Outdoor Engagement "Love Story" portrait Secrets

1. Introduction: I'm with you. Each moments I can. I take all those replayed in the night. Bye. Hi and welcome to the romantic engagement love story portrait course. In case we haven't met. My name is fairly new Bower and the founder of photo fonts media and photo fonts on YouTube. In this course, I'd like to share with you my photo and business ideas and show you how taking the engagement love story portrait session can not only help increase your business, but provide your clients and you with some really outstanding photography that can set you apart from your competition. When I first started offering this type portrait session, I realized the opportunity that he gave to her couples to have something unique that captured the beginning phase of their life. And it really showed in their photos and the feelings that they had for each other. First time. Not only was this my favorite portrait session, but it turned out to be a very lucrative part of my business. And it was fun because I got a chance to capture them, had a really happy time of their lives. And it's also fun because I got a chance to travel with them to some beautiful beaches and New Jersey, North Carolina. Paul had islands, the Duke Gardens in North Carolina, in Central Park in New York, and some other really interesting locations. It was looker to it because I was able to sell some life-size will all portraits and beautiful storybook albums and folios. Plus, if I offered a session in some of my top packages, I was able to book more of those top packages and therefore increase my bookings and my sales. So there's a lot of neat stuff that I'd like to go over and share with you. So let's get started. 2. Why the Engagement "Love Story" Portrait Session?: So why the engagement portrait session? Well, if you're doing weddings, it's obvious that since you already have your couples book, anyway, why not offer them something that there's a good chance that they're going to need anyhow. And that would be an engagement session. However, you want to make sure that you do more than maybe some people may be offering, which in some cases maybe just a head shot. A two people had shot looking straight at the camera, looking to the left, looking into right. And that's it. You want to make it something unique that when they see the images, something that they got to have. And that is putting the whole story together. And years ago I started calling it the engagement love story portrait session. Now they also call it a lifestyle portrait session, which means that it could be of a family, of an individual, just two people. So it's pretty much the same thing. So whether you call it an engagement session or a lifestyle portrait session, it's a story and I really like to show a complete story. You're going to be doing a combination of certainly head shots, close-ups, but then you're also going to be showing the environment because those are the ones that make beautiful wall portraits. Where you show in your environment, say maybe of a beach and beautiful sunset or something. And you can barely see them. And that's something that is really unique that they may want for a wall portrait because it's not too much in your face like a big giant head shot. It's more of a beautiful scene, but yet they're in it. So we sold a lot of wall portraits that way. So again, you want to make sure that you offer something different. And if you are doing weddings, I'd recommend that you put something like that in your top packages. As an example, I had in my top package, which was one of our most popular. I would offer a portrait session. And I will also offer a folio like this, which included eight images, in this case here, therefore by fives in Folio. Now of course, you can offer maybe something else like a montage, I think, but this is something that I use. And it was very popular and people had these on display at their reception many, many times. And of course, it's a great way to display their images in their home. So I've included that in my top package. And in my very top package, I would include the same thing, a portrait session. However, I would spend more time with them and now I will tell him so. And then in that I would include a neat little album with up to 24 images in an album that's actually made by my lab. And it will probably go into that later on in more detail. But it includes 24 images that I would design the album for them. And it's really quick and easy to design. And this way that's going to make your top package more attractive. So that's another way that you can go. And I also recommend, even though you're putting those in your top package, I also recommend having certain packages, ala carte. So for instance, say you're getting a couple that maybe may not be getting a really huge wedding package, but they still, they still appreciate having an engagement in a lot of story portrait session and Don because they do want to add something displayed at their wedding or it's something that they didn't want to own and maybe have it in their home, either on the wall or a beautiful album like this. So always offer these ala carte. Also. Another reason is there's gonna be many times, like in our case, never quite a few couples that we would do their engagement session. But because their wedding was say maybe out-of-state or even out of the country. We weren't able to do their wedding all the time. But they did want something really nice as an engagement session and they came to us for that. And that is something that people are going to seek you For once you become known as the engagement love story porch or for dy over, meaning that you're going to put their whole story together. So like I said, again, call it the engagement love story portrait or lifestyle portrait. It's gonna be something that's totally unique to what you're doing and possibly what you may be offering because you can offer these. But we're going to talk more about that too as we get into the course. But also by offering it in the top packages and offering it ala carte, you're going to be able to get clients who possibly you may not be doing a wedding, but they can spend a lot of money with you in ordering their engagement portraits. So I would highly suggest that you consider setting yourself up as being one of the top, not only wedding photographers, but someone in your area that is one of the top engagement portraits also, or as we talked about lifestyle portrait photography, because that's going to give you a lot of additional business that you may not get if you're only doing wedding photography. So that would be a really good way. And that's just the beginning because even though you're offering all these things, There's there's also additional sales that you can possibly get, which would mean large wall portraits. And then we're going to talk about that also. So those are some of the reasons that I feel that the engagement low story portrait session can be a huge part of your business. So what do we do to set yourself apart and how do we, how do we put that story together? So we're going to talk about that coming up right now. 3. Ingredients for a Successful Portrait - Show Passion Pt 1: So what are some of the things that you can do to make your engagement story more romantic? Well, there are certain ingredients that you can add in. The first one that we're going to look at is show passion. So how do we show passion? While one of the things that I like to do is have them leaning, always leaning in towards each other. And in this particular case here, we're looking at a early morning sunrise Beach, Florida. And notice how I just asked him to throw their hips in towards each other. Of course, they have their inside legs. It'll be the gentleman's left leg and the ladies, the bride's her right leg. They have their body weight in towards each other and the other legs are out towards the side just a little bit. And this way, it just shows that they're leaning towards each other, making them more romantic, putting a little bit more passion into the photograph. And on the next one here we're actually doing the same thing. We're leading them towards each other as they're sitting on a blanket. And then I just placed the bottle of wine that they brought along and a couple of glasses. We poured some wine into the glasses. And then again here they're leaning in towards each other. And in this particular case there, I just asked him to lean forward and just touch forehead slightly. So it's a nice romantic look also showing you a little bit more passion. Even in this closeup here, notice how they're leaning their bodies, also in their heads, of course, leaning towards each other. It just shows more of a romantic feeling. Even if you're doing more of a traditional classic typos here, we're just sat the couple down on the bench and neighbor and some really heavy shade, but there is a neat light coming in from the back that was touching their, their hair. So let's reason I chose this spot. But here, even though they're just looking towards the camera, they just wrapped their arms. She has his or her arms wrapped around him. And of course their bodies are leading and their heads are leaning a little bit in towards each other. And even though it's a nice straight on Pleasant View, it's not overly Romantics though. This might be something like this might be a good pose or a good photograph that the parents will enjoy and the grandparents and so on. So it's just something that's not too mushy that would be great to use for the parents. And then even on this one here, even though the groom, the gentleman is standing there just sort of leaning on the wall, but he's leaning a little bit towards her direction. And I put her up on the top of the wall and I just asked her to wrap her arms around him. And that also makes that more romantic. And then on this next one here, notice how she's just leaning back and then he's leaning a little bit more forward. And even though she's looking towards the camera, he has his head turn more towards her direction. And this just gives a nice little bit of a romantic look to it also. Then here we have a different couple, but it's the same wall. And the bride, the young lady is just leaning back towards the gentleman. They're leaning their heads a little bit towards each other also. Then on the next one here, I move them over to a stone bench. And I just asked her to wrap her arms around him and he has his arms around her. And then of course they are looking in towards each other almost like they're a bad kid. So they're looking into their eyes just to remember, it's a very, very happy time and it's just so easy to get these beautiful images. What are just so happy? Their love. It's the early phase usually of their relationship and they just have so much fun just being together and also have in their photographs taken. So that's why this is such an important part. Their engagement just add these beautiful portrait where we're able to capture all of feelings that they have for each other. And then here I just had this couple of room which is looking at the camera and the bride also looking at the camera, but she's turned towards him. And I just asked her to wrap her arms around him and lean in closer towards each other. And that always works for a nice kind of traditional but yet romantic. And on this one here I'll just ask the lady that just to turn her head a little bit. And then she tells her also, and I just had the gentlemen give her just a little bit. I always say just give her a little soft touch on her cheek without puckering up. Because if they start to pucker up, it sort of has a funny look to it. So just by him touching his lips to her cheek just a little bit. It's a nice romantic look and it still captures that beautiful feeling. Then of course we'll just top it off by just asking them. They're just give each other a great big kiss. And here's just another way of showing a little bit of passion though, without being too intimate. And notice how she has her left foot just a little bit back. Of course, they're leaving a little bit toward each other as they kiss 4. Show Passion Pt 2: Here we're going into a wooded area and this is more of a sort of like a traditional type pose where they're both looking at the camera. And again, notice how I just had them lean their bodies, their hips actually in towards each other. And that just makes this a nice sort of a classic type portrait, but yet just a little hint of a romantic type feel to it with their bodies leaning in towards each other. Then I still have them leaning in towards each other. And I just asked them to look at each other as he wraps his hands around her waist and she's resting cause her left hand just a little bit on his chest area. Now we can make it a little bit more romantic by just asking her to just lift her hand and just place it real softly on his cheek as they're looking towards each other. And again, notice how they're sort of leaning in towards each other and I have her left foot just a little bit back just to break it up. Because you want to avoid you want to avoid that. That's straight on. Look where the bodies are perfectly straight. Sometimes it's okay to do that, but it's good to know the rules. Then when you do note or rules, of course sometimes you just may want a break. I'm just just, just to be maybe outrageous or because it just may look interesting if you break certain roles. So even though you can break the rules, It's always good to note are rules as they are looking at each other. I'll just add them, just give each other a great big case. And I usually ask them to just to hold it for a second or two. And notice how on these images here, if it's further back, because this shows some of the surrounding, some of the beautiful foliage. So this was a park that they want it to go to and it has special meaning to them. So like I said, I wanted to show more of the environment on this particular one. And of course later on right after this, I also did some where I came in a little bit closer and then certainly did many close-ups as well. Then here we're looking at a certain pose that I just might have the lady look over at the camera. And again, I just have the gentleman give her just a little soft touch on the side here as you see here, without having him pucker his lips because that's sort of a funny look. So just doing that adds just a little touch of romance Then it's nice as a black and white too. Now many times throughout the session, I'll have them kiss and I do it in many different ways. Here we're looking at a beat portrait and I just placed them a little bit off to the side. And I just had them pretty much straight on and look at each other, but it was a little bit, little bit too stagnant if they're both just sort of straight. So I just had the lady bring her right foot back just a little bit and it just adds a nice curve to it. And other times I may do what's called a passion case, where we have them wrapping their arms around each other usually. And the lady use throwing her head back. And then sometimes he is tilting her back. But at any case, he's throwing her head way, way back. And then he gives her a little kiss on either the bond of her neck area. And it just makes it look very, very passionate. And as a another way that you can just add a little bit more passion to the kissing. Here at this particular location, I found this neat dirt road and then it had any of this frame, but he's beautiful trees just framing that, that open road. And I just had them stand in the center of it facing towards each other with no arms wrapped around each other. And of course I just had them lean again. She was leaning a little bit back and I had him just actually telling her back leaning forward. And then I asked her to bring her leg up as you can see, just to add a little bit of movement and to add more shape to instead of just straight up and down. Then here's another example of how he's just dipping her back a little bit. And I had the lady's left foot back just a little bit to break it up. And of course, on this particular one there looking at each other and then after that, I'll have them kiss. So here we're looking at another interesting kiss on the beach, right where the waves are starting to come in. And this is just really fast pace because I might have had them walking here and then I'll just add them. Just yell to them, say hey, just wrap your arms around each other now, leaner back and give her a great big case. So a lot of times I'll do it that way because it keeps it fun. Instead of just making it real stagnant like okay, post, one, post to. Just go with the flow and you just sort of watch them, do certain things. And then many times though, if you watch in-between when you're about to take photographs, you can also get some really nice expressions. And then here we're looking at another example of the couple of looking at each other and this was taken just in a parking lot at nighttime. And again, notice how the groom is just sort of legs apart, just getting a good solid foundation as he leans her back just a little bit. And then she's leaning back with their arms is resting on his chest. And then I had her bring her left foot up a little bit just to separate the feet slightly. And this was taken at nighttime. And as you can see, I have a little bit of a rim light here, which this butt take you don't want to have my assistant with me. And I just had him stan in a little bit behind them get real small. So he was hidden. It was back far enough, so he was hidden. And then he was hauling a second light, which was a quantum flash that we fired. And he gave them a little bit of a rim light on here, which we're going to talk about a little bit when I talk about the equipment, I'm going to show you that. But this way here because this was at nighttime, it gave a little bit of a rim light because if we wanted to add that, then you wouldn't really have the contrast. It would just sort of blend in with the nights. So by just by sometimes you have to use a backlight or you have to look for lighting in a certain way, so it looks more attractive. But this is also, even though they'd just looking at each other, that they're leaning back. But many times when he just asked them to hold onto each other and he's leading our back. It's just so much fun for them that they can't help but smile and they're just leaning way, way back, kind of uncomfortable on there. And she's they're both looking at each other smiling, laughing, having fun. So it's really simple at this point. When you do all this exciting romantic stuff, it's really easy to get to put passion into these photographs 5. Show Fun & Variety part 1: Let's take a look at adding fun and variety to your engagement portrait session. Now those two go together. So if you add all the variety to the session, doing all different things, maybe even different locations, even though you're in the same area, though if you look around, there's a lot of different things that you can do. And basically it's the same area and you just take a little walk around. But when we do meet with the bride and groom as they're planning their wedding, we always have a consultation. And many times when they see our samples or the albums on display, they see the engagement love story portrait session. And that really sparks their interests. And then that's something that most of them really and truly do want. Then we have a consultation as too. I always ask them some of the hobbies that they might have and many times they'll bring along if they've been married before, they may have children. And then we'll do several not all of them, but we'll do several with their children. And then sometimes maybe one of the parents may come along and they may take the children home then, or they may just stay with us. But either way, it's fun to do and it's an important part of their life. Also. Pets, also a very, very big so if you find out that they do have pads and they want to bring them, we've had all different pets. Dogs are the most popular. Some people do bring their cats, but the sky's the limit. But you can start off like in this case here, we just did more of a candid as it started off like a lifestyle type portrait. In these first two images here of this couple and their two dogs. And these two, by the way, were taken in black and white infrared using a special camera that I had converted to do only black and white infrared. And then of course we gave the second one has a blue tone to it. You want to make sure that when you get the two of them with their pets, that you also do several of them looking at the camera because those it's always good to mix it up again. It's the variety in the session. So when you do some natural walking, running, that type of thing. But the ones that they usually get for a wall portrait is the ones that they're looking at the camera because this way you can see everyone's face. And it's the most popular. In fact, that they got one of these was ordered as one of their wall portraits in addition to the album. So pets are very, very important. A while back I had one of my cameras converted to do black and white infrared photography only. So every time I use this camera, I only get black and white infrared images. Now, I'm going to talk about that coming up with the equipment. But in a nutshell, what black and white infrared photography is that infrared actually goes into the range that goes beyond what the human eye even sees. So that's how you get these really exotic looking, dramatic skies. And then sometimes depending on how the light hits the trees, anything with foliage or chlorophyll and seems to glow. So when you have a nice green tree, it just takes on a glowing quality. But the sky always turns very dramatic, even sometimes on a hazy day and even seems a cut through the haze and then it picks up some of their needs storm clouds if there are any. So it's just an over-exaggeration of what the human eye sees into the clouds. And it just gives a really beautiful, dramatic effect. So we'll talk about that infrared later. And of course, when I do this black and white infrared photography to the image, I'll add just a little bit of a hint of a brown tone. Then I'll also do some making it into a blue tone, which is also very dramatic and it's a different type of look. And it also adds to the overall story and just adds to the album. Another really interesting part of the story can be their vehicles, whether it's recreational, perhaps they have bicycles, a motorcycle, sometimes they have unusual or exciting sport cars, but anything like that. I always ask them that if they wouldn't mind, if we could use that for their portrait session. Or at least, I mean, certainly not in all of them, but in, in many of their session, or at least in some of their sessions. So we can add more variety even to their album. Here we're looking at a couple that he brought along a motorcycle to the session. And I'll put the bag on the lower thirds of the photo. And I've put a couple on the right third side. And it just sort of made a neat little way of displaying the bike. Even though they weren't exactly forefront. You could see them in the background just hugging because many guys are so proud of their bikes, they really want to show their bike. So that's what I did here. And then of course you can also do some fashion or some glamour type things using the motorcycles because the motorcycle can be used as a sexy prop. And it really has been many, many times you'll see certain ads using motorcycle and as a sexy little prop, so to speak. Here we just lay the young lady on the bike and I put the gentleman right a little bit behind her. And here this is more of a serious one. They're both looking at the camera. And I set this up in a nice triangular shape as far as the composition goes. And then also made one black and white 6. Show Fun & Variety part 2: And then he goes back to the fun stuff. And if you want to do something like this, this is very easy if you're fairly new, I doing this type of photography and you're not real good yet at posing, but this is a real simple one that you can do with a lady just hops on the gentleman's back and it's like a piggyback. And then she's giving him a hug. In this particular case, we show a full length. And then on the next one here, in post-processing here, I kept the couple in color, but I changed the background into black and white, just offering countervailing need unusual effect. And this looks really nice when he got this in their album. And then you come in a little bit closer and you get those just nice, natural, no effort smiles. And if you want to have some fun, they just asked the young lady to just nibble or just buy it a little bit on his ear. And that just creates just a really fun photograph for you. Something else that I like to do. In fact, this is a very important part of photography and it took me a while to learn this. But if you ever look at some of these beautiful images taken by these world-famous photographers? Or even if you look at some of the old master paintings, notice how they're looking at the camera and notice how they're not really smiling. It's not a great big smile, but when I do something like this, I always tell them, okay, now just look at the camera. It's beautiful and I just want you to smile just with your eyes. Smile only with your eyes. And then you get a really beautiful look or beautiful expression where there's no big smile. That's historian of face. It's just a really pleasant log and it shows a happiness in their eyes. So you just tell them, smile with your eyes. And that is one of the big secrets of successful portrait photography. Made it into a nice black and white here also. And then after you do that serious one, where the smiling and the eyes again, I just tell a lady that just nibble on his ear or just bite on his ear, and then that breaks the ice as far as having fun. So if they haven't given you any big smiles yet, that always seems to break the ice. And then they really seem to loosen up after that because there may be cases where you may not have met them yet. And this is your first meeting with them. And it does take maybe a few minutes or so usually because unless they're professional models or they're extremely comfortable in front of the camera. But many people are a little bit shy or maybe a little bit nervous and having their portrait taken by someone that they haven't met yet. But it only takes a little while until they get used to you. And then you see how you get along and you just communicate. And it's just so easy for you to capture those great expressions, that means so much to them. Another way to add to the variety of the story is to add certain things that have meaning in their lives. Like as an example, they were on this boat at a special time. It's a matter of fact, he proposed to her on this boat. And of course, this was taken at the beach when we did their engagement session. And that's when he told me that he actually proposed on this boat. If they could just re-enact it and I could photograph that and that's what happened here. So that is just something that has special meaning to them and adding even more to the variety of the story. Hobbes also give you a great opportunity to add to the variety of the story. Here, mark is shown holding his Nikon camera because that was his hobby, was photography. And not only was he a great photographer, but he was also he started off as an assistant with me. And shortly afterwards he became one of my main second shooters and he was fantastic. He was an outstanding photographer and he wanted to include him just holding his camera and then his fiance enjoy reading. She enjoyed books. So she brought along a book and then we actually photographed her with some she was reading. And of course here if you're looking at the camera. And then I also did some of Mark as he was photographing her. She was reading. And then we put those altogether in their story. And then also she brought along her two sisters to help out. Now one thing I wanted to mention, anytime that you have somebody that comes along to help out, how many times on an engagement session, it's just the two of them once in a while that bring along a friend or a sibling to help out. Even occasionally, although not often, it could be maybe the mother or one of the parents that come along. If that's ever the case. I always like to include them in a session. And so you can not only photograph them as we did here and just a giant, great big hug. I also had them hold the reflector for me. And he may hold a second light, whether I put it on the light stand or sometimes I'll put it on a mono pod and they're holding that for me. And I just I really I'm not afraid to ask him to do certain things unless there's a problem. If they give me any kind of a hint that they don't want to, of course, it doesn't matter. We just want to ask them then, but many times they love being part of the whole process, being part of the photographic session. And then here on the second image of the four, then it was just more horseplay added to the session and also included more variety to their album. 7. Show Fun & Variety part 3: And then here we're looking at another beach photo. And I generally like doing this when I have it clear, like a plane type of a background that doesn't seem to interfere with the composition. But as I have, the gentleman throw her up in the air, she actually helped along by jumping. So she'll actually should be pushing her hands off of his shoulders. And then it's going to make it look like she is really, really up there. It's always one that they get as part of, at least part of their story. And then of course, you might want to do two or three just to make sure you get them at the right height. And to add even more variety to the session, you can use different lenses. Now generally, most of the images that I take are done with a 70 to 200 millimeter lens. I love using that Nikon lens and it's a 2.8 lens. Now, I do want to mention, although it's 2.8 and sometimes I do use 2.8. But if I'm ever a little bit nervous because if they're not on the same plane, one of them is going to be a little bit out of focus. So even though it's important, because many people think that to get the background blur is where it's at. Well, if you get beautiful background blur and then if you photograph in two or more people and one of them is out of focus that you don't want to be, that's not good. So one way to avoid that problem is to make sure that when you do photograph them, that they're on the same plane, that they're even every time one of them may be a little bit back. And then sometimes I do that on purpose. I'll put them where I put one of them a little bit back because I want them slightly, slightly soft or slightly out of focus. But when you want to get them in focus, you want to make sure that they're on the same plane and you're always are least I always do. I'll focus on the eyes. Generally, I'll focus on the eye that's closest to the camera. In this particular photo, I use the Sigma 15 millimeter lens, which just broke it up, gave a nice little bit of a bow, a little bit of a distortion to the column, but it just broke up the images so they're not all the same. One thing now you definitely want to avoid. And sometimes I remember seeing this where I would look at somebody else's engagement session that they did, either through a friend of a friend or somehow I would see a session. I may see like 20 or 30 images that are taken at the same location, same lens, almost the same composition. It may be a head and shoulder type portrait, and they're just, there may be 20 or 30 images like that. So you want to definitely avoid that and they definitely want to make sure that you're getting great expression. So, so don't be afraid of maybe taken two or three or sometimes even more of the same image just to make sure that you have it just right. And then of course, when you show them, you eliminate the rejects and you show them only the best stuff. Because by showing them all the best stuff, it's gonna be hard for them to eliminate anything. Once they start eliminating, it's gonna be easy for them to eliminate images. And they say, well, we don't need this, we don't need that. Whereas if they're just about almost all of them or all of them are just about perfect or excellent photographs. It's gonna be hard for them to say, No, I don't want this. So many times. They're going to end up ordering just about all the images that you show them. And then here's another example. Since we're on wide angle, this is also taken with a 15 millimeter lens. We were driving through and I spotted this tree and I if we could just stop here, I just wanted to take a few. And this was a neat image. I believe we use this either on the front or part of the back cover of their album. And even though they look kinda small in there, but when it's enlarged or it's enlarged as part of a page, it just breaks it up because you're showing the environment. And yet they're in there, mixed in with some close-ups and medium telephoto type portraits, just adding again to the variety of the whole session. And here's another one similar to that, but they're just looking at the camera. When I started photographing this couple, we arrived on ball Head Island, I believe it was late in the afternoon and started them. And they wanted some taken outside the chapel where the wedding is going to be, and that's where we photograph this. And then we had the lighthouse in the background. So that was kind of a neat touch, kind of a nice composition. Also. Then as the sun was going down, we utilize some of those warm tones and we just sat them on a deck here. Just brought the chairs a little closer together, holding hands, looking at each other, again, just adding to the variety. And then as the sun was setting, we found a spot on the island that phase where so we were able to get some with the sun setting. And then here we had a pretty dramatic sky that really added to the image. And then of course you can see where he's leaning her bag. You can see the sun starting to set and the dramatic sky up on top. This is more of a wide-angle view. And then of course we come in closer to about a half a body shot. You can see a beautiful colored tones yet in the background. And then as the sun starts to set even more, we get what's called a sweet light. This is a light that photographers are always looking for us. Just a beautiful, beautiful sweet light. And you can see just how soft it is and just has such an amazing color quality to it. Spot here we're just walking, just natural. Nothing fancy. Just walking, looking at each other. Just utilizing that sweet light with those interesting cloud patterns in the sky. 8. Show Fun & Variety part 4: And then after the sunset, we all went for dinner, had a fantastic dinner. And then I took them back outside again. And here I set them up underneath this lamp on the boardwalk, just the two of them taken out at nighttime. And then we also got the idea of going out to the beach at night. And this was very, very dark out here is kinda tricky. And I remember we either use either a lighter or a flashlight so I could focus on them because I couldn't really see them at all. And then of course they dress into their formal outfits here. Took these images. I was also using an off-camera flash, which was a quantum cue flash that I had mounted onto a light stand. And I did bring a light stand on the beach. It was relatively close walk, mainly we stayed at this location, so I took along my cue flash mounted onto a light stand and a little bit off to my left side as we're looking at the couple. And here I just set them up on the left side thirds of the image that put the moon towards the top thirds. Now I do want to mention that the moon, this particular Moon, wasn't quite full. But with the help of Adobe Photoshop, of course, I gave it more of a circular pattern, so it looked a little bit nicer. Otherwise it was kind of like blob looking moon and not really full. But we got a nice pattern note with that. Moon light is shining on the ocean. And m2, just together, she has her arm through his arm and leaning in towards each other. And then later on using the same lighting system, I just had them turn towards each other and just looking at each other. And again the moon in the background. Then even though they've addressed kind of formal, they didn't really mind having a seat on the sand. Now that's one thing that I want to mention because you're gonna get the type of clients that, that photography is so important to them. Do not mind a little bit of inconvenience or even a little bit of risk. Just makes sure that you understand that it's a risk that they're taking may have sin in their, in their clothing, that type of thing. But they certainly didn't mind just sitting on the sand even though they were dressed in their formal clothes. And on this particular one, I put them in the center and we got the moonlight course in the background on the ocean with the moon up on that top third of the image. And this has more of a triangular shape again. The next day we woke up bright and early because on this particular port to session, we did it over a two-day period, starting in the afternoon of the previous day. And then here we're doing the following day early getting a sunrise photo. This way we were able to get maximum usage of the time of not only the sunset, and then also from that time to the sunrise. And it was just a beautiful session, had so much fun doing this. There are many times you're going to probably find that when you do these things, you're going to just say to yourself, Wow, this is so much fun. I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this. So it's really something that can be really quite enjoyable. So anyway, here we're looking at an early photo of the sunrise as they're slightly running on the beach. And then of course, next photograph, I made this into like a watercolor type look by using the brushes in Adobe Photoshop. And just a, another one where they're walking, looking at each other, walking on the beach, and his son is coming up now a little bit higher. Now you do have to move kinda quick because we're not sun starts to rise. You can almost see it moving very, very quickly. So you gotta be ready and make sure you get that sunrise just at the right time to pick up those beautiful color tones. And then here on the next one, I've made this kind of a high key effect, also using some of the brushes just to break it up a little bit. And then later on that morning we went to a different location and the sun was coming in here backlit, giving some nice shadows of the tree. And then other couples. And we switch back to using the 15 millimeter wide angle lens here. Now the 15 millimeter lens, if you're shooting too close to them, it does give some distortion like you see here in this case, but I wasn't a real, real close or the distortion wasn't too bad. But it can get pretty bad if you get real, real close up against them. It could make the nose look really funny. But they liked it and it was kind of interesting and it wasn't really too distorted. It was just another way of adding more variety to their story. So now you've seen some of the ways that you can add more variety into the engagement session. And there's even more ways you can do that. But I've given you many because my problem while we seems to be that maybe taken way too many photographs forum, but I'd rather have them making it a little bit difficult to choose because there are so many great images. And by having so many great images, they're gonna wanna, just about all of them are almost all of them. And that's gonna be a nice way of putting all those images into an album or a wall portrait or sometimes several wall portraits. So add the fun and the variety to your session. And not only is it fun for everyone, but it's going to be more profitable for you. And it's going to give the client some really beautiful photography 9. Impact part 1: The P, P of a, or the professional photographers of America, has defined that there are 12 elements necessary for the success of an art piece or a merit image. And guess what the number one element is. Impact. Impact is a sense that you get when you're viewing an image for the first time. If you're looking at an image and adjust, evokes such emotions such as anger, hate, joy, happiness. Of course, these are for print competitions, but in our case, we're dealing with engagement, love story portraits. So we're photographing more happy times. So we want to show the intense emotion of love and romance, but we can also add adventure and excitement to the image to create even more impact. And how can we do that? Well, there are several different ways. Number one is that you can choose certain types of really interesting and exciting locations. Whether it's a beautiful lake or a mountain area, or side of a hill, or it could be just a beautiful rose gardens. Every couple is different. And some couples really wanted to be adventurous and go to all these really unusual locations. Plus also they wanna go to certain locations that has meaning to them. So maybe they're big hikers or they met or he proposed to her at this location as we've talked about in an earlier chapter. But going to a really interesting location can really add impact to your photographs. Several years ago, I came across a another way that I could add fantastic impact who might photography. And I saw some images that were done by Jonathan Penny who is a, just a fantastic printmaker. It makes these beautiful prints for people that want something that's totally awesome. And he does many prints for print competition also. But I saw some images that were done in black and white infrared photography. So I started to study that. And I just fell in love with black and white infrared photography. And it served me really well because it gave me an edge because not many people were actually doing black and white infrared photography at a time in my area. They just renewed my passion for photography and it just made it so much fun and the clients loved that also. Now, when you do black and white infrared photography, what you're actually doing is that black-and-white infrared goes beyond the visible spectrum. It goes beyond what the human eye can even see. That's what makes it so interesting. In other words, say if you're looking at a sky, a blue sky, blue turns very dark, which makes the Cloud really stand out quite a bit more. And then water sometimes turns very, very dark. And that's always a nice contrast. If you're at the beach. Alpine a lake, it's such a, such a neat effect going beyond the visible spectrum. When I first started doing black and white infrared photography, I was using a 35-millimeter camera called the contacts excellent camera. And I had a xyz lens for it that was 25 mm. Now this is back in the film days, and I would have to use a special black and white infrared film. And my favorite was Kodak's high-speed infrared film. And as soon as digital became available and Evers cameras that were able to be modified. There are some companies that actually did infrared camera conversions. You could do it yourself. I think you have to somehow take off the filter that's in front of the sensor and you have to add a, another type of a filter. But anyway, I'm not sure how that works exactly. As soon as I found out that there were companies that were doing that, I sent one of my cameras off to have converted when I got it back. I also realize, just like in my film days, when you do black and white infrared photography. Here's another secret. I recommend using a wide angle lens. And what that does, it enhances the things that the infrared does. So by using that wildland, you get a really neat wide sky effect. You get some need foliage which has a really funky tone to it. It just glows. So that's a another secret of getting really beautiful black and white infrared photography results using a wide angle lens 10. Impact part 2: So there are companies out there that will do that conversion for you. And I'm a little familiar with life pixel because they do just about all cameras conversions that are possible. If you look on their website, they have a list of all the camera manufacturers and the models that can be converted to do black and white infrared. I know there's some that I'm familiar with that cannot be converted, such as the old Fuji as twos. But just about most of the newer cameras today, whether it's Nikon, Canon, Olympus, panasonic, Sony. They have a list of all the ones that can be done. And they also tell you what it costs to have that done. Now, if you are on a tight budget, you might want to consider doing a point and shoot camera. For instance, the Nikon cool pigs camera does a really fine job. And some of those cool pigs cameras can be converted. Also. In fact, the one that I had converted was a capex, believe it was a old 995. And I got some amazing results with that camera. So once you get into it and you want to create some really serious beautiful photography, I really recommend that you get maybe using one of your older digital SLRs. Or if you now I'd have one. Maybe you could find something on eBay that has been converted to do black and white infrared, and maybe somebody is looking to sell it. But either way, you can either use an old digital SLR that can be converted, or you can also just buy one that has been converted, That's up to you. And live pixel can do that conversion for you. And they do offer, if you look on their website, they offer all these different choices. And one that I've seen that buffer is the one that goes into the 830 nano-meters filter conversion. And that is pretty high up on the infrared spectrum given that most beautiful, surreal results to it. Another way that we can add impact to our images is to do some unusual post-processing. Here we're looking at an image. I was actually taken with my cool picks that I was telling you about Nikon cool pigs believe it's 995 model. And then I made this one into a really deep blue tone. And then you can see up on top how the clouds really stand out from that dark blue sky and the water up front is very, very dark. And this was at a location that was pretty close to us here. It's a beautiful lake and there's a little creek that runs right beyond the leg and then some bridges up there. So it's gonna be interesting area. But anyway, just changing the tones or the color of the image can also add some unusual impact. Your image just gave this one a kind of a slate blue effect here. And then of course you could see how the infrared, it just enhances the clouds. Nothing really special, but it's kind of a neat way to break things up as they're leaning on the rail here overlooking a lake. This is actually a different lake. And then here's another image at similar. But I gave this morning a deeper blue tone and then I was horsing around and I added a little moon effect to it here. Every once in awhile I'd just like to play around and maybe create something unusual. So now I look at these special things sort of as a cherry on top, you don't want to do a whole lot of images like this, but every now and then, you want to have a certain image in there that's going to get attention and that's where the impact comes in. So when I see it for the first time they go, wow. And many times that could be their wall portrait that they ordered for you 11. Best Use of Lighting part 1: So let's talk about how you can make the best use of lighting for your engagement and loves three portraits in the great outdoors. Well, I want to start by saying that I believe that you should make this as simple as possible. In other words, not to be bogged down with all kinds of equipment because you don't want to be keeping them waiting or you want the variables to be the couple that you're photographing, not your equipment. Because you're gonna be moving around quite a bit. You want to keep it flowing. You want to keep it fun because all that is going to show in the expressions in all your photographs. So anyway, that's my belief and that's the way that I've done it ever since, almost ever since the beginning. Anyway, there are times that I take along maybe a few extra things if I'm going out on location, maybe to another state or a great distance, the wave I'm also able to take along and assistant, I'll take more. So let's just start with the lighting techniques that I use while doing these engagement love story portraits. Now my favorite lighting accessory for outdoor portraits would be the reflector. And in this particular case here, I have one that's a 42 inch round silver reflector is silver on one side and then on the backside, it's white. Now, usually I like using the silver and I use this most at a time. Now of course, we are talking about additive lighting, so we're gonna be adding some light. And the reason that I like using certain types of lighting is because say for instance, you're doing some close-ups of the couple. And then you may have some dark spots underneath the ice and raccoon eyes. So you definitely want to avoid that as a professional photographer. And then also you can use this to add in some nice catch lights to the eyes also. Well, let's talk about the different ways that I may use a reflector. Usually when I do these engagement portraits, I do these alone, usually done during the week. I prefer either early morning or late afternoon or rather early evening also is good, maybe a couple of hours before the sun sets. And then unless of course you're doing some moons and my chest, then you have to stick around. And then that's when you're going to probably end up using a little bit more equipment than you would normally use in a daylight hours. For instance, if you're doing a moonshot, you may want to use a tripod because many times you may end up with a, a half a second or a second exposure, just as an example. But the stuff has gotten so good now the lenses are spectacular. The camera bodies are just awesome, super awesome at these high ISO abs. And your senses of today are just fantastic. So getting back to the reflector, now, like I said, when I'm using this, I almost always use this on a close up, maybe like a half length or closer. I'll use this reflector because I want to brighten those eyes. And then of course, if I'm by myself, I may just lean it against the tree. Sometimes I'll even hold it. Or many times I actually clamped this onto one of my camera cases that I have is called a porter case. And that works out really great. It's a case that has wheels on it. And it just allows me to move the equipment around really fast and easy with those whales. Plus, I can clamp this onto the handles and it works out so well. So that's usually the case now, there's also cases when I have, they may bring along some family members to help. I'm maybe moral support. Or if they do bring along some family members or some friends. I'm really not afraid to ask them if they would like to help out with some of the equipment and they usually get a kick out of it because then I show them how they can use a reflector, what we're looking for. And I just tell him, not watching the eyes. Now watch what happens if we turn this this way. And they usually get such a kick out of it that they just really enjoy it. And then of course they learn a little bit about photography also. So that's the ideal situation, having somebody come with you to help hold your reflector. And then of course, if not, you can always clamp this onto your your Porter case, like I mentioned, which I do quite a bit. Although the reflector is almost always used for close ups, I occasionally use it on full lens to if I'm able to get the light on there. So if I have a nice light that's hitting a reflector here, and then I'm doing it full length and I'm able to get some nice light. I may even use it on the full lens. And also, I do want to mention that if the lighting is too harsh, That's when I'll turn it over and I'll use the white reflector is always used to just open up the eyes and possibly add some nice catch lights in there. Also 12. Best Use of Lighting part 2: Although the reflector is my favourite light source for outdoor photography, occasionally, I may use an on-camera flash. Now, I mainly use this for, for a main light, but mostly for a fill. Again, if I want to add a little bit of light into the sockets in, maybe just soften up the shadows. And usually I use this more for like a half length or further back. And then when I do this, I always have a, it's like a call this dough fan. This is a stuff and by onRequest. And I usually I almost always have this thing on here all the time. And the other thing that I do, I also have a little, little softbox here. This is called a Thor micro box. And I had this so long ago, money and sheer fear around anymore, probably not, but this little softbox here, I actually just slips over the front of my speed light, which is the speed light SB 800 by Nikon. Very, very dependable flash. It works great. And then this just velcro goes. Velcro is the magic tool for the photographer. So make sure you keep lots of Velcro around because you never know when you're going to need it. So this is pretty much how I use this. Now. I don't use this all that much if I can. I'm always using the reflector. Mainly. Sometimes I may not even use this at all. But if you're doing something where you need a little bit of a fill light as an example, say you're shooting with the moon again. And everything is dark except of course, the moon and maybe the lake or river where you're photographing or the ocean, you want to put some light onto the couple so they're separated from the background. So there are times when you may need to use a fill light. And I usually set this anywhere 1-2 stops under what the exposure is. Minus one to two stops, usually about minus one-and-a-half stops. Now the other thing you can do, and I still do this occasionally, is to use a second light, off-camera flash. Actually. Now you can actually use this off camera because you can have, you can use your other flash that spilled in you. I never even use the flashy that comes with a camera by you can use this also, but you can use this, they call this and Commander mode, where you're able to sync to an off-camera flash. So if you want to get something off camera instead of flat lighting, you can hold this or you can set this onto a mono pod or light stand if you went to. So that's another alternative. And I wanted to share this with you all. So I don't use this as much as they used to, but I also have a quantum cue flash here. In fact, this is used on weddings all the time. Occasionally, I'll at least take it along on the engagement sessions. And once in awhile if we need it, especially if I have a long and assistant, they may do some shots that are backlit. So let's say we're doing something outside that we have a beautiful background, but the couple is a little bit lost in the details, so we can separate them by using this. We can actually have my assistant will stand behind them and he'll aim this behind the couple. Then it'll be a backlight which gives a nice rim light effect. And it separates them from the background. That just adds so much more impact. But I don't use this all that much, but occasionally I do. And I usually take this along also. So there it is. A couple of ways that you can add to the outdoor portrait lighting situation because many times the lighting isn't exactly perfect. And of course being especially if you photograph in the close-ups, you want to make sure that you open up those eyes because the eyes are the windows of the soul. And you can capture so much emotion by going into those eyes. That is number one, my favorite choice, a reflector, either off-camera flash or the on-camera flash if we have to, but I don't like using it all that much. And the situations when you photograph in the couple and they're pretty far back because you're photographing more of the environment, but yet they're in it. Of course, then I never use any kind of lighting because it's just absolutely not necessary. The scene can be just so beautiful as it is. But again, if you're doing things at nighttime, you may want to add just a little touch of fill. But generally for these great environmental images with a couple of enum, they are just natural lighting. And then you can make the best of that when you look for the proper light. And that is something else that we're going to discuss also. So keep it simple. Keep it fun for them. So you're able to capture all those great emotions that come out of this portrait session. Thank you very much 13. Finding The Light part 1: Outdoor engagement, love story, and lifestyle portraits offer you a great opportunity and challenge and photographing and a great outdoors. Unlike studio portraiture, you may be challenged in finding the optimum light at many different times of the day. Because many times you may not be able to work on your schedule. You may have other appointments. You may have two or three appointments back-to-back, or your client may not be available, but for a certain time and it might not be the best time. My favorite time to schedule these appointments is either early morning or late afternoon or early evening depending on the time of year. And I prefer late afternoon or early evening usually about two or 3 h before the sunsets. Because in addition, if I wanted to do a sense that I also want to be able to do a lot of other images that require more light, so I'm able to add the variety to the story. And then of course, if we're at the correct spot and we get a beautiful sunset, I'm going to try to incorporate that in there also. But many times, if we're at the beach, we always plan on either a sunrise or a sunset. Now that we've established the best times to take these type of portraits, let me go over what I look for. The first thing that I look for soon as they get to location is the light. I wanted to see where it's coming from. And usually I'm looking for back light. And then of course later on in the afternoon or evening or early morning, we get a nice sunlight and it's especially nice in the spring or the fall is my favorite time because the light is low and it comes in at an angle. Now, in addition to also looking for an open sky, say you're doing some portraits and there's a tree line there. And you'd have a little bit of a space where there's an open sky when I can I try to utilize that spot but it's not always there. So I'm always looking for some kind of a back light that I can use as a kicker light or it's also called a rim light. Now, it kicker light, what it does is add light to the side of the face also comes in and it highlights the hair. So it could be also serving as a hair light and then as a kicker light because you're highlighting a certain part of that face is actually adding more dimension to your portrait. It just makes it so much more beautiful. In this photograph here, we see some of that backlight, that kicker light coming in from the side as you can see. It's highlighting the side of the gentleman's face. And also it's coming in a little bit on top, adding a little bit of a hair light. Also adding a little bit of light to the lady also, as you can see, a close up here. Now sometimes if you're working around really harsh light situations like in the Carolinas here. And if it's around midday, we have a lot of lot of contrast these situations. We have to be able to find the correct spot. So I'm always looking for spots first. I'm not that concerned about whether those beautiful fields or flowers. Now of course, I definitely want to use that, but it's gotta be at the right time in the day. So I tried to find the optimum light being a kicker light or a hair light that's coming in. But then in addition because we have that, we have to I almost always use a fill a fill flash or most of their time I'm going to bring in my reflector, adding a little bit more light to the face and the courts opening up the eye sockets and just giving a little sparkle to those eyes. 14. Finding The Light part 2: And here we're starting our portrait session with the classical traditional style, whether facing a little bit in towards each other heads together. And here I've found kinda be interesting spot where if you look at these images on the second one here, I had the gentleman in the lady both turn your head a little bit towards the sky and you can see that kicker light coming in actually from both sides. You could see it on as we're looking our left side. It's actually touching the ladies here, acting as a hair light on her and also the gentleman's left side of the face and also his right side. You see a kicker light coming in just highlighting both sides of his face. And of course just making the face of stand out more, adding a little bit more dimension to it. On the full lens here, I'm using a little bit of a fill flash on my camera. It's just a it's just a weak fill. The average is about one-and-a-half stocks. Sometimes I'll go one-stop, sometimes I go to Snopes, but I have it set for about minus one-and-a-half stops on these portraits here, I'm using my Nikon 70 to 200 millimeter f 2.8 lens. And on the close-ups here, I brought in a reflector. And on this one here, I'm zoomed to 190 mm. I opened up that app 3.2 and my shutter was one, one-twenty-fifth of a second at ISO 100. And I'm shooting either manual setting or aperture priority because with my newer Nikon's, the aperture priority is just so good. So I'm pretty happy with that. Then notice on the close-up here, we also had these kicker light's coming in a little bit on the gentleman's right side as we're looking at them. Also a little bit on his left side, it's a little bit of a bright spot coming in in between the leaves. And it's just highlighting her hair. Really nice. And somebody's make for a nice black and whites to. Then here I'm zooming in just a little bit closer. I'm at 200 mm now and I brought the reflector in a little bit closer and you can see how their faces light up just a little bit more and also just adds a lot of life through the eyes. It really gets rid of those raccoon eyes that you definitely don't want. And then here we still have those cooker light's coming in. You could see it a lot here on the gentleman's as we're looking his right side and you can see it on the side of his head and also you can see it coming in from the back on his shoulder. And occasionally, I'll turn some of these images into a black and white so they're able to see them both. And then on this image here I just move them further in where there is no backlight coming in so you can see the difference. And if I wouldn't have the reflected here, this would really be unusable and a reflector add some life to the eyes and sparkle and it just opens up those deep shadows. So even though we don't have a kicker light, it's still a pretty nice portrait. Just candid, casual, cheek to cheek. Look here, boom, there's your shot. Another lighting situation that I use on occasion is where I see little patches of light coming through in-between the leaves. And that's what I did here. You just have to be careful that when you set them up, you have to set them at the right spot. So these old patches of light are not hitting into the face, may be distorting it or highlighting some parts of the face way too much. Wherever I'm using this type of lighting, I always like to make sure that it falls on the hair or it comes in a little bit from the bag, just giving a little bit of a kicker light effect or a hair light effect. And it comes in a little bit on the gentleman's left side here also. And here's another example of this lighting here. I just took this one further back. And then you can see some of these light patches as they're coming in through the trees. Here. This one's further back full length and also showing some of the surroundings. And then we come in a little closer and you can see more of that light how it's falling on the ladies beautiful hair and a little bit on the gentleman shoulder. As we come in a little bit closer, notice how that light is giving a nice highlight again to the lady's hair and a little bit on the gentleman's shoulder. Of course here we're using the reflector to brighten up those eyes, get rid of those dark eye sockets and just add a nice overall look to the face. 15. Finding The Light part 3: I like to mix up this portrait session by occasionally using wide-angle lenses. And here I'm using my Sigma 15 millimeter lens because I liked the way I get that, that bowing effect of the pillars. And then notice also here we get some really strong backlight. And these were taken during my favorite time of the year in the fall, believe it was October. And you could see the back lighting coming in. This was in the morning. And you can see the strong backlighting coming in and just throwing nice shadows from the pillars and also from the couple. Here we had a very clear day, very contrast the situation. So we have to be careful when we're using this type of lighting for kicker light or hair light's coming in from the back, that it doesn't overpower the light that's falling on a face. So we have a nice diffuse light coming in on the face. And then you can see the backlighting coming in and it's touching the back of the hair and a little bit on top of the hair. And many times this is very, very strong. In this case here you can see that it is a bit strong and it does sometimes seem to shine through the ear. So you have to be careful of that. But if you make a black and white, you don't get that pink tone, or you could turn that down in Photoshop. But this is a nice example of using that, that type of lighting coming in from the back. And of course we have our reflector coming in again, just opening up the eye sockets and adding a nice little soft diffused light into the face. These are taken using my 28 to 75 millimeter camera and lens. And the setting here was set to 62 millimeter, F 3.300 and 80th of a second, 100 ISO. Here we're looking at a few images again taken my favorite time of the year. These were done in November, late in the afternoon. We started about 04:00 P.M. and you can see it a beautiful backlight coming in. Again in the fall, we get that beautiful light, or the sun is lower and it comes in from the side. And in this case we're utilizing that light as a backlight. As you could see, it just highlights her hair in all these different images here. And then I found the spot on a dam where I had them both standing. Then I turn their heads almost in profile, facing more to the side. So as the sun hits their phases, we get more of a rim light around their profile. Not quite a profile, but almost. And this was also taken with my black and white infrared camera. At the time I was using my Nikon cool pix 995 that I had converted to do only black and white infrared. And of course I had a wide-angle attachment on here. And then here's that same couple. And I move them further out so we can see a little bit more of the water in the dam. And again, notice the beautiful backlight that's highlighting her hair. In this particular image here, I enhanced it using one of the filters and Nick color effects Pro, which we're gonna go into later on. And I really liked this setup here, so I switched over again to my infrared camera, the capex. And it's just amazing how even though this capex is a point-and-shoot camera, it really works well for doing black and white infrared. And I've sold, and they've purchased many, many images as well portraits. And also they were used in their engagement albums and many images on Get also used in their, their wedding albums. But I just love this particular setup here with a beautiful lighting coming in again from the back. And then you can see how the infrared, it just enhances the sky and the foliage, and the water in front turns very, very dark. And yet the couple stand out because their clothing actually turns light when you're using the infrared capture here. And then here's another example of the same lake, the different couple. This was also taken the same time of the year in November. You can see that sun coming in, just adding a beautiful highlight to the couple and especially to the lady's hair. Now there may be times when you get a very harsh lighting situation. So what you can do then is possibly like I did here, you can put them in either silhouette or a semi silhouette, like you see here. It just shows some of the beautiful foliage and the light in the background. And then they appear as almost a silhouette. And then here we are at the beach portraits. Keep in mind that about an hour after sunrise, in about an hour before the sun sets, you get what photographers call a sweet light or sometime some photographers might call it a golden light. But it's just a really beautiful light that it just comes in from everywhere. Just lyse everything up so beautifully in softly and warm. It's just a gorgeous light. In the first image here. We don't really have it all that much yet, but a few minutes later, if you look at the second image, we can see it. It's a little bit warmer and it just hits the face a little bit more. And then when I ask him to bend her over and give her a great big kiss, you could see it even more here. And as they're having fun in the sand, and we can especially see that sweet light again here. And it's just a beautiful soft light that's lighting everything up. Beautiful warm, glowing light. So when you can make sure you stick around for that sweet light, very, very nice to get. Again in the morning about an hour after the sunrises, if you're doing a sunrise photograph or it's about an hour before the sun sets. And once it's there, you can't miss that. You're going to just say, wow, look at this beautiful lighting. And I've used this lighting many, many times, not just at the beach, but you can see it everywhere really. So now you know what to look for and how to find that beautiful light that's going to make your portraits really, really stand out 16. Classical Posing Intro: Now what about posing? These lifestyle engagement, love story portraits? Well, if you're fairly new at this, then you're in luck because much of it can be spontaneous, just certain things as it happens, natural, candid things. So if that's the case, you want to make sure that you're ready to capture all these things that can happen to make this part of their story. Now with that being said, though, I also believe that the classical style of portraits can be very important. Because that's a style that I think anyway, that's never going to go out of style. You can see it in some of these old master paintings from centuries ago. How beautiful they were. Just certain things. They were just so, so simply pose and we're just so elegant. And it was just so beautiful to look at. And I've seen the same things at conventions when you look at these competitions that they're having for these beautiful images that are on display. And many times you can see it in magazines. And they are just so simply posed and yet they are so elegant and beautiful. So I do recommend when you can, that you enroll in some kind of a great class in classical portraiture. You could find many in, through some of these professional photography organizations like the p, p of a, which is the professional photographers of America, and the WPP, which is the wedding and portrait photographers International. They both are professional trade organizations that can help get you to the top of your game because you can enroll in some of their classes, whether it's being held at a convention. If you look at their program, you have many different speakers and the things that are gonna be teaching, Bless you have certain colleges that may even be offering this type of course through professional local trade organization. So definitely look into learning classical portrait posing. So now, with that said, I do like covering things that are very spontaneous because more and more now, not posing near as much as I used to. But there are certain things that I may set up a certain pose. And then I'll take that image and then I'll go from there. What we're going to talk about, it's set up one pose and then you sort of runoff of that one image after another. And then in addition to all the natural candidate things, as it happens, I also like to add the romantic style, of course the classic style. And then I mixed in many times I'll mix in the classic and the romantic style together. Because now the classic style I do want to mention is also something that the may end up as a wall portrait order. And then many times the parents get the classic, which is kind of a traditional style that there'll be proud to show their family and friends. So then neglect the classic stuff, however mix in the romantic and also like to add a lot of fashion when I can do this session. So let's talk a little bit about posing because I just wanted to go over a couple of things that can help you get started. I think really quick. And I just want you to know some of the basic rules. So once you know these roles on classical posing, you can bend them, twist them, break them, and turn them inside out so you can do anything that you want with them. But it's good to know because then you have a solid foundation of how to make things look really good. But funny because I was looking at my professional photographer trade magazine a couple of days ago. And I saw this portrait, the bride and groom. And they were standing like this, straight towards the camera holding hands. And of course they were breaking some of the rules of traditional or classic style posing. But it was kind of neat because it worked, because it gave the appearance of just off the wall, dramatic impact in that image. So certain things that you can do to just throw things out the window. But then again, you don't want to do them all like that because he wanted to bring back the BUT in the opposing or all the images that you're doing for this couple. So you want to keep that in mind. But by offering all these different styles again, you're going to end up with a beautiful story of their love. So let's go through posing just a little bit. This can be a good pose. If you're in the military and you're at attention. But like I said, I didn't see that one image at a couple of holding hands straight towards the camera. Kind of interesting. But know it for what it is. It breaks a lot of the rules. So what are some of those rules? I just want to go through just a few steps that you can take 17. Classical Posing Basics: Now when I start off photographing a couple, I usually start off with the traditional style. And that means I'm going to turn them towards each other. So let's just say that I'm on the left side and my partner, she'll be on my right side now. So the first thing that you want to do is you're facing a little bit in towards each other. Not straight towards the camera. Not really, although you can do it later on and I do it all the time straight towards each other. But in a classic style, I'm going to bring them just a little bit, maybe about 45 degrees out. And then watch what happens as I tell them. Alright, I just drop your body weight towards your right side, which is gonna be there inside leg. So it's going to be there inside leg, my right and it'll be her left. So I'm just going to drop that right hip. See what happens soon as I do that watch, It's just sort of straight. What does that do? It just makes it look so much more natural, doesn't it? You could put her hands in the pockets, arms around each other. Just doing. It's just a good basic setup to start with. And also because it's so comfortable, you're not going to have people that may be passing out from being too stiff with their knees locked. So this is just a road comfortable style. And it also what that does is dropped that right shoulder and it ends up they're leaning in a little bit, see towards each other. So she's on this side. He's going to drop her body weight on her left and it drops their shoulder that way. That's one of the few basic things that are really, really easy to learn, but yet makes such a big difference in the way a portrait looks very natural and very comfortable to look at. Now, also, when you're doing that, just saying that the gentleman's overhear body weights on his right. Like I say, you can do different things, arms around her hands in the pockets. And also on the gentleman. Notice that if you're looking straight and you're leaning his head a little bit towards that low shoulder. That's called a masculine pose. It's more masculine. It's more like a C, kind of a curve. So straight and then you just a little bit, you'd just tilting the top of the head a little bit towards the low shoulder. That's masculine. And you can do that certainly with the guys. It's more attractive. You can make them even look more powerful if you're leaning a little bit forward or just more masculine that way, then of course she's gonna be over here. Well, it doesn't even matter what side you're on because again, body weight on the right little tilt masculine. And then watch what happens if I tilt the head towards the high shoulder. More of a feminine pose. You can see it's sorted, starts to bring in like an S curve. It's more of a feminine look. So you don't wanna do that with guys, or at least, I don't think anyway, although you see it a little bit at times. And if it's not too bad, it's okay. But if it's like a whole lot, It's just sort of Well to me, it's too feminine and I think anyway, so if you do that, That's okay for the girls. And girls can be photographed either way. Head towards a high shoulder. Also head towards the low shoulder. Girls can be photographed either way. So those are just some of the basic things. And also you can use a different body parts like cans. So in many times of course, we're talking about doing things that are just instant spontaneous canada thing. So if I tell them they just hugging each other, I'm not going to stop that flow and say, whoa, whoa, cut gut, gut. Because it's not that kind of portrait. So we're just gonna go with little bit of imperfections may be, but when you can know, when you do something to know, is that when you do pose hands though instead of adding the hand, maybe like straight on the arm, straight. Watch what happens if you bring a lady's hand a little to the side and maybe just bring the forefinger up just a little bit. And just watch as we bend that wrist back. See it's very feminine, is very nice to use this kind of a of all hand pose in either your engagement. But especially on wedding images. If you're doing say, a bridal portrait or even on our wedding day, it's a brides holding her bouquet. If you bring those hands up that wristband back a little bit, it just makes such a big difference as compared to maybe this or something. So those are just a couple of things that I wanted to point out. So that's a good basic start for body weight and head tilt. That's about it. So let's take a look at a few images. 18. Classical Posing, a look at photos: When I start the portrait session, I may begin with a poll is something like this one here. I'll bring their body weight on there, inside leg. So in this case, the gentleman's left side and the body weight of the ladies on her right side. And then of course there are other legs are bent slightly. This is just a good way to get started and to relax them as I begin talking to them and they loosen up more. So as the session goes on. And then I do some of the more romantic stuff. So just starting with the basic stuff, just sort of breaks the ice and relaxes them more. Notice also that as we're zooming in a little bit closer, we're getting more of a background blur. In these images here I was using my Nikon 70 to 200 millimeter f 2.8 lens. And notice that as I was coming in closer, I get more background blur. Now something that you want to keep in mind. Notice that in this case here they both have their hands in their pockets, just misconduct casual. And notice also how the lady has a little space between her arm and her body. That's important because that actually automatically helps in taking weight off of that person. So it's going to make them up here a low bit thinner than what they are. So that's something to keep in mind because nobody wants to look extra heavy. And when you do this, it just adds that shape to the body. Megan hair look a little bit thinner. And then I just tell them to you. Okay. Leaning towards each other and notice how I bring her left hand up resting softly on his chest. And also we can see the ring on this as we're coming in a little bit closer and making this just a little bit more of a romantic pose. And it's nice as a black and white also. And those still standing in the same area. So I just may tell him okay. Just look at each other as she places her left hand on his cheek. And again, we can see the ring. And then as you're looking towards each other, I'll take the image, maybe a couple of them. And then I'll also just ask them the kiss. And as my next shot right there. Then on the next one, I just may say, Alright, so just turn your heads back towards me. I want you to get cheek to cheek side-by-side and just give each other a great big hug. So this is just all spontaneous, real, natural. And then you capture it as it happens. And every time they do this, you're going to get a natural, beautiful expression. This one never fails. And as I talked about, I also like to break it up with the use of an occasional wide angle lens. And here, this was done just for fun using the sigma 15 millimeter lens on my Nikon. But just gives a nice wide angle effects. You want a beautiful fall colors here. And again, they're leaning in a little closer towards each other and just looking at the camera, but it gives a little bit of a different wide perspective, just breaking up the session. And another pose that you can do it if you want to show the hand with the engagement ring on here, we just have the gentleman arms full of these just resting against the stone wall. And then I bring her in a little bit closer, her right arm around him, giving him a low hug. She arrest her left hand on his arm. And course, here we can see it a ring and they're both looking at the camera on this one, it makes a nice black and white also. And then as they're turning towards each other, you could do one looking at each other and then also you just tell them the kiss. And right there is your next shot. So you could see all the different things that you can come up with when you're starting with a basic style opposed making just little changes and they're really not posing anymore. It's pretty natural and it's spontaneous. It's almost candid. And then we're going to talk about in the next segment where you're going to learn how to pose without posing 19. Posing Without Posing: Now something really exciting and interesting that you can do is what I call posing without posing. So the posing part is you might want to set up just a simple pose and then you just run off of that. So once you set up the up pose, you photograph that, maybe change their head position, use hands. You might want to zoom in for a close-up out for a full length. So you can easily take 8-12 or more images and way less than a minute. So I call this posing without posing, and it makes the session for them a whole lot of fun. It's not as stiff where every pose is held. So this is something that we're going to take a look at right now. This is something that I do quite often in my engagement portrait sessions. Say for instance, on setting them up in a certain location. In this case here they're facing towards each other. I just tell them there bring your arms around each other. Hugging. Just touching foreheads. Okay, that's the pose. So that's why I call this posing without posing some setting up a simple particular pose, and then I work with that pose. So after I take the image that you see here, I'll just say, okay, that's great. Now just turn your head towards me. Boom, there's another one. And then I might zoom out for a full length. And by doing this, you can easily get eight to 12 images or more in under a minute and just a few seconds. Here on this next image, I just moved him against the gate and cause she's right next to them. They're leaning in towards each other. Same way as before. Their heads are together looking at the camera and notice how well she has her hands on his arm and also showing the engagement ring slightly. Of course he's got his arm around her waist. And then I can zoom out because this is such a beautiful garden I definitely want to show to garden area. It's not all about close-ups all the time. It's about showing the beautiful surrounding areas. So here, even though I'm using the Nikon seven unit 200 millimeter lens, I guess you could say I'm zoomed out quite a bit, so it's not really a major telephoto locked. And yet I'm still capturing a beautiful garden area because sometimes you'll want to show the garden area and these are especially nice for wall portraits or for using these as panoramas spreads in your page. And then notice here on this image here I just had them looking towards each other as we're looking at the full length now, notice also how it just fine tune the body a little bit. I have her placing her left foot a little bit back and it's resting on your toes. And this is more of a fashion type look. So instead of getting that up and down, sort of uncomfortable Look, it's just more fashion oriented. They're facing towards each other. She's leaning her body weight towards him. It's also more romantic yet it brings in just a little bit of flair of fashion with that leg being bent. And then again, in just a matter of telling them to odds. Beautiful. Just turn your heads again towards me. So here I'm doing a similar pose as before, but this is a full length showing a beautiful garden area. And notice how now her hand is fine-tuned, just a little bit nicer to it's not just flat out. It's just her wrist is bent back and it's a little space in her forefinger. And then on the next one here, I may just ask her turn her head a little bit and maybe eyes looking either down or at the camera. And then he's giving her just a little soft touch with his lips on her cheek. Always telling him not to pucker up by just the soft touch on her cheek. When you take these running images, I recommend that you do several because many times you make it awkward stance or the leg or the foot. So since you're not wasting any film, it's just taken off. So you know, you've got at least one good one at each little angled let you photograph and many times I'll also get, as they're walking, I'll do a full length and I'll just have them holding hands on the inside with their inside arms. Just had them turning their heads towards the camera. And then you can do this as a full length. And then if you want to, you can also zoom this one in a little bit closer. That's a good reason also to use a zoom lens because you could, instead of you having to run back-and-forth, you can just turn your wrist and you can change the whole perspective and the whole composition of that image. So let's go over a few portraits that were done at the beach. When we do the beats generally, if we're not doing a sunset, we're doing a sunrise. So here we were actually up very early getting a sunrise. And as soon as we got there, the sun wasn't even up yet if this is starting to come up, but we had a pretty nice moon. So I just positioned the bride and groom A little bit down on the bottom third, and I saw the moon, and I placed the moon up on the top left-hand third of the image. And I just had them looking at each other. Notice again how they're leaning. She's leaning more in towards the gentlemen, and I'm also placing her left outside a little bit further out. And then the other one is just adding a little bit more of a fashion flair to it. Then you can get them looking at each other. And then also you can do one with a kissing like in this case here. I thought this might make a nice one making it into a black and white and giving it a blue tone. So that's what it looks like. It was done at night, but in reality, this was done right as the sun was starting to rise. And then as the sun was rising, we had them do several of them always holding hands and they're running. And our first one here you can see I'm running away from my direction. And then I just tell them to you. I turned around, hold hands again and start walking on the beach and they're looking towards each other. And here I'm using a little bit of a fill on camera flash as a fill, and it might be one-and-a-half stops less than what the exposure calls for. So as you can see here in his walking photographs, were not doing any posing. I'm just giving direction and telling them exactly which way to look maybe and then which way to walk. But it's all natural. So as they're walking then I just might say, alright, stop there just for a second. Bob, just pick her up a little bit. Look at each other. Sue, just point your leg out or just point your foot out a little bit straighter. So this just makes it look a little bit more attractive instead of just the legs dangling, hanging down straight. I just add a little bit few more lines. And then here of course they're looking at each other. And then you can also do a seminar on whether a kissing or he's leaning her back. And then we just continue with some more walking because we're getting a beautiful sunrise here, those beautiful tones. And I'm just using just a little bit of a fill flash on these. And then on this one here, notice how I'm actually using the sweet light here. And you can see how early in the morning at certain time, as soon as that sun comes up, you get a really beautiful, beautiful light. Photographers call that the sweet light. You can get the same thing Also during a sunset. Assist, a glowing, radiant light. Beautiful. So if you ever are there for that, make sure you do something quick because you don't have it too long. Then here we're looking at another engagement couple on a different beach. And again, these are just natural that are holding hands, walking, looking at each other as they're walking, trying different kinds of poses. And again, like I said before, I'll just tell him, alright, just stop and just pick her up. Pick her up and just give her a great big guess as she raises her one leg a little bit higher than the other. So you could see some of the things that you can now do with what we call posing. Without posing, so you just set up a certain setup or you can call it a pose. And then you can do from that, you can do a or 1012 images. And if you add a beautiful locations such as a beautiful beach or a nice Parkway or a rose gardens. There may be nice paths that you can have them walking at and you can utilize that. But just learning and knowing a few different things on how to set people up. And then you can use that setup and you can photograph in clusters. Instead of just shooting onetime, changing everyday around, going to another location one more. And then changing the whole thing around against the way your eye and just change the positioning, change the mood, change the body language. And then you have all these different images at the same location, but yet each one is different. And if you do a great job, guess what? They're going to want them all 20. Corrective Posing: In this segment, we're going to talk about corrective posing. And that is simply something that you can do to enhance the look of either one or both of the people that you photographing in this type of session. So just say for instance, we're going to take a look at some photographs, but ahead of time, I just want to point out, just say you're photographing someone that is quite a bit shorter than the other, and then we have somebody that's extremely tall, even though the other person is average height. So you don't want to show them exactly at that level. So there are certain things that you can do, especially when you get them close together. So they look, it just looks more appealing to the eye. It's just more attractive, easy to look at. So there are certain things that we're gonna go over with that. And also, if you ever get somebody that's, of course, many of the people that photograph, they are just regular people, regular walks of life from any kind of job basis or any type of a business. They might be a CEO or they might work in a factory or plant. They're all different. And many, many times, there are certain things that you can do to enhance their images. If you also get somebody that's on the heavy side, certain things that you can do to make them look a little bit better and maybe less on the heavy side by just turning them slightly. Never had them exactly straight into cameras turned on slightly. And if anybody that you photographing as a double chin, just add them maybe while especially if they're sitting down leaning forward and then just raise the camera angle up just a little bit higher than you can avoid much of that double chin. So what about if you're photographing a couple that have such a difference in height. And there's a few things that you can do to make them look even better. So let's take a look at that. Sooner or later you're probably going to end up with photographing a couple that have such a huge difference in height. So whether the guy is tall or the lady is tall, there are certain things that you can do. And that's what we're going to have a look at right now. And before we do though, it just reminds me of the job. And notice how sometimes you'll watch kids growing up and all of a sudden they're in high school and they become, wow, they just grow really tall. And then if so many people that might say to them, wow man, you are really tall. You play basketball. And then actually that's not really politically correct because that's like saying to a short guy, wow man, you are really short. You play miniature golf. How it's just a little bit of sense of humor. So nothing met at all against tall people or short people. Just a little bit of humor, but let's continue on here. In this case here, I'm photographing a couple. They were a beautiful couple of photograph. You can see that cheese considerably taller than the gentleman here, as you can see in these photos. And then there were several things that I did to correct that. Also want to mention that many times when you're booking their wedding or if you're doing a consultation, you'll notice that. And then a lot of times I'll mention that. And I just may ask them if it's okay if I can make him or whoever it is her possibly. But it's usually if the guy shorter, I want to make him look a little bit taller. And I've never had a situation where they said, no, I want I don't want to be made taller or I don't want us to look good together. So I've never had that situation. So just do your best in finding ways of having them looking as attractive as possible. And that also includes height difference. So, okay, so here we're looking at an image here that I put the gentleman upfront here and just casual, bringing his hands in his pocket is body weight was on his left side. And then she's leaning in a little bit towards them, placing her right hand through his arm. She's also resting her left hand on his shoulder, also showing the ring again. Then by doing that, he's closer, he's upfront. And then she's just leaning and giving her the appearance of being a little bit shorter and him being taller. So that's one thing that you can actually do if you're working with heavy people also, many times, you could put part of their body behind the other person. And of course, you can also turn them sideways to minimize some of that weight. So the next image here, it's basically the same image except just having her turn her head looking at him. Then of course when they do that, it's just on natural smiles. And you can still see that he looks taller now. So it's kinda nice, pleasing way of showing them together. And this also shows there or her engagement ring. So then here I set them up against a waterfall by the Stones, beautiful setting. And there is a little bit of a ledge there. So I just had the gentlemen step up on a ledge and the lady standing right in front of them as images placing his arm around her. And she was leaning back towards them and just gives the appearance of him being actually, in this case here quite a bit taller. And then keep in mind also that you don't have to stand them up for every pose. Here. I just placed the lady in a nice casual pose. Here. I've placed the gentleman little bit behind her with his foot up on the stone ledge here, leaning forward, given the appearance of him being so much taller. Then here I had them both sitting on that stone wall here. He was sitting a little bit straighter and then she was just sliding down just a little bit. Given the appearance again of having him look taller, then zooming in. I just asked him to give her a little soft touch with his lips on her cheek without puckering up just that soft touch. And of course, using the large lens opening here, we were able to get nice background blur, concentrating on the couple of being sharp. And I really liked the way that they were set up here, and I also liked the nice lighting. So I just changed my position and I faced them more towards the front. And notice how she's leaning her head towards him. And again, it's kind of a feminine pose. And if you look, he's actually leaning in towards her. And this is just such a nice, easy way of making him look a little bit taller. They just look so relaxed here and so comfortable. And it's just a really nice, natural, happy expression. So these are some of the things that you can do if you ever run into some difficult situations regarding height 21. Clothing Consultation: One thing that you want to do even way before you book their portrait appointment is to have a clothing consultation with a couple. And this is where you can suggest certain colors and what the colors can do for them. And how we can really benefit them in getting a much more beautiful portrait than it would then FDA wouldn't be choosing the right colors. Now, do they always listen to my suggestions? What do you think? Now? Of course not. But anyway, let's take a look at and see the kind of images that you can get when choosing the correct color combinations. Now I do like more solid colors and darker clothing. There's a couple of benefits as to why darker clothing can make people look better. Number one, if you notice on some of these photographs here, your attention actually goes more to the couples face instead of the clothing. Now they have on darker tones and she's dressed in black sweater and he's got a dark gray sweater. And when you see that, your attention goes more to the faces then to anything else as compared to when somebody comes in dressed in white tops. If you look at this photograph here, you'll see that your attention goes right to the bodies, right to the clothing. It's sort of hard to concentrate on the faces with this type of clothing. So keep that in mind now, of course, like colors I do like light colors and pastel colors at the beach or in the sand and certain situations. But for the most part, especially if you're out there in the fall, the winter time. Earth tones and dark colors are always nice. Now this couple did bring along a second outfit. In fact, the gentleman, I had to change his shirt after awhile, and he did so it wasn't quite so distracting in this photograph here, but darker towns again, your attention goes more to the face. And the other benefit is that it can make one look slimmer. So somebody who wants to look extra heavy, have them wear white or very bright or light-colored clothing. It's going to make them look heavier if they wanted to look carrier, but who does these days? But dark tones are going to make people look thinner. It's going to attract your attention also to the faces. And as far as full lengths go, I always tell a couple that we're going to probably do a few in full length. So the keep that in mind also. For full length casual. I always like genes and khakis. That's a really classic, traditional type of a outdoor look. And it's not going to be trendy, which is the next thing that you want to do is to avoid really like trendy types of clothing, clothing with logos or names on it. But just try to avoid that trendy log that is gonna be out of the style. And it's going to look really funny in a few years because they want, if they're really serious about their poetry, they want their poetry to be timeless. So when they look at it in 51025 years, it's still going to look great. So here this couple or dress casual in dark tops that match the same color. And they also have dark jeans on, again, that classic casual look. And if you notice on this one here with a motorcycle, a lot of your attention does go to the motorcycle because of the bright spots of all that shiny chrome and all that. Because they wanted something done with his motorcycle and you know how guys loved their motorcycles? Yep. I use the love mine. Here's another example of a black top from the lady, a dark blue for the gentleman. And notice where their eye goes more to the faces. Of course here we have some sunspots in different areas, but generally, we're concentrating more on the faces instead of their whole body. And some nice solid colors with a classic gene look for the fall, blue and she had on a purplish top. This couple of came in with matching tops, which I don't really recommend they do that, but they did and they were happy. And then of course, you can always make some, if they choose the wrong colors, keep in mind, you could do some black and whites also. And then here's more of that classic look. That's always going to be an chiasm like a black sweater with a white blouse underneath. He's got that nice classic medium blue tone and they really go well together. And another couple and jeans, blue jeans with I think he's got a either a dark blue top and she has on a medium blue top. So very pastel, a solid colors They have their light color dogs and their attention goes a lot sort of dogs which people love their animals. And when you photograph in the fall, you had the opportunity of getting some really beautiful foliage. And as coupled chose some really nice earth tones that went really well with this time of the year. And then here's another couple of dress casual in their earth tones, also with blue jeans. And another fall portrait. And he's dressed in a yellowish, very bright yellow to match the fall colors and she has on a beige type floral pattern, but the pattern was very, very light. You can hardly see it. And he was a musician and I had a guitar might car, so I just borrowed my guitar, just went to the car, had him hold it and I just took a couple with a guitar and he loved that. And even though the guitar that I had in the car, which was the only one I had in a car, was more for either blues or you could say it's popular for heavy metal. But anyway, I use it just on a couple images and they really liked it. You want to avoid bright colors unless you had something that you're doing on purpose to draw attention to a certain outfit or something. But as you can see in this photograph, your attention goes right to her sweater or arms, which bright red or orange color. And it really takes attention away from them, from their faces, their expression. And it just at a couple of using this outfit because they also brought along several outfit changes. And here you can see how bold patterns can really distract your attention goes right to that pattern and it takes some of your attention away from them. Just the attracting or just putting too much attention on to the clothing, unless you're selling clothing, of course, that's a different story. And on this next image here, he wore a really beautiful floral dress, which you can see it's kinda busy and loud, but they're there from the islands, so it's actually part of them as part of their culture. But if you look also the colors, there are some greens in there that match pickup the exact same color as his shirt. And it worked out really nice. But in addition, they also brought along a change of outfits and then we were able to do some with the other outfits which were more neutral and not quite as this drag thing, although this floral pattern know is kinda nice for their situation. And usually you might think of an outdoor portrait as being very casual genes type of thing or khakis. But when they're formally dressed like in this case, a suit and a red tie that picks up the red and her gown. It's kind of a neat, like an opposite effect. And they're standing outside the chapel here. And they wanted, they actually wanted a lot of things done formally, even on the beach. So this was done on Bald Head Island here right by the chapel. And then we go over to the lighthouse right over there. But earlier we found this nice location where they dirt road just leading into the trees like a tree tunnel. And you can see they're both dressed in formal, dark clothing here. And it kinda works too, even though it's formal and outdoors, it's kind of a neat opposite type thing of what one might expect. This was a couple here that brought along all these different outfits. So we were able to do a lot of clothing changes and get a lot of different variety in their images. Just such a great couple of photograph. And then that's the end of the day because we did a two day shoe with them, afternoon and evening sunset and then early morning sunrise and then a couple hours maybe into the morning. But here we're looking at, after the sun goes down, it's totally dark here. And we have the moon here. And they are still dress formal. So we utilize our formal look on the beach, which was kind of different because you would expect people to be very, very casually dressed. But here you can see it kind of gave a neat look to the image. Romantic being dressed up like for dinner or formal. In fact, they didn't even mind sitting in the sand. All dress with their formal outfits as sued in her beautiful gown. And then at the beach will usually use more pastel or very light colors. But this lady really loved her black dresses and her black gowns. But light colored clothing at the beach always work out nice. Here's just a nice classic khaki pants with a girl's pastel blue dress on. And then here it is again, light-colored for the guy and she has on a light yellow very soft pad or no, it's not bold. And it's just a nice pastel look. And again, here's that beige or can look which goes together. Very, very nice on the beach. You just have to be careful when you're doing close up. You just have to keep in mind that much of your attention is gonna go to the clothing. So now you could see how choosing the right color combinations and color tones can make a huge difference in the end result of their portrait. That's why it's always very important to go over clothing with them. What some of the benefits are of light and dark color clothing. And in the resource section, I've also included a guide that can help them choose a proper clothing. And you could go over that with them or you can just make them a printout and have them take that along. But just be sure that you're doing a clothing consultation so they have enough time that if you have to go shopping, they can plan for and be ready and helping you create beautiful portrait with the right colors 22. Props, Hobbies & Pets: In addition on suggesting certain types of clothing when you have your consultation with them, I also go over some other things that might be of some importance. And that is that they could bring along certain things like hobbies or their pets. And many times they may bring along a family member from a previous marriage. It's matter of fact, I remember doing one engagement portrait where the gentleman brought along his mother. Now you all get that all the time, but she was from a foreign country and he was here at that time. So he wanted made a photograph, just a few with the three of them together and then some are just her. And then that's always nice because that adds to the story, mixes it up and gives even more importance to it. So again, pets, hobbies, family members, and many people also are fascinated with their vehicles. They may have a fancy car or they may have a really cool and really neat motorcycle that they're really proud of and they want to be remembered with that motorcycle two with the two of them together. And then here we're looking at hobbies. And the gentleman on the left had a huge passion for photography. His fiance on the other side, like to read, being in law, and she spends a lot of time, I guess, researching and reading and stuff. So we had them bring along a little bit of what they liked to do. And then we photograph that. I got one of them to. Actually we incorporated it together. He's photographing her. Here. You'll notice that he had on a white shirt in contrast with her black dress. So he did bring along another shirt. So we just asked him to change his shirt and then we got more of a pastel or a medium color, blue, solid blue. That worked out much better than the white. White would have drawn a whole lot more attention to the shirt. But it worked out good that way. And many couples are really into sports, so they bring along some sporting items. We have everything from baseball, football, golf clubs, and many people are heavily into music and we see a lot of people do bring in their guitars, horns, or whatever they play. Even though in this case, as I mentioned, they were using my guitar for it. But people do bring a lot of musical instruments. I might also suggest that they bring along a blanket that we can use sort of like a picnic theme. A blanket, a picnic basket with two glasses and a bottle of wine or grape juice. And you got to make sure you tell him, Don't forget the opener. When I first started doing this, I forgot to mention that. And we had a couple of people didn't have anything to open up with, so we had to rough it. But anyway, that's always a nice way to add some more variety to it. Portraits. And you could do some where they're laying down, they're toasting heads together. And you can just run off for that. As I mentioned, you pose it once and you just had them do certain things. And now you've added even more variety to the story. Things that they have a passion for. And it's going to have meaning to see those images, especially with the proper clothing. It's gonna be a classic, timeless luck that they're going to share it with their family and of course each other for many, many years 23. Composition part 1: Let's take a look at some of the elements of composition that I tried to look for. Anyway, when I'm doing these portraits. And everybody knows the rule of thirds where you can place your subjects in the center. But they should be off either on the top, bottom left, or right hand thirds of the frame. Well, there are certain times that I do place my people in the center and placing your subjects in the center and can be effective if you have something outside of the center that leads your eye towards them. In this case here we have some of the foliage surrounds them and then they're highlighted by the backlight. But you can utilize lines of direction, just anything that can bring your eye to the people that you're photographing. And like I said, I actually put my people in the center quite a bit. And here we're looking at the same couple of photographs and natural color. And here I'm utilizing some lines and diagonal lines of direction. Your eye helps take you right to the people. And I also had them slightly off-center here as well. And then of course they're being also highlighted by the background. And then I also have on top, I have a little bit of framing that I use when I found the spot that had some branches overhanging there and that's where I placed them into. And we see some few birds that were flying around and out-of-focus night just happened. But anyway, I liked the lighting here because the first thing I do look for is the lighting. And the next thing is to find or to set up a nice composition so the photograph works and is pleasing to the eye. Here on this beach portrait here I put them on the right thirds part of the image. And then we have diagonal lines coming in from the rocks. So we're using lines of the erection, diagonal lines of direction. And same thing here. Now, one thing that I do want to point out when you are doing these beats portraits, I tried to avoid shooting directly into the ocean and I'll put him at a slight angle. So when you see this serve, it's coming in at a diagonal line and that's always very pleasing because that diagonal line is drawing your eye right over to the people. And then here we're at an outdoor location and I was utilizing the stone wall that you see here. And I place them a little bit on the right hand again, the right third part of the image and the Stonewall is acting to lead our eye over into the couple that were photographing. And then here we have them in the center. But notice how in his center, every time you do a portrait like this, I explained earlier that many times I'll have them lean their heads a little bit towards each other. And then I'll try to pose their bodies so they're in some kind of a triangle shape. Having a triangle shape is always a nice composition to use. And then sometimes you can also use s-curves. And in this photograph here you can see that I post them on the stone wall here, but I placed them at a slight angle and I also oppose them, especially hairy. You can see them in kind of a triangle composition. But notice also I found these, these leaves of the trees overhanging here. So I was able to use framing, using the parts of the tree as framing. And that worked out really nice too. In this photograph here I wanted to show a little bit more dimension. So I use the, the death of this treeline. It's like a tunnel of trees. And when you look down here, you can see the beautiful depth. So I placed them in the center and I was careful I didn't have any thing hanging out behind their heads like branches are trees. And then of course they were on a dirt road with their former close. It's kind of a nice contrast with that third road. Yet their dress formally. In this black and white infrared photograph, which of course I gave you a sepia brown tone. You can see the lines have direction like an S curve here coming in from the bottom left over towards the couple as they're doing a what's called a passion kiss. And this has a lot of neat elements in with the infrared, with the puffy clouds, dark sky, dark water. So here I was able to utilize the lines of direction and also using a wide angle lens. I believe it was a 25 millimeter on a full frame. And then I was also utilizing the foreground to background with a wide angle lens. So your eye goes from the foreground over towards, towards a couple of which are actually right here in the center. So we have a lot of interesting things that are actually leading our eye into that couple Then at the beach, of course, we're always shooting at a slight angle into the surf. And I'm always looking for diagonal lines such as in the surf comes in. And then that leads us over to the couple. So whether you do it normal color or high key, you get the same effect here, which is facing the opposite direction. And you can see the surf coming in now from left to right. And it just brings our eye right over to decouple. This is the same couple that was taken the evening before on the sunset we're getting beautiful, beautiful clouds in the sky was just so dramatic. And of course here we had them little bit off center and one walking. And I realize with this beautiful sky, even though it was great and color, it will be even more dramatic if I shot this in black and white infrared. So I switched over to my black and white infrared camera. And this is what I came up with and just wanted to point a few things out here. There's a little bit of a water section here in the sand and RI takes us from that over towards the couple. Then we had the sky just coming in at an angle. And again, because we're utilizing a wide-angle lens, it just notice how the sky just has so much depth, so much more dimension to it. And then as I set them up, I had him turner heads into the open space. It's a good rule to follow that. More open space is in the direction that they're facing. Although I liked the image the way that it was, but I wanted to see if I can improve upon it a little bit more because I wanted to enter this into print competition and it didn't hang. One of the things that I did here was I reversed the image. And notice now that they're facing into the open area which is now on our left side as we look at the image. And the reason that I did that is because in the English culture we read from left to right. So our eyes are accustom going left to right as we readjust to us more pleasing to the eye. However, I understand that the Asians, I believe it's the other way. I believe there's his right to left. But anyway, I wanted to see if it made an improvement and I did like it more. So I did reverse it. And also I burned, in other words, made darker the sky. So it has more, more drama to it, more impact and just vignette at the side a little bit more. And that's what I came up with. And then here we're just going back to a couple in the center. Now, many times when I do pose a couple and the art and center, I try to utilize lines have direction many times I'll have them place like in this case here, the gentleman has his right hand in his pocket. So his arm, I'm getting kind of a triangle shape out of him anyway. And of course, by leading their heads a little bit towards each other, they're not just straight up and down. They're leaning a little bit and making, giving them diagonal lines of direction in the faces. 24. Composition part 2: And then here I'm placing then the third left side of the image using backlight, make it more dramatic. And then here's another black and white infrared image with a sepia brown tone. And this one here was taken in Central Park in New York. And I saw this beautiful area here. And as I was photographing them, we were walking all around and just ask the gentleman here if he would mind renting a rowboat and bringing the boat over to this area. So he ran over, he ran at the boat and then he was rolling over. And it was well worth the extra effort that it took to do this. Because when I saw this area, I think I had a lot of potential. Well, first of all, I just liked the look that infrared gives to the skyline. And then also this area has a lot of nice trees that it used for framing and a beautiful light coming in from the infrared. However, I had to get them in this particular spot here because notice how when you see them, the light is falling on them. And I had to place them in an area with a background was darker so they wouldn't be lost or be part of the background. So I had to keep telling him this was kind of it took a few well, took a little while to get this every time I place them in this particular section there. And I asked him to stand up in the boat would start to drift and I had to tell him Gioia to get back. So he had a road back and how to do that a few times until we finally got it. But I really liked this image a lot is one of my favorite images and a really fun coupled photograph. And it did really well and print competition all over from the professional photographers of America to the wedding of portrait photographers International. And then here's another black and white image, which I gave a blue tone to. And notice here that I'm utilizing the scene. I didn't mention much about scene setters or detail shots, but every now and then, you might want to get some of those, but this particular image shows the scene that day. So I placed them on the bottom section of the photograph. And because of the beautiful clouds, we had, that dramatic clouds. I put them down low so we can see more of those clouds. And yet I was still able to frame it using some of the trees up on top and a couple of was pretty much in the center. So again, here we have them framed by things all around. We had the foreground framing them with the, with the high grass. And of course they're being framed up on top with the foliage on the trees. Here you can see how I'm using a triangle type of a composition here. So many times when I do that, I'll place the arms out to the side. Here. His arms are out to the side, which actually follows the same line pattern as a motorcycle is. And we're getting a nice triangle shape right here, just using those diagonal lines of the triangle instead of just straight up and down and boring type thing. And here's a combination color with a blue tone on the background. And notice again how I'm just bringing the arms out to the side using a triangular type of a composition. Here again, as we're driving through this section here, what we're doing, the portraits, I spotted this really neat trace. I wanted to use this because as sort of like the way the tree has sort of a, a triangular shape to it. So I placed them a little bit off so they wouldn't be lost in the image, so you can see them a little bit better. And this turned out to be a really dramatic image in both black and white and color. Here again, you can see the triangle shape as I pose them. So many times, if I'm posing them on a wall or alleged, I'll use a lot of bent arms, bent legs. And here I did something that I don't do too often and that is shooting straight into a wall Stonewall like a C here because usually I would place this wall at an angle to show more depth. But I liked the background here and I just liked the soft lighting. And they're leaning and again, just a little bit towards each other for a nice romantic look. And then even as we come in pretty close, like in this photograph here, you could see our lines of direction is at a slight angle and also their heads in their bodies create a triangle shape. And if their heads were just straight up and down, it would seem kinda boring, I think anyway. And when I can, I'm always looking for something that I can use as part of the composition. And so if there's nothing actually overhead, I may use a part of a tree. So here in this case I've put on that really all the way against it. But close to the tree so you can see the tree often aside here. But I wanted to point out here also get used to the fact that when you're doing these portraits, keep an eye on what's behind them because What you see many times in amateur photographs and they don't realize it, but it takes awhile until you, until it becomes second nature. So every time you take a photograph of somebody, whether it's a couple or just one person or family, you want to be aware of what's behind them, what's behind their heads. So you don't want to have anything sticking out. So it looks like they have something that's growing either heads or something strange. So I'm always looking for just the right spot that I can use with us. Nothing that's interfering with the image. I just want a nice clean background. Of course it's not all the way clean here we can see all the trees in the background, but by using a large aperture where able to knock that out of focus. But we don't have anything that's really growing out of their heads. And the same thing here, I was using a tree on our left side edge we're looking. And then we're also framing it from the top with a little bit of foliage color. And again, right behind their heads, there's really nothing that's really interfering with coming out of the background. So just get used to that fact. And that's one thing that you can really do that so simple to, to keep your eye open for. And it makes such a huge difference between an amateur photograph and something that was done by a professional. So here I'm using diagonal lines have direction, and I'm also using framing from the the tree branch dots above the lady's head, just adding a little bit more dimension to the image. And of course we get that beautiful backlight here. So just a recap on some of the things that we talked about on the elements of composition. First of all, diagonal lines, I'm always trying to find lines, diagonal lines, leading lines that sort of leads our eye into the subjects. Then of course, keep in mind the rule of the thirds where you place your subjects either on the third part of the frame, whether it's the top left, right, or top and bottom, tried to keep them a little bit off center. But when you had them in his center, it's okay as long as you have something on the outside that helps draw your eye in towards the center. And sometimes that works out really, really well. And keep your eye open for certain shapes that work out really well, like S-curves. You can look for S curves in the composition of where you're photographing. Or you can pose your people and S curves or C curves. And I mentioned triangle shapes also. So when you're posing them, you have sort of like a little triangle type of a setup utilizing their arms out to the side. And of course, when using a wide angle lens, consider finding something that's going to lead your eye from the foreground to the background, something that had a lot of impact. And that's going to draw our eye from the foreground to the background. And when I'm using a wide angle lens and I want to show more of the environment than a photograph. And I wanted to have the couple. So there's more open space in a direction that they're facing. So I just face them towards the area where there's more open space, just looks better. And you can also create depth in your image by using framing such as tree branches, foreground, or you can shoot through leaves and that type of thing. So these are so many elements that you can use to improve your photographs. They can really help make your photographs stand out from the competition 25. Camera Settings part 1: I want to talk a little bit about camera settings and how this can help you when you're doing these types of portraits. Well, the first thing that I do before I go out, I'll set my camera time. I know you're thinking what's the big deal on setting the time? I'll make cameras? Well, this is gonna be important if you're going to be using at least three cameras on your photo shoot. And if you're gonna be doing a fairly long shoot, maybe several hours or even a full day shoot. But it's extremely important. We do it all the time on weddings. If you're gonna be doing, say just a couple of dozen images, disregard this. It's not that important, but it can save you a lot of time when you're getting all your images together. Because if you're going to be using, Let's just say three cameras. One might be infrared, black and white infrared photography one might have on a wide-angle lens. And then your other camera is going to have on your, your zoom. You are say, maybe a 70 to 200 millimeter lens. So what I do is after I get all the images together in post-processing, and I'll put all the files into a folder. Then I open up Adobe Bridge, and then I'll go in there and I'll rename them according to time the time that they were taken down to the split-second. Now it's important that when you set your time, you set it up as close as you can with each camera body down to the split-second. So that when you are renaming these, they appear in the order they were taken. In most cases, I'll shoot in aperture priority and occasionally manual. Now, with the new camera bodies today, they are so fantastic that aperture priority does a fantastic job. And the reason that I like aperture priority obviously is because using a telephoto and usually I'm using a zoom lens such as my 700 to 200. And I may shoot at F2, 0.83, 0.5 around there. And the reason that's important is because I want to have full control my aperture so I'm able to knock the background as much as possible, out-of-focus or as much as I want really. I mean, there are times that I want to get the background in-focus. And for that case, I may use a smaller lens opening. And then I may also just use a different type of a lens may be more of a wide lens, but anyway, getting back to aperture priority by setting it. So I get a large aperture so that you can say to 0.8, I'd knocked a background out of focus. And then of course, you can also adjust your setting as you're looking, as you're looking In your view finder, you can actually see what your shutter speed is. And if the speed is actually too slow for my conditions, say usually I'm using at least a mono pod. I use a tripod as much as I used to, but I can always see what my speed is. And if it's not fast enough, I just make an adjustment on my ISO and we'll talk about that in a few minutes. Also. Shutter priority, usually not aperture priority. Yes. I do want to mention an important part of your, your shutter speed and here's a good guide, or you can call it a rule to follow. If you're going to be hand-holding your camera, use at least a 50th of a second. Minimum of 50th of a second is a good rule to follow. However, if we're gonna be going into a longer or zoom lens, and then your shutter speed should be at least a focal length of your lens. As an example, let's say that we're using a seven year 200. And let's just say you're zoomed all the way to 200 millimeter on a full frame, you're going to be using at least a 200th of a second if you're handholding it. But if you're gonna be using a vibration reduction or image stabilization lens, you can add probably two or three stops on to that. Now, as I mentioned, that is the guideline for a full frame if you're gonna be using a crop sensor as an example, say you're a Nikon shooter and you're gonna be using a dx crop sensor camera that has a factor of 1.5. So a 200 millimeter now becomes 300 millimeter on your focal length. So you're going to have to use at least 300th of a second if your full frame, its 200th of a second. Great rule to know and a good guide to follow. However, I do recommend any way using at least a mono pod or a tripod. But if you have to hand hold it, this is a good guide. And of course, keep in mind vibration reduction IS can help you even more, get sharper images 26. Camera Settings part 2: There are certain cases that I wouldn't have more control over my camera settings, so I'll shoot manual. And a good example is if you're along a lake or beautiful park, of course not the beach. And there's a beautiful sunset that you see. So what you wanna do is you want to make your exposure for the sunset. Otherwise, if you're exposing, say on the couple that are walking, whether maybe closer towards the camera and have sun is setting behind them with beautiful colors. But then again, if you're making that exposure on the couple, their exposure is gonna be accurate, but you're gonna get a washed out sky, meaning that it's going to be very, very bright. I not going to see all the colors that you should expose for it's gonna be overexposed. So the first thing that you wanna do if you want to capture the sky, whether it's a sunrise, sunset, beautiful clouds, is make your exposure for that sky. Just say as an example, we're shooting at 100 of a second at F, say F8. And that's gonna be our exposure for that particular both say it's a sunset. Okay, so I got to make sure that if I'm looking on the couple, obviously they may be several stops underexposed. So if I shoot at that particular setting, the sky is going to be beautiful, but they may be in a silhouette, which may be okay if you're doing a silhouette, but if you want to have the correct exposures on his skin tones, you have to get light into them. The best way to do that is by using flash. Either. Well, the best way is to use off-camera flash. It's a lot easier if you have somebody with you and assist in helping you holding that second light, next choice would be putting in that light onto a stand and whether you use it straight directly off the lifespan or you can put an umbrella on it to soften it. That's of course the next best thing. And then if you have two, and if there's no other way, I'll use my flash on a camera even though it's not the best way. But I'm using it mostly as a fill. And I'm filling in. I'm actually filling in actually quite a bit on the sunset. So I really do prefer off-camera flash just to give your, your people a little bit more shape in their clothing instead of being that flat lighting. But if you have to use on-camera flash, you want to make sure that the flash that hits them is just about the same, maybe a little bit less, as to what you're getting off your exposure on that sunset. So in other words, you want to make sure that if you're setting is say, f is your exposure. And then you want to make sure that your flash is set to reach a couple at, that's also getting a very important, it could be a little bit under, of course you can make the correction. And, but this way, now your shutter speed doesn't matter because your flash is actually making the exposure. Well, let's say that you want to knock your background out of focus a little bit more. So you want to change your camera setting to F4. And that means that you're going to have to up your shutter speed. Now you have F4 as your aperture. So you want to make sure that the amount of light that falls on your couple is gonna be about F4 also. That's very simple to do. Now, shooting manual, to me, of course I was, I started any old days of film. So I had to learn to shoot manual, but it's really not that hard. And once you get used to shooting manual, It's it's just so accurate because there's no variations in TTL. There are some variations that can affect your exposure. But, but once you get that down is gonna be really, really simple to do. And if you don't want to shoot manual, of course did not have these great flashes that you can shoot off camera now also using, using your TTL, which is through the lens exposure. So you can actually use your on-camera flash here as a commander. Then you can get another off-camera flash to make that one fire. So it gets really simple actually in doing that. Now, the other thing is I also understand I haven't used it yet, but the current generation of cameras have what's called a scene mode. And nikon has it in there. It's called Night Portrait. So what that allows you to do actually using a flash, you can actually set it on night portrait. And if you take the photograph is going to give you a proper exposure on the close up more of the couple because it's going to allow for the proper exposure on the couple. And yet you're also going to be getting the proper exposure on the sunset. Now, I don't use that. I haven't tried that, but I understand it works pretty well. I'm just so comfortable shooting the way that manual because it's accurate, it's repeatable and it never varies. But Scene mode, maybe something that you want to check into. If you're not quite sure yet about shooting manually? 27. Camera Settings part 3: There's also gonna be times when you're going to use what's called dragging a shutter. And dragging the shutter simply means that you're making your exposure based on, usually, you may be using a flash. Like I said, on certain instances, your flash is making your exposure. Let's just say as an example, a year whether you're again at the lake, at a park anywhere really, it could be downtown. And there's a beautiful moon out there. And then you want to expose for the moon and maybe the ambient light of the buildings. Or of course, if you're at the beach, you want to get that moon and then you also want to get maybe some of the reflection on the water. So in this particular image here, taken in the evening, it was set at F4. At one-sixth of a second was the reading. I got to expose the moon and then the light on the water. And here I was using my camera on 28 to 70 millimeter of 2.8 lens. And of course, in a case like this, when you're shooting slow, you definitely need a tripod. So that was the correct exposure of getting the moon. And then what it had to do then is put enough light on to the couple so that they were also going to be seen. Because if I wouldn't have the Flash using that flash day would just be not even there. In fact, it was just so dark at here that we had to use how to use a small flashlight or a lighter soil is able to focus on them, so it's very, very dark. So as I said, the exposure for the moon and then the light hitting the water, I had to make sure that my flash output was set to F4, that it reached a couple. Then here's another example when I sat them down in the sand and they just had them looking towards each other and the moon was above them. And I believe I mentioned this before, but I don't believe the moon was quiet as full as you see here. So I made it a little bit fuller. But again, I expose for the moon and the reflection off the water. In this case, I was set at f 2.8 at a one-second exposure, ISO 400. And the same lens, TAM Ron, 28.70 millimeter to have 2.8 lens. And then I have my lens is set to 38 millimeter here. And again, I had to use the tripod here because of the one-second exposure. And how to make sure that the flash that was hitting this object was set to f 2.8. So by dragging the shutter when we're doing these types of sunset and sunrise or nine images, what we're doing is we're gonna be using a longer than normal shutter speed to brighten the ambient, which is the available light. And that's gonna give us the correct balance between our flash and the ambient light setting. If you have to, you can always up your ISO. And speaking of ISOs, I know I've said it before. I'll say it again that the quality of these cameras today is just so amazing. Used to be 100 was the ISO that works the best. But now the technology is just so amazing that you can hardly tell the difference anymore between ISO 100, 800,000 or sometimes even higher. But if you're gonna be making a larger wall sized images for your clients, there's no sense in shooting ISO 25,600. Just because you can, there is gonna be a difference in quality at that high ISO. You can more than likely still use it for maybe an album size image by just stay on a lower ISO and you're gonna be guaranteed of getting great quality images. I also want to mention that I'm shooting both a raw file and also a fine JPEG file. In my particular case, I had the two card slot, so it's easy to set that up. One card shoes wrong, one jpeg. And on my older Nikon's using the compact flash cards, I would I would still be able to adjust my cameras, so I was able to shoot a raw file and also get a fine JPEG file on that same card. And this way, if maybe a color balance is off just a little bit or your exposure is off, you have just a little bit more male, actually quite a bit more control over your color and you could change certain things. Say you want to play with your color balance, you can really do some neat adjustments on there and get some really neat effects. And then you can also combine images with that. So I liked doing a few things after in post-production. Also, you're getting some unusual effects that you might not be able to get out of your camera. Now, on white balance, normally I'll shoot auto white balance because all my icons, the auto white balance is very, very good actually. But I do shoot a raw file just in case I have to get into it. And I also have the JPEG file, so I recommend you doing this same, at least shoot RAW. And if you camera allows, you can also shoot a fine, high-quality JPEG file. And after awhile, you're going to get so good that you may not even have to go into the image. But if you do, you know it's there and I can help give you even a greater image. 28. Involving The Couple: Something else that I really like to do is to get the couple more involved in your portrait. And what this does actually is make the portrait session even more meaningful and come up with some unusual images that may have special meaning to them. So here's what I do. After, but not after, but even during the portrait session, I may do a portrait of each one of them individually at a certain location. So after I find the proper location, I'll set them up. And if my camera's on a tripod, I'll have it all ready already zoomed in. And then say I'm photographing the lady first. I'll ask the gentleman to step forward and I'll have him look in the camera and I have him take her portrait. And he usually ends up taking a couple are several different images of her. And then of course, after he's done, I'll find out probably use the same location and I'll set the gentleman up and I'll have a lady step van looking at viewfinder, press the shutter, and then I'll have her take several portraits of the gentlemen. And by doing this, you're going to get special images that the expressions are just so, so open and unique and just so fun, love it. And so it's a neat way of getting them involved. And then at the same time, having then getting a portrait of them individually taken by each other. And many times, if I had a tripod, I'll set the tripod up to do that. If not, of course, you'll want to make sure you have a strap on your cameras. So you put that strap around the person that's doing that photography just in case there's any drop which involve or anything. But it always works, that it always has worked out really well. They love it. It's going to give them images that when you add to the shell, have even more special meaning. 29. Add Movies: Something that I really recommend that you do is add movie clips onto your portrait session. These days, it's so easy because now I'm using my digital SLRs. Takes a little while until you get the hang of it if you haven't already. But once you do, it's such a great way to add a little bit more of a cherry on top of there. These are, so when they see the images, in addition to doing beautiful portraits, of course they're going to want to get an album or large rock worker. And when you show them a slideshow and then several movie clips involved, they're going to love it even more. You can use your digital SLR when you take these movies. And depending on your skill level, you can put on some really nice fast lenses and get some really beautiful, beautiful results doing this. And if you're fairly new at it, you want to practice as much as you can until you get used to using your digital SLR. It's got a little bit of a learning curve as far as doing movies, it's a little bit different. And you're going to have to I had a little bit of a problem with focusing on that. So I chose to shoot manual focus when I do. So I got the hang of it and it got really nice overall. I'm pretty happy with using this as my main movie camera also. Now when I first started, I actually first started doing this using a, it was a Canon, think of as call that h vt, which was a, a camcorder type thing that use those small tapes. And then I had those tapes converted over when I use my editing program. They converted that into a digital file. And I was able to add little clips onto my slideshow, which I created using pero show, goal or producer. If you're not comfortable using your digital SLR to do movies, consider maybe going into a mirrorless camera to do that. And you can set it automatically. Just have to make sure that you focus point is set correctly and you just hit the button and it's going to start recording movies automatically. You just have to watch your white balance where if you use the same camera, Everything's going to match up more exactly. But easier is going to be if you're using a mirrorless camera automatically, or if you don't have that even a good point and shoot, you can even use an iPhone or other type of a small device, small camera, or a smartphone if you want to. Because their quality in those things that are really so amazing. And you're basically just using a little clip in there to do that. And that's going to add more excitement and more add even more impact to their slide presentation when they see it. So just something else that you can do to add even more value to their portrait. 30. The Magic of Soft Focus ACDSee part 1 ACDSee: So let's look at another way that you can add a nice, romantic, dreamy look, three portraits. And that is soft focus. And I wanted to do this update because one of my favorite Photoshop plugins is no longer available. And that was called scatter light lenses, made by the Andromeda company, which I used to use for soft focus, went on their website and it's no longer available. So I'm assuming they're out of business. So I wanted to give you an update on several different ways that you can get beautiful self-focus effects. So let's start with one of my favorite programs, and that is AC, DC. And here I'm using AC, DC photo studio Ultimate. So let's go ahead and open up our image. We're going to start with this particular one here. And let me bring it up a little bit larger. In this particular image already had some retouching done just to soften the blemishes just a little bit. However, I want to crop this image just a little bit. Before we start on giving it a soft focus look. I'm gonna go to Edit. And all the way over on the left side, we're going to see a cropping tool that I always like to crop for the most part, especially when I'm doing a portrait, like to maintain our aspect ratio. So you want to make sure that on the top-left here, makes sure that the box is checked where it says constrained cropping proportion. So no matter how much or how little we crop, we're going to maintain our aspect ratio to what it was when we took the photograph. Okay, so there we have our crop. So now we're going to use Save As because every time I want to save an image that has been changed from the original, I'm going to give it a new name. So let's go ahead and we're going to call this one. We'll give it a number at the end. Usually, let's call it number two. So here's our crop image. Now let's work on the cell focus. And I think you're going to really love this. And you'll see the neat way that you can control the degree of soft focus. So we're gonna go to develop on the left side here, where you see focus, you're going to see underneath, you're going to have different options. First, we're going to start with the strength of a soft focus. And as you slide the slider bar all the way to the right, you can see the degree of soft focus that you can get. And of course, when you slide it all the way up, it's way too much. So we're gonna give it just a little subtle hint of soft focus. But sometimes however, when I'm doing a full length and I want to give it a really dramatic self-focus look. I'll add quite a bit of soft focus to the image. And then if we go to the brightness section, we can also adjust that to our liking. And in contrast, you can also adjust your sole focus to the way that you want. Alright, so now we have a small amount of soft focus added, but let's add one more thing to it. And we're going to add a vignette. And let's start on the strength part of it. As we move our slider to the right, you can see it gives more of a miss the effect around the sides. As we move the vignette control over to the left, we can see that it'll darken our vignette. And that's what I'm looking for here, where it darkens the image around the corners and the sides. We can also make other adjustments like feathering. So I like it where we have it now. So now we're gonna go ahead and save this again. And remember we're going to use Save As, and we're going to use, we're also going to give it another number. But now we're going to just add 03 to it. So we know that it had some work done. We know that it's not the original. So let's go back and this is the original image that we started with. And then after cropping, we came up with this image and then we added our sole focus and vignetting. Here's our final image. Just a little touch, soft focus to give it a nice romantic, dreamy look. And this is using AC DC 31. The Magic of Soft Focus - Smart Photo Editor part 02: So let's look at another software program that you can use for self-focus. And I liked this program quite a bit. It does so much. In addition to solve focus, it does so many things that we're going to take a look at. So again, we're starting with AC, DC. And the neat thing about this is if we right-click, we can go to external editors. Here. I can bring up the programs that I have access to to do my image editing. And notice that I have Photoshop in here as well. But this time we're gonna be using smart photo editor. You have so many different options that you can make an image into black and white, brown tone, blue tone, you name it, it just does so much. You can put edges on and so on. Where we have our image up then you can see several different choices of effects that you can do. But let's start again with cropping. So we're going to go ahead and on the right side we're going to hit Crop and then we're going to fix our aspect ratio again. But let's make this. We'll say four by six. And now we have a four by six aspect ratio. So let's go ahead and crop this and you'll notice that as we are doing a cropping, we're going to maintain the same aspect ratio. Then we'll hit Apply. Now we have our cropping done, and let's go ahead and work on our soft focus. So we're gonna go back to fx gallery and then we're going to hit Style detail. And here we have a bunch of options that we can use for our self-focus. And as you look through, you can see all different ones from just a little bit of a soft effect to quite heavy soft focus. So let's choose the one that's called portrait softened by Tony and all these options that you see here, or actually, I believe they're all uploaded by users. So it's more of a software program that a user will share what they came up with. And that gives you all different options by all different people. So I kinda like this one. So let's go ahead and click that. Again. We don't have to stop here. We can add to it. So let's add a little bit of vignette. We'll go back to the FX gallery and we'll go to style. Here we have a choice of doing all different vignettes that you can choose from. And in addition, you can also make more adjustments to the vignette if you want to. Now we have a combination of our soft focus and the vignette added. And something that I want to mention that's pretty important, is when you apply a soft focus effect or any effect for that matter. If you apply it really heavy, we can go in and we could bring the eyes back more to the original way that it was before we added any kind of effect to it. I'm going to use the airbrush tool and I'm going to set the opacity to about here. And we can also adjust the size of our brush. And then we're gonna go into the eyes. And as we paint, we could pay it back to what we started with so we can bring back some of that sharpness. Any eyes, however, you don't want to overdo this because I've seen some pictures where it looks kinda ghoulish. Everything is soft and the eyes are super, super sharp. So again, you just wanna do It's subtle, so it's not too noticeable. And here's the image that we now have using smart photo editor. And we're going to go ahead and save this. And again, we're gonna give this a unique name so we know that it's not the original image. If you want to do even more, you can go back into it and you can add, let's say you wanna do a nice black and white or sepia. And let's go down to color. And let's you choose black and white. And now we have all different options for black and white. This is called accurate, accurate black and white by Tony, perceptual blocking wire, you can see the difference. This is black and white Hollywood glamour. And after we've added our black and white, we can do so much more if we wanted to. And this is the image that we started with. And this is our self-focus added using smart photo editor. And this is our black and white. So this is smart photo editor. Also one of my favorite programs that allow you to easily do some nice soft focus effect and many other different enhancements that you wanna do. 32. 032 Soft Smt Pho Ed Part 03 More: I wanted to show you another image that we're gonna be working on. This one, it has a lot of foliage. And then here we can add more soft focus than we might usually used to give it a really maybe an over-exaggerated self-focus look. And we can add again other enhancements if we wanted to. So let's go ahead and start with softening. And we're gonna go into detail soft. Here, we're going to choose more of a softening effect than we would normally use as if we're doing a close-ups. So let's look at some of these options. And on top row we can also change the control. So we can minimize the effect by sliding it over to the left. So now that we had the effect that we've added, which is called water for some reason. It's called water by Tammy. So we'll keep this and we're going to add even more. We'll go back to color. And I'm gonna go to black and white. And let's see what we come up with not using this type of soft focus in black and white. You could probably add more soft focus to it if you want to. And this will be nice to add to their collection of photos. So let's save this one. So this is what we started with. And then here is our black and white version. Soft focus 33. Mirrorless Full-frame Update: I wanted to give you another camera update that I think is pretty important. Especially if you're not really heavily invested yet in the camera system that you plan on using for your wedding and your portrait photography. And that would be mirrorless full frame. And right now Sony is really becoming so popular in that regard. I have here is Sony A7 three. And while this is equipped with the 24 to 70 millimeter F4 lens, now, this system is fairly new and there's only so many lenses available. So it's not like you have all the options that you do when you're using your Nikon or you can gear, but this is just something that I think it's worth considering, especially the several reasons. Number one, it has a capability. In fact, it is actually considered a full frame camera. But with the press of a button, you can turn us into an APS-C sensor. So why would you wanna do that? Well, in case you want to get a little bit more extra reach out of your lens. And the other important reason would be the cost for under $2,000, you can get a mirrorless full-frame camera system. That's really state of the art. These are really amazing cameras. While the A7 three has about 24 megapixels, it also has a big brother, the A7 R, which sells for quantity bit more. It's a little bit under $3,000 currently as we speak. And it does it offers more, little bit more features and so on. But I mean, if, if money is no object, of course you want to get the best that you can. But for under $2,000 here you're getting a really amazing, amazing technology. Full frame, the smaller mirrorless camera body and high-tech, very, very high-tech technology in these cameras. Now, just yesterday, Nikon also announced their new cameras system, mirrorless full-frame. Pretty surprising. Very similar actually to the Sony's. Nikon has a Z6, Z7. I understand it's coming out by the end of the year. And it is very, very similar to the a seventh three, however, the A7 three. The thing that I like about this also as we talked about it, because you know how I feel about having to card slots. Sonya has a two card slots in both the A7 III and A7 are three Nikon from what I'm hearing the cameras not out yet, but it has been or I guess it's in production and it will be coming out very soon. It only has one card slide, the x cubed dy, which is supposed to be more reliable. But I don't know if given the option of having two or having one card slots, I would much rather I'd feel so much more safer having to card slots. So my icon, what were they thinking with that one card slot? Everything else is pretty similar. Nikon Z6 has also 24, I think, 24.5, I believe it is megapixels. I believe that Nikon shoots at 12 frames per second, or Sony's is ten frames per second. So both are probably physically in the same range except one card slot. And of course you're limited to the amount of lenses in both systems. And Nikon, I think, is only going to have about three lenses that are gonna be available for the mirror list. However, with Nikon Z6, Z7, mirrorless full-frame camera systems, they do have an adapt there where you can use some of your older Nikon lenses. So that's a big plot. So I just wanted to give you a bit of an update on this. But some of you that definitely want to shoot full-frame and at a tremendous cost savings. Smaller camera body, newer technology. So this is really something worth considering. 34. Telephoto Zoom of Choice: Let's talk about why think is the most important piece of photographic equipment and that is the lens. And for engagement portraits, I would like a lens to be in a focal length range of about 14 to 200 millimeter. But I also need that lens to be a fast lens with an aperture of at least F2, 0.8. Since f 1.8 or F14 would be asking too much in one lens. Since currently no such lens exist. I have to select the next best lenses that put me in that focal length range. While I could still get the aperture that I could use to get nice background blur when I wanted it and yet still have the subjects really sharp and in focus. And for me, that lens is the Nikon 70 to 200 millimeter f 2.8 lens. It's a VR lens, which is a vibration reduction. Cannon also has one they call there's the ISO image stabilization lens. Also a great lens. So which either way you go, that would be actually it's my favorite lens, the 70 to 200, F to 0.8 millimeter right now is my favorite lens. There's also other brands such as Tam, Ron and Sigma, which are also very, very good lenses. Because I have them both. And they are a little bit less if you're on the budget, but they can also do a fantastic job. But I prefer using the zoom lenses so that I can go from an extreme close-up to about a half length with just a turn of a wrist. This helps me to keep the flow of the portrait session going really smoothly without having to stop and change lenses or camera bodies. And by using this lens at wide open or close to wide open, I'm really able to get really nice background blur because this is a very sharp lens. So if I focus on the couple and I open up all the way, I know that I'm going to have a sharp, super sharp image with beautiful background blur. Now, one caution that I want to mention, you don't really have to get background blur all the time because there's going to be times that you want to show some of the settings that are gonna be in the background. But there are also times when you want to isolate the couple and so they really stand out. So you wanted to throw everything else out-of-focus no matter what's behind them. It could be a pile of leaves or a dumpster. It doesn't matter a car, you can throw it way out of focus. So no matter what it is, is going to look good. It's going to isolate them and they'll really stand out. One thing that you have to keep in mind, though, if you want to get maximum background blur, you have to be careful of your focusing. Now when you focusing to people, you want to make sure that they're on the same plane. If you want them both in focus. In other words, if you focus on the eyes, you want to make sure that their eyes are on the same plane. So if you focus on one eye, the other person's eye is also going to be in-focus because it's on the same plane. Now, with that said, just because it's a 2.8 lens, I don't shoot 2.8 all the time with it. Many times for the reason I just stated, I may go to F 3.2 or at 3.5. And it just gives me a little bit more of an edge in getting the couple in-focus while blurring the background out. As the Nikon 70 to 200 millimeter F2, 0.8 VLANs is my favorite portrait lens at the moment. If I would not have this lens, I would take a really hard look at. And I will probably get the 70 to 200 F4 lens. This way. If I want background blur, I just open up all the way. And of course, by zooming in very, very close also at fault zone which is 200 millimeter, and then you open up too. In this particular case, if you're gonna be using an F4 lens, you're going to get maximum background blur out of that lens. And even at F4, you're going to get some really, really nice background blur. So again, if I would not have my current at 2.8 lens, I would take a serious look at the 70 or 200 F4 Nikon lens, since I'm a Nikon shooter. One thing to keep in mind though, is if you're gonna be using a crop sensor camera, no matter what brand it is, it's going to be changing your focal length range. So in other words, say you're gonna be using a crop sensor of 1.5 factor. And that means that you're 70 to 200 millimeter lens is going to be about 105 millimeter to 300 millimeter. And that is well within a really nice focal length range to give you beautiful background blur when you want it 35. Budget Lens of Choice: Another lens that I want to talk about, but I don't really use hardly ever on portraits, especially on engagement portraits. But you may own this lens. And that would be the 18 to 200 millimeter. And the lens that I have, it's also a vibration reduction, of course, canon has it. Other manufacturers make it as well. Tamarin has one. I believe Sigma also makes that lens or a similar one. As matter of fact, I think one of the manufacturers goes from 16 millimeter to 200 millimeter. But anyway, this lens is a lot less than a 70 to 200 millimeter, but it's not as fast as a matter of fact, it goes from F 3.5 at its widest setting, what you'd be 18 millimeter. And if he zooming all the way into 200 millimeter, it only goes to f 5.6, which if used correctly, you can get some background blur out of it, but just not as much as you can with the F2 0.8 or even the F4 lens. As a matter of fact, I was covering an event last weekend and I had to move really, really fast. So I decided to use that lens because I had to go from wide angle 18 millimeter. And then all of a sudden I had to go into zoom in really close and things were just happening. I had no control over stopping anything. I just had to use the equipment. I had to get the maximum amount of coverage that I could. So when I photograph some of the speakers that were there, I set the zoom to 200 millimeter, and of course I would set the aperture at f 5.6. Now when I do these portraits many times, I'll shoot aperture priority. I prefer aperture priority overall if there's a difficult lighting situation. And many times there is, take the reading on the faces and I'll set it so I could shoot manually and I can make the adjustment that I need on my camera. But this is also a decent lens. It wouldn't be my first or even second or third choice probably. But if you have it and money is an issue, you can still do a nice job using this lens because I remember when I first started doing these engagement portraits, I didn't have a lot of equipment. I had to use basically a standard lens. So I realize everybody is in a different situation. A lot of people have really, really beautiful equipment. And they may not even be professional photographers, they may just be hobbyist. But the professional photographer knows how to make the most of any situation that they're photographing and also how to get the most from the equipment that they're using. So again, on the higher focal length lens that I would use, I liked the 70 to 200. And like I said, I wouldn't own the 2.8 more than likely our own the F4 lens. It's an example how technology definitely can make an improvement on some of the equipment. From it being a lot smaller, lighter, and also it's less expensive than 70 to 202.8 lens would be 36. Compact Mid Range Zoom of Choice: In addition to the 70 to 200, you want to get something a little bit less something in the medium range. So I also occasionally might use my tamarin, which is a 28 to 75 millimeter. It's also an app 2.8 lens, very fast lens, excellent lens, actually very, very sharp. And that lens works that really good if you're at the beach and you're jumping around and It's very, very light and easy to shoot with. Plus it's a good medium focal length range. Now you also want to get one that's going to take you up to a very wide angle lens such as a 15 millimeter or even beyond that, a nice wide angle or the fisheye lens. And I normally use that lens just like a little bit as a cherry on top just to put something extra in there so that they stand out from the other ones also. So again, we're just 7,200 is the optimal lens for me anyway. And then of course, go more into mediums such as the 20th to 175 or back there. And you also want to catch some of that really extreme wide. And you put it all together and it really adds nicely to their store 37. Prime Lens of Choice: And if you want to use a really great prime lens, which is a fixed focal length lens. To do these types of portraits, there really is nothing better than the 85 millimeter F1 point for lens. That would be my first choice for the prime lens. F1 0.8 would be my second choice for this prime lens, but there really is no substitute for this type of lens. It is a fantastic sharp, super sharp lens. And it is really a great focal length for doing this type of work. So that's all I got to say about that. 38. Black & White Infrared Advantage: Another camera body that I want to mention that we actually talked about it earlier is doing black and white infrared photography. So for that, I suggest taking an older camera body, like in this case, I have a Nikon D3 hundred. So you could take your older camera body, whether it's a Nikon D 40, the 60, 90, even though I think it goes up to a 7,000, they can all be converted to do black and white infrared photography. And that's the best way to go. If you're on a tight budget, you could actually use a good point and shoot camera and have that converted to do just black and white infrared photography. When I first started doing this in a digital format, I had an old Nikon cold packs. I believe it was 995 converted. And that works really, really well. It's very low res compared to today's technology. But if money is an issue and you're on a tight budget because there's only so much you can get. I recommend either a good point and shoot like in my case, I'm a Nikon shooter. So consider, while these have a look at the cool Pyxis or an older digital SLR and the same with cannons. You can also use some of their point-and-shoot and some of their other digital SLRs as well. But I would really recommend you doing that as soon as you can, because that also is going to set you apart a little bit more from your competition that isn't doing that black and white infrared photography, camera bodies, very beautiful stuff. And as far as accompany doing your black and white camera conversions to black and white infrared, you might want to take a look at life pixel. That's life pixel, and they'll do all kinds of conversions for you, all different cameras. If you go on their website, they'll tell you which cameras can be converted 39. Lighting Tools: As far as lighting and running and sensory goes, my favorite would be the reflector, which I have here. And this is a 42 inch reflect, a silver on one side, and then the other side is white. So depending how bright the sun's coming in, I may use the wide if it's too bright, as I talked about in the course of silver, which gives a nice variety effect into the eyes. We can push them, catch lights in there, get rid of those dark eye sockets that you see sometimes outdoors. So if I can have only one piece of lighting accessory for the engagement session, this will be it, another light source, but I don't like using it and don't use it too much. Only if I have to add a little bit of fill light in, there would be my on-camera flash. And in this case I had the speed light by Nikon D SB 800. And I usually had this set for about minus one-and-a-half stops, anywhere from minus one to two stops. It all depends how much light I want to reach the couple of width, but average is about minus one-and-a-half stops. And I do have a little bit of a softening. It's called a stove and Omni balance on here. And then I also use what's called a Thor th, OR micro box. I'm not even sure if they make these anymore. I've had this for ages and ages and then I'll put this onto it. But there's many companies that you can get these from. There. They're very popular and it's going to soften your light even more because I prefer more of a soft light. And then sometimes, as I mentioned, I'll use this if I have to add a look catch light in the eyes, mostly if we're further back and the reflector want reach, I'll use the on-camera flash for that. Occasionally on engagement portraits, I may use a second light, although not too often. And when I do, it is called the quantum cue flash. And this particular one, this goes way back also. And this is manual. So I set this for manual. It, it all depends on the ISO I'm shooting, but usually as an example, I may use say, a 16th power in ISO 400. But if I have an assistant, I'll use this more. If not, this usually stays in a car unless I definitely needed to do some back-lit shots, which it works really great for that. And in order to use this, first of all, I have to have a transmitter on my camera. And the transmitter that I'm using, it's made by quantum also. And this is called the radio slave for it's a, this is the transmitter part of which I actually, I can read them out this onto the bottom part of my handle on the tripod, or usually via the flash already attached, I'll just Velcro it again onto the top of the flash. And then of course we plugged this into the flash. So when I want to use this flash, I'll generally use it for things that I want a backlight. Save. For instance, I had a couple against something and they're blending in with the background so I can make them stand out more if I use a second light and then as a backlight. So it just gives a nice rim light effect to that. 40. Post Production: So now that you're all done with your portrait session, we're going to come to another phase of the operation. And that is post-production. And I'm going to run through the things that I do anyway. So as soon as I get back to the studio, upload all my images onto my working computer. And of course you want to make up folders, so it starts with the client's name. And then of course you also use subfolders if you went to but the client's name. And then I put all their images into their folder. And then as soon as I can, I'm going to make two additional backups onto portable hard drives because I do like to backup all the files just as they were straight out of the camera, just in case you ever have to get to them. Now at some point you're going to have to go through your images and you want to eliminate all your rejects and your dukes. And I usually do this maybe two or three times. But in the very beginning, if you have images that you know that you're absolutely not going to use, oh, you have two of the same image that are just identical. There is no sense and showing them both. Because this is very important. You'll want to eliminate all the duplicates. So when a look at him, it's actually less confusing for them. Easy to make their selection. Now let's go through them all and eliminate all the rejects and the duplicates. And for that, I use a program called AC DC. I've been using AC, DC since the early stages of digital photography. It is really so good. It's a great program that you can use to manage all your files. And I'm not using ac-dc Pro because what I'm shooting raw, I can also process some of my raw files on here if I wanted to. So we have all the files now into one folder. And like I mentioned earlier, I'm shooting both RAW and JPEG, but I'm working usually I'm working with a JPEG files. If I have to go into a raw file, I'll make the changes that I wanted to change or do some experimentation. Then I'll save that over onto or into a JPEG file. So we have all jpegs now in one folder, right? So we're looking at all the images from AC, DC, and we're gonna go through all the images. And if I see any that are duplicates, like here's one, I'll probably keep this one and I'll get rid of that. So I'm going to just click Delete on that and now get rid of that. They wanna do that. Go through all your files. In this way, you're going to have all the good files into one folder. Now the next thing that I'm gonna be doing is if it was a long shoot and I use several different cameras, I'm going to batch rename them. And if it's just a short shoot where I just had maybe a couple dozen or 50 or so images. I may not have to do that, but this is good to know for extended shoots. And this is always, always a must for wedding photography because you have all these different images, all these different times they were taking. And if you have other assistance, sometimes I have to assistance, but anyway, they'll believe me, it's going to save you a lot of time if you have multiple cameras shoots. So I just wanted to show you how that works. So for that, I use a program called Adobe Bridge. Now you can also use Adobe Bridge on their Creative Cloud Program, which you can check into. But I have an older version that was purchased and it's on my computer, so I don't have to pay a monthly fee for it. And for me it works out fine. But if you're gonna be doing gangbusters, a whole lot more volume. And then I recommend at least checking out Adobe Creative Cloud because you're going to definitely want to use Adobe Photoshop also. But anyway, here's what I do. So once I put them into Adobe Bridge, select them all, and then I'll go into a batch rename. As you can see, I'm going to rename them by time, hour, minute and second. And then I'll click okay. And then, uh, program is going to rename them in the time that day were taken. This is very helpful if you're shooting multiple cameras and it matters to you how close you get down. I don't use this all the time again, if it's on a short shoot, not really necessary, but if it's a complicated and a long shoot with multiple cameras, this can save you a bunch of time. 41. Add Creative Effects part 1: Let's have a look at some of the filters that I liked. The year starts with my very favorite. And that will be the neck color effects collection. And my favorite is that color effects version. Now they also do make one that I want to point out. It's called Silver Effects pro. Great for black and white, you have so much, so many different enhancements you can do in black and white. With toning, you can make them look as though there was a red filter at it for a dramatic sky look. So for black and whites, I recommend that you take a look at silver effects pad for the other ones, I'm going to go through now, it's called color effects, but let's take a look at some images now. Different images may call for different effects. So many go through maybe a couple of different images. And we're going to start with more of a lighter area, like a high key look more light colored image. And then we're gonna go into a darker tone one. The knit color effects Pro filter is a Photoshop plug-in that you can use to do all different kinds of enhancements. So we have our image and let's take a look. Now before we do that, I wanted to put a copy layer on here because I'll show you why in a minute. But we're going to make a copy layer and then we're going to also put a layer mask on here. And the reason that I like to do that is because certain effects maybe a little bit too harsh. And now we can always paint back in some of the original tone of the image. And for this, you may have to learn a little bit about Photoshop if you're not already. But I get the feeling that most of the younger generation pretty much are pretty tech savvy these days. And quite a few of the younger generation now quite a bit. Not there is to know about Photoshop, but if not, you can certainly do tutorials all about Photoshop online or you can take certain classes. But I really do recommend that you get into Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop just as soon as he can if you're not into it already. In this demo, I'm using an older version of Nick color effects, but the newer Collection five has some pretty powerful upgrades added, along with some fantastic new features. So I think you'll find it pretty darn impressive. So now that we have our layers and our Layer Mask, let's go into our filter and we're gonna go into neck color effects pro. And one of my favorites is one they call Monday morning. And of course these other filters that are installed now in Photoshop. And I think that just about any version of Photoshop on a war. Because right now I have up an older version of Photoshop. And I like using that version and it works fine for that. So after we click on it, we get a little bit of a choice of different things that we can do it. We can add grain. We can take away the green, and we can also they have what's called a smear control. And we have it about maybe a little over three-quarters of the way up. And I'm going to keep the grain on here. So if we click on that, There it is, is kind of like a pastel tone. It's kinda neat the way it is. Now, if we wanted to, the reason that we have these layer mask there is we could actually paint back in if you want it to some of the original image that was there. So if we click on the Layer Mask thumbnail, bring up the brush tool which is B as a shortcut. And then I had the opacity set to about 35. And watch here we can just pay it in if we wanted to. Some of the original colors of the original photograph. If you wanted to nominate, go back and take that out. So I'm going to keep it just the way it is here. Now there may be times when I want to add more than one effect to an image. And that's what we're gonna do here. I'm gonna go back into Filter, Nick color effects Pro, and we're gonna go into another one I use quite often is called color of stylize her. And that allows me to choose from all different tones. So if I click on the palette here, it comes up with all the colors of the rainbow on this side. And I can make my selection from. And then over here I can fine tune all the different tones as you can see. And I'm going to stick with a brownish tone and watch what happens if I click on that click, Okay, and then our image is turned into a kind of a sepia tone. And of course I can make this black and white this way. Today is kinda being needed to do 42. Add Creative Effects part 2: The other filter that unlike using quite a bit, it would be duplex. And if we click on that, we can see again, we have a choice of all the different colors in the rainbow that we choose from. And I kinda like this one that's like a goal. I would need gold effect. So if we click on that, click, Okay, and then you can see how it just gives the energy beautiful like a gold warm tone. Kinda really neat. Now what if we wanted to change the color? So let's go back and try another one. Let's go back into Nick color effects Pro. Same one. We're at duplex, and this time we're going to choose a different color. Let's go into a bluish tone. It's kind of a neat blue there, so let's try that. So now you can see how we get kind of a nice blue tone. I do this, so that's kinda neat also. But let's take a look at a, another filter that I use quite a bit. And this one is kind of interesting. It is called Sunshine. And for this one, of course, you have all your controls. You can modify things over here. Let's see what happens if we keep it as I've already had a preset. So it's the sunshine filter added. This is what we come up with. And it's kind of a neat effect if we want to use it for images that may be a little bit on a gloomy, taken on a gloomy day, cloudy. We're missing that warm tone. You can add the sunshine filter to pick up some of that warm tone. In this case, I think it might have been a little bit too much, so I'm gonna go back in and paint in some of the original tone and maybe just get rid of just some of that brightness here. But anyway, this is how it looks after we adjusted it. Mrs. hot wise when we started. And there it is again. Let's do one more with this particular image and then we'll go on to the next. Let's go back to color stylize her. And then for this one and we're going to pick a blue tone again, we'll go into a pretty deep blue. See how that looks. Because many times I log using a blue town and I use the blue tone quiet a bit for my black and white infrared images. So now you can see how this one works with the blue filter. And now the original image. Now let's take a look at it. Another image using some of these filters. 43. Add Creative Effects part 3: And as I said earlier, different images may cause for different effects. So let's take a look at another effect taken in the woods with more of deeper outdoorsy tones. So let's go back and make our layer copies again. We also give it a layer mask so we can paint back in the original. Okay, go back into our favorite filters, Nick color effects Pro. Let's take a look at one called Midnight CPI, which is kind of an interesting effect here. Now if we click on this, it gives us a really unusual, very deep kind of a gloomy town. Well, we can paint back in a little bit of the original color by going to Layer Mask and just bring back a little bit of brightness. Now I'm doing this kind of fast here. Now if I was doing this in the original image for them, of course, I would maybe put more time into it and make sure that my mask and is more accurate. But this will give you an idea of some of the things that you can bring back. So now we have more of a deeper, darker image. Here's that looks before, and this is using the midnight sepia. Okay, so let's go try another. We're going to go back in for this one and we're going back to color, stylize her. And again here we have the color palette and we're going to stay with blue. I'm going to make it a little bit, maybe deeper, blue. That's about the same. Now let's click on that. And then if we click Okay, and now we have a kind of an unusual, neat, it's still kinda dark, but you can see how we get all these different tones out of that. Let's try another one that is kind of interesting. And this one works in only certain situations, the old photo line. And we do that. We can see how it sort of makes it look like a faded old photo. Kind of interesting. You want to be careful of making things too trendy. And remember just a little bit of a cherry on top, not overdo it with too many effects. And if I'm doing several effects on one image, I'll eliminate some of those and I'll just show them one or two. So not to be too confused when they're making their selection. Alright, so let's go back and look, try another one. This is one that we looked at in the other image, also the sunshine one. And notice how it just makes those colors pop. So this might be interesting for certain images. And again, we can paint back and stomach the original tones because sometimes it's maybe a little bit too bright in certain situations. I'm going to just bring some of that highlight down just a little bit. And this is how it looks with the sunshine filter added. And this is how it was before we started. So these are some of my favorite filters that I like using a NIC color effects Pro. And as you can see, there are many different meat ones here. They have a graduated well, you can make the sky blue. You can do all kinds of special enhancements, make the center lighter. By usually I liked the Monday morning if backs, and occasionally I'll use the sunshine. And I also use quite a bit the duplex and the color stylize. This some of my favorites. So there's the give me an idea how far you can just give your clients that little bit extra, that little cherry on top 44. Final Touches & enhancements: Next I'd like to talk about what may be called trade sequence of professional photographers and how you could take your photography up to the next level, not professional level. We're going to take a look at an evolution of an image on how he came right out of the camera to the final touches and how we're going to be presenting that image to our clients. Now I realize there are certain situations in photojournalism or you have to document things as they truly are, or you're photographing people as they truly are. Certain characters. They have character lines, they have it rug it look. Now if you're documenting something such as in photojournalism, you'll want to capture things just as they are, just as they appear. If you're photographing somebody, if you're doing a portrait, somebody with character lines, they had that rugged look. And you're just documenting that story. Then of course you should keep things just as they are and maybe not change anything around. And on the same token though, you want to make sure you document that in a truthful way without having to set anything up or to fudge anything. But the type of photography that we're talking about is more on the glamorous side where talking about love, romance, engagement portraits, which leads to wedding photography, which this type of photography is really a vanity type of a business. People wanna look beautiful. They want to look great. You want to look younger, thinner. They want to have fine clothes when they're photographed. So this is what we're gonna be talking about and how we are going to be preparing our images. So I just wanted to take a look at an image just so you get an idea of the certain things that you can do to make your image more professional. So here we have our couple in a nice casual outdoor type of a setting. And even though they have white clothes on, it's still, I sort of liked this picture and they did two. And let's just take a look. So this is how it looks right out of the camera. And then the first thing I noticed though, when I saw this, I didn't like the branches coming out of the tree behind the couple. It really distract it. So so real quick in Photoshop, I just took that out real quick. And then this is what we end up with here. Without that, the next thing I did, what's called vignetting, where I just selected a little part of the edge of the image. And I darken that just a little bit to attract our eyes more towards the center of them, towards their faces. Then I took this image into a program that's used for enhancing, retouching, smoothing out skin tones. It's called portrait professional or also known as portrait Pro. When you open up the image, you'll notice that it finds the faces. It has like an outline of the face and it finds us automatically. And sometimes it's a little bit difficult with two people, especially if they're looking off to the side. So this generally works really well after looking towards the front, more towards the camera. And then here, as you can see, it's actually finding the phases. So the first thing I did was enhanced the lady's face. And this just takes a few seconds to do. Well, we were able to smooth the skin tones, the skin lines brighten up the eyes just a little bit and just fix a few little blemishes that were on there. And then after that, we went back and we went to the gentleman's face and did the same thing. Just a little bit brighten the eyes up and smooth the skin tone just a little bit and that was done. And this is how it looks after they were both enhanced. And then I realize that we can probably get a little bit more attention onto the faces if I brighten up the phases just a little bit, and that's the result where our attention now goes a little bit more to the phases and not to the clothing or to the background. And on the final image here, I may or may not do this all the time, but I added a soft focus effect to it. You can see how everything is just beautifully soft, their skin tones or even softer. And many times, I'll do this on close-ups. And of course you can vary the degree of softness that you use. And sometimes I'll even use this on a full length image, maybe showing the whole scene, which just kinda gives it a nice little soft, romantic, dreamy look. So you can use this on occasion, and I do just to break it up and just to add even more glamour to it. So here you can see a before and after image. So let's walk over to the computer and I'm going to show you how easy it is. You can take your photography to the next professional level. 45. Evolution Of An Image: When you get serious about doing these and even other types of portrait, this is a program that you really want to consider. It's called portrait professional. And let me just run through some of the things that it does that is just so amazing. And this could save you a lot of time in your post-production work of you getting a few images ready. Like I said, I may do a handful of enhancements and I may do just a couple of images that have retouching Don. They usually end up that those are the ones that they might order. So let's just run through, we're going to open an image and we'll click Open. Now just as soon as it opens up the image it finds the face is automatically look at that. Isn't that amazing. And of course this works very well on more close up, but even though this one is at least that three-quarter length is still finds the faces. However, it finds the face is a lot easier after looking more straight ahead, more towards you. It found actually both faces. And now we're gonna go through one at a time and notice how it was pretty close to the outline of the face. So we're going to work on the lady's face first. And it asks us male, female and girl, boy. So click on female. And now we can make a little bit of adjustment here we went to. But this is very, very accurate, very, very close to the way it should be. I'm just going to fine tune the, the lips. We're going to not hide the teeth. And it's very, very good right there, maybe a little bit on the eyebrows here. Stretch them out just a little bit. Look at that. Okay, So as soon as we have this all outlined, we're going to just go into next. And then it does some magical things automatically. So here we can see it now that'd before and after image before we even did anything. So just to give you an idea of some of these controls that I use quite a bit. We're gonna go into show I control. So this is the one that you can widen up the eyes, brighten the eyes and you can sharpen or you can brighten the iris. But just to give you an idea, let's go into brighten the eyes. Now watch what happens to the one on the right. And you could see how it makes the eyes so much brighter. But you don't want to overdo this. You'll want to make it look natural, but yet still beautiful and still believable. We're going to do. So when you keep it right about there, something else that you might want to look at is brighten the iris and that you can do, make that adjustment here. And there's just so much you can do here. And then also, let's go into show Skin Smoothing control. So for this, we can even do more work to the skin. For instance, it says here around the eyes, skin smoothing, so watch her skin smooth out just a little bit. You can see that. And then of course, the imperfections, we can increase that just a little bit. And something else that I use quite a bit is we can come up here and use the touch-up brush. And for that we do those little minor things like underneath the eyes that need even more tension. We can soften them a little bit. Do some down here by the chin. Just give you an idea. Alright, so you get the idea now of how easily and quickly you can actually work on this. So after we finished a lady out, we're gonna go into next. And then we're gonna go into enhance another phase in this photo, and that's gonna be the gentleman space. So we're going to select his space now. We're going to choose that course. He's male. And then we're going to fine tune his outline here a little bit. We're going to bring the hairline down to where it is. Make a little adjustment on the lips. And this is just fine tuning it. Exactly. Okay, so here we can see the gentleman's face. We can see already that before and after. But we have to work on a little bit more of the eye. So again, we're gonna go into white and the eyes just a little bit. And again, we're just going to keep this natural. We're gonna go brighten the iris maybe just a slight bit. Get the eyes up a little bit. And if you wanted to, you can always use this to brighten up to teeth. But on the last image of the lady, I noticed that the teeth were already brighten up somewhat, so I didn't want to overdo it. So I'm going to go into touch-up brush. And for here we're just going to touch it around just a little bit around the eyes. Also see how quick and easy that is. And get rid of just some of these blemishes down here. And that's it. So to give you an idea, we'll go into next. And then we're going to save this. And here's the image that we ended up with. And of course, you can put more time into this if you want to, and you can find tune things even more. But just that little bit that I did while even explain it to you just took probably under 2 min. And once you're actually doing this, you can actually do this very, very quickly and come up with a beautiful image. And again, this is portrait professional, something that you really want to consider when you're getting deeply involved in doing portrait photography, especially romantic images. Because you want to get these images looking their best. They went to look their best. Like I said, it's a vanity business. They went to look beautiful. Nano want any zealots and no pimples coming out and they went to look their best. And this is an easy, easy tool that you can provide them with beautiful, beautiful images. 46. Before Beginning Your Presentation: Although I still have pero show producer on my Windows ten computer, the parent company photo next is out of business. And that's company that had all the Prosecco software programs that made up all these beautiful slideshows. So I wanted to give you an update on that. When you go to photo indexes webpage, you get a notice that reads, as of January 31st, 2020, they are permanently closed, but they do offer a replacement solution for creating slideshows. And their official recommendation is photophobia. And they also have a pretty nice royalty free music library. Now I haven't used photophobia since I still have pro show producer on my computer, but I was looking at it over and watched a few videos. And I was looking at some of the features and a templates that they have. And using photophobia, you'll be able to come up with some really nice slide shows. But I wanna give you two or three other programs that you can use. But if you have pro show on your computer, it's well-worth using. It was such a great program. So many people miss it, but I wanted to give you a couple of different alternatives to Prosecco. And the first one is made by the one soft company, and that's called PTE AV studio. And I believe this is a successor to the older pictures to EXE program that's over 20 years old. In fact, if it's the same program, it's one that I used to use in the early days of electronic imaging when I first started doing electronic slideshows. And the other company that you can use to create beautiful slideshows is called Animoto. And there's quite a few professional photographers that use this software to create slideshows. And I believe it's a subscription-based company. And it means I have to pay a monthly fee. But there's different options that you can choose from. And some of the ones include royalty free music along with their subscription. So that can save you some money. But I'm not really too keen on paying a monthly fee. And if you're gonna be doing a lot of these slideshows, it may be to your benefit to check into this. It is a really nice program for creating beautiful, sophisticated slideshows. And of course I'm using AC DC for some image editor name and my viewer. And ac-dc, as I pointed out, also, you can create a very simple, yet it's elegant. It's easy to put together and quick to put together a beautiful slide presentation. So let's not forget ac-dc for your slideshows. It says that the other ones I mentioned are a little bit more elaborate and give you a lot of, a lot more options that you can use for your slide presentation. But nothing wrong with AC. Dc is a simple, yet classy way of presenting your images. As far as royalty-free music goes, there's a bunch of companies also that I used to use that are no longer in business. And that's really a shame because we've lost so many great companies that had really good products to use. So now I've pretty much down to two different companies that I use. The first one is called pond five, and they offer some beautiful, beautiful songs in there. And they have a huge price range that you can choose from. But you don't have to spend a whole lot of money to get some beautiful music on there. You can just indicate that you want to spend, save from or up to $20 or even less. And then all that music will come up for you. And it had all different classifications of music to choose from. So that's pond five. And they also offer other different media in case you need a video clip for a project or photo. The other one that I've used is called Pixabay. And this is from different authors. They offer music that you can use for your projects. So when you use their media, you're able to give them a donation. I think it's only fair because they spent a great deal of time not only in learning their trade, but in creating their product for you to use. So besides giving them just a mention or something, send them a contribution. I'm sure that'll be well appreciated. When putting these slideshows together. I always liked using a projector because this way I'm able to project the image up to a larger size. And I can also project it and fine tune it into a certain size that they may consider ordering for their wall. So the two that I've used are made by the Epsilon company that's been around for quite awhile now and they have some great products. And I've also used a sharp projector, and they have all different levels to choose from. You don't have to go with a real, real expensive one unless you had the funds and money is no object. But it's not really necessary. But just be sure that the projection that you get projects large enough so you get that impact when you're going to be presenting their slideshow? 47. Quick easy slide show ACDSee: Let's take a look at a way that you can put a slideshow together easily and quickly. While there are many different good programs that you can use to put together a slide show. And some of the ones I recommended that you might want to take a look at it. My case, I still have pro show producer on my computer, but I still like using AC, DC to put together a beautiful simple slideshow. And since I'm already using ac-dc as my photo viewer, and some cases I use it for image editing. Ac-dc also gives you the option. I'm putting together a simple yet elegant slideshow. Because you may run into cases like I have. When you have to put a slideshow together quickly. As an example, say I have a couple that came in from out of town to do their engagement session. And they're only gonna be here for maybe a few days or a week and a half to put together a slideshow so that I can show them their images and they can make their selection before they go back, home or back to where they live. And they may not be in town again until right before the wedding. And they have to look at their images so they can make their selection. The images that they want to use, whether it's gonna be for an album or a wall portrait. And that's when I use AC, DC. So let's take a look at that. I put all their images into a folder and I'll still do a batch automate and I'll reduce the file size down so they're easier to work with. And then I pull up a CDC and you can see all the files here and all the files that you want to use in the shell. And I do want to mention that I normally use every single photograph in their slide presentation. I'll choose the best of the best. However, I may show them the image afterwards. But to do this slide presentation, I don't want to bore them with too many duplicates the same, and making this show even too long. So I try to keep the show under 5 min or so if possible. And then once I have all the images in that folder, all I have to do is click on slideshow, configure slideshow. I'm going to click on Advanced because I'm going to add some music onto this also. So it's going to ask us where we want the music directory coming from. So we're going to hit Browse. And I actually already have it in here. It's in that folder that I'm working on this course, songs for show. And now we're going to click Okay and watch what happens in the show starts up automatically really fast. This isn't that awesome. It really doesn't take any time at all to put this show together. All you do is put the images into a folder. Same thing with the music track and you click Slideshow when they come in and bam, it gives them the presentation and it's going to knock their socks off 48. Thank You & Best Wishes: So that concludes the course and my take on how I go about photographing and presenting the engagement love story portrait session. And actually the same applies to whether you're doing lifestyle or family portraits. It all ties together. So I want to thank you very much and sincerely hope that the course has helped you. And if it has, if you could just take a few seconds of your time and leaving a nice review. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much again.