where the subject of our shots seems to be larger than life and jump off the page (or in most cases these days with photography, the computer screen :).

So today we are talking about “eliminating the middle ground” as my friend Mike Larson dubbed it. What does it mean to “eliminate the middle ground?” It is simply to take your subject, either a person or a detail shot, and place them in an area where there is space between them, the foreground and the background. When we do this, our subject immediately pops out of the image much better because they are the only thing in sharp focus.

Example image from our recent engagement shoot with the amazing Sarah & Ryan!

Notice how they seem to jump off the screen and have some much dimension, even though the lighting is not very contrasty at all.

Now, if you want to ramp up the effect, you can do this by implementing a few other techniques at the same time. If you don’t have your subject near something like a wall that you can use to lead into your shot (which would increase the effect) then you can get low to the ground like in the shot above to bring more of the foreground into the frame. This helps blur everything in the shot except our subject which makes them that much more 3D looking. If you were to shoot from high above, then more of the ground around them would appear to be in focus and it would lessen the effect.

Another thing you can do to increase the effect is to shoot at a very shallow depth of field. In the case of the image above, this was shot at f 1.2 which makes the focus plane very shallow. The further away you are from the subject, the more that appears to be in focus, so shooting really shallow at this distance helps increase the effect and counteract the extra depth that you get from shooting further away.

The last thing you can do is to use a long lens. The longer the lens, the less depth of field and more blurred out the background and foreground will be. This image was shot at 85mm which is a great portrait length. Anything longer than 50mm also compresses the image and makes it look more intimate and seem as though you are peering in at a moment.

Check out some other images with the same type of techniques used.

Keeping anything distracting out of the shot also keeps the attention on the subject like in the image above.

In this above image the background is pretty close to the subject, but the shallow f stop (1.4) along with being in close, throws the background way out of focus and gives the effect nicely. It also helps to smooth the skin as most of it is out of focus as well!

In this shot, the groom was pretty close to the trees in the background, and pretty far away from me, but by framing the bride and her father (who were very close to me) around the groom, it gives a similar effect and helps pop the groom out of the background.

Now the real trick comes when you are shooting with high-powered strobes which force you to sometimes shoot at a much larger depth of field. The way you compose the shot, and what you put in it, now becomes very critical. One thing you can do is eliminate everything except the sky which pops the subject out.

You can also get very extreme with the foreground by placing the camera directly on the ground like in the above shot. Even though this image was shot at f11, it still has the look of shallow depth in the foreground, while the subjects and background have tons of depth. That is when it starts looking fake and like you inserted a background, even though this image is straight out of the camera with zero Photoshop.

You can also use light to make your subject pop out of the frame. In this case, two light sources coming at the subject give him lots of nice contrast which make him appear more 3D. Then, using the low to the ground technique along with the angled lines of the rail car, you get lots of depth and dimension in a simple image.

Have a photo question that you want answered in our Tuesday Tips and Tricks? Shoot us an email at tips@grayphotograph.com and we just may do a blog on it! Now get out there and shoot!!

Welcome to Part II of Tuesday Photography Tips and Tricks | What’s in Our Camera Bag!  Via the goodness of our HD flip video camera we continue on with the contents that we carry in our main camera bag to weddings.

If you missed the first half from last week CLICK HERE.

Enjoy :)

Constant lighting for this video provided by Westcott’s SpiderLite TD5.

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On another note…

… it’s that time to start talking about workshops again!!!!  We are releasing dates & locations soon for our fall IN-CAMERA workshops!!  Make sure you are signed up for our photographer Newsletter to have the opportunity to be the first to register for our Nashville classes 24 hours before anyone!

… Not close to Tennessee?  Well, we have something special coming up just for you peeps!… You might just have a say where we bring our out-of-state workshops to!  Stay tuned to our blog for more details  :)

If you have any questions or comments, we enjoy hearing from you!

Welcome to the latest rendition of Tuesday Photography Tips and Tricks!  This week we bring our tips and tricks via the goodness of our HD flip video camera!

We decided to take you guys through our main camera bag that we take with us to weddings!

Enjoy :)

Constant lighting for this video provided by Westcott’s SpiderLite TD5.

If you have any questions or comments, leave ‘em below!

Check back next Tuesday for Part II as we share the rest of what is in our camera bag!

Welcome to the latest addition of Tuesday’s photography tips and tips!  We know a lot of you out there have questions about how we do our lighting and set up so we wanted to give you a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes of one of the set-ups of a bridal session that we shot a few weeks ago.  The fab bride that you see below is Mallory, and she and her man, Aaron just got married this past weekend, so we are excited we can start putting up some of her bridal images!

We shot this setup with a Westcott 24×32 Softbox, two Photogenic Powerlights (600 watts & 1,000 watts), Pocket Wizards Plus IIs, the Sekonic L-358 light meter, and of course 2 Alien Bee Vagabond II‘s for our power source.

I put the main light about 35 degrees off to the side and as close in as possible  to give the “painted on” light look. Putting it off to the side creates a “loop” lighting pattern where the light loops off to one side of the brides face and body and helps create more depth and dimension. Then, to help “pop” her out from the background even more, I set our second light to the side of her, hitting the rocks and her back. We shot this BARE BULB with a small 7 inch reflector so the light was a little more harsh and defining.  The front light was metered at F/9 which was about 2 stops brighter than the background (to give us a very flash heavy dramatic look) and the back light was metered at F/11 to make it really obvious.

This is what the set up looked like:

After setting my camera settings to what my meter was telling me, I began to shoot, and the below is one of the images taken.

Here was a second shot that we did by just keeping our same settings and moving the bride over to the rocks. We re-metered to be sure we were at the same settings, removed the background light, and shot.

Hope you enjoyed!

Check back on our blog tomorrow where we will debut Mallory’s full bridal session!!

Today’s Tuesday Tips and Tricks is all about saving you, the awesome photographer, time, which is your most valuable asset. Time is the only thing you can’t get more of in this life, so you need to use it wisely. Sometimes as photographers we just trudge along in many activities within our business and never think about how much time we are actually spending on certain tasks that we do. If you know Jody and I at all, you know that we spend very little time in actual post-production because we work very hard to shoot our images how we want them right in the camera. We do that because we want to spend time with each-other, time building our business and time enjoying life, and not be stuck behind a computer all day editing photos.  It’s all about having the freedom to do what you want.

It is really important to not just look at the bottom line at the end of the year to see how “well” you did, but really look at how “well” you are doing per-hour of time worked. It is cool if you can make 100k a year, but not at the expense of losing your personal life and neglecting those that are most important to you and those that need you. Most of us can be scared to look at what our hourly wage might be, but need to do so. When you do, you realize what your time is really worth and what things you should be doing, and more importantly, should NOT be doing! We could write an entire blog post on just this area of business, but for now, we are just going to stick to the tip at hand. :)

So, anytime we see a great piece of technology that helps give us our time back on a day to day basis, we not only use it, but want to share that info with all of you! Today’s awesome time saver is…..

The Delkin Image Router!!

Basically what this baby does, is it downloads not one, but up to four CF cards all at once! You can also daisy chain two together and download up to eight cards at once! What that means is you won’t have to keep coming back to your computer every 6 or 8 minutes and inserting a new card. Instead, you can download all or most of your cards at once and then go have dinner with your wife! Awesome!!

But, why not just buy a 64 gig CF card, shoot the whole wedding (or whatever type of shoot it is) on that, and download that one card? Glad you asked! We only use 2, 4, and 8 (on the mk II) gig CF cards at a wedding (carrying them on our person) because if you happen to lose a card or it gets damaged, then the WHOLE wedding is gone and you are totally up the creek without a paddle! CF cards are a newer technology and you should expect them to fail. Buy new cards every year and don’t keep lots of important images in one place for very long.

So, check out the Delkin Image Router on BHPhotovide.com and you won’t be disappointed! It retails for around $85 and is well worth the investment!