Kristina and Johnny are an amazing couple. These two are so easygoing and loving. Can we say “thrilled”..when they suggested Mission Trails for their engagement session! 🙂 The out doors made Kristina & Johnny shine! They were so comfortable and at ease. This indeed was an awesome day for all of us!
BEHIND the SCENES
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a ‘behind the scenes’ post, so I thought..why not! We’ve been asked several times how we get our shots, and how do we get that crisp clean look. Well folks, here is how we do what we do! 🙂 We always start off with shooting our X-Rite Color Checker Passport. This is definitely worth every penny! It allows us to save tons of time in our post processing. These next images are all off camera, no touch up’s have been made.
Here is an image that we shot before we threw some light onto our couple. Here we measured the ambient light, the surrounding light, and got a reading. Once that light was metered, we added a soft light umbrella 45 degrees above our couple. You can place the soft light either right or left, which ever you like. We decided to place it on camera right.
Don’t you hate it when you see a great location for a picture, you try it out & take the shot, but you get nothing but shadows…just like this??
As photographer’s, we (Ed & I) dislike shadows for the most part. Below is how we work around our beautiful San Diego sun. We pull out our light diffuser. For those of you that do not know what it is, it is a large white rip-stop nylon made into a circle. You can purchase one on-line. We use our diffusers when we want to reduce the amount of light from the sun. Too much light creates unnecessary shadows or it can drown out your subject in the photo. This pictures below illustrates how the image will look when a diffuser is used.
How we got the lighted field shots were pretty easy. We metered the ambient light and stopped the shutter down one stop. Then added soft light on the couple, camera right.
These shots were kinda of tricky. I (Mar) knew that I wanted to use these big, beautiful trees in a few shots…So this is what we started with, dark ambient light with lots of harsh shadows.
The first thing we did was pull out our flashes.
We repositioned our back light stand carefully in back of Johnny with a 1/32 power on the flash. Next Edmond Stood in front of the two with the light diffuser to block out mr. sun! 🙂 So, we had a slight back light, a key light, and a diffuser for this particular shot. I opened the aperture up to get a nice bright look. I’m not sure If you noticed Ed’s shadow on the floor? Take another look… These are the little details that we make sure we always catch. You definitely have to be aware at all times! So, I asked Ed to get a little higher, and repositioned him, in order to get that awesome shot.
Here is the final shot… I also asked ed to give me a slight sun shine on their face for a little character 🙂
I saw this picture…here is Ed with our diffuser! fyi 🙂
And I thought I would throw this image in.. A little proof that we do get a little dirty on our shoots! We love being photographers 🙂
Don’t be shy to leave any comments, questions, or likes!!! We love to read all of your thoughts about our work..We would love to help anyone that would like it!
-Mar