Wedding bells on a cruise!

I know I know, I missed last weeks blog post, I was thrown off my usual schedule since school was over... I promise I will get back on schedule! So I am finally posting pictures from Crystal and TJs wedding! This wedding has got to be one of the funner weddings that I have worked over the years, not just because they are my cousins but because it was on a cruise!


There are many different difficulties of working on a cruise and shooting a wedding, one is people, we amazingly didn't have much of a problem with this a lot of people were nice and realized what was going on and made sure they weren't in the background. The second major issue would be the weather because its not like you can just say oh we will just do it next week when the weather clears up because you wont be there next week! Lighting I honestly just worked with one of my SBs the entire time and the camera I used was my D7000. Outside during the ceremony I didn't use my flash at all the ambient light was enough but not overpowering we got real lucky on that one.

I spent my time before the wedding with the bride Crystal as she got her hair and makeup done. Obviously I have the usual pictures but some of my favorites are these. Unfortunately it started to rain for like 20 min right before we were about to go up so I wasn't able to do much on the balcony area due to it being wet and I really didn't want to mess up the dress up before hand.




Detail shots are one of my favorite things to do at a wedding because I feel that it really does help tell the wedding story and one of my standard shots is always of the rings, whats with the rings usually change from wedding to wedding depending on what is available for this one i used the sash from her wedding dress and the veil. I also used more ambient lighting in this shot which is why it has a more amber hue to it making it seem more summery.

 Outside where the ceremony was held it was a small ceremony so I didn't have to worry about pulling out any of my long lenses and was able to stay fairly close to capture everything. During a ceremony you always want to be on your toes to catch every little thing without taking a million pictures. If you aren't careful you will have a lot of pictures of them looking at each other and you might miss that cute smile or laugh when something happens.


The more you work weddings the better you get at telling when these moments will happen but nothing is exact because it will happen when you miss a shot here or there dont get discouraged we are human and we make mistakes, just learn from them. You can always recreate the first kiss or the ring exchange if you miss it the first time but the spontaneous things that are unscripted are harder to recreate. I got lucky and caught both the ring exchange (not shown) and the kiss (right).


Also be aware of your surroundings because you want to use them to your advantage. For example sunsets, they are probably one of the most romantic things nature can do on its own so utilize that if you are able. You usually will have to up your f-stop if you are wanting to catch the colors of a sunset better because it will make them darker and more rich. Also have fun and be artistic and don't be afraid to try something out we live in a digital age so you really are only wasting space on a memory card not money for film, just remember to learn from your trials, if something works well then use those settings again, or the pose which ever, but remember not all poses work for all people some can pull off a pose better than others.

One of the other reasons I loved working this wedding the pictures were fun to conduct like the one here to the right. This was immediately after the wedding before we had dinner on the main floor of the ship was this cafe and a floor above was this platform and each floor above had a balcony type thing that you could over look the platform so I went up one floor and shot from above to get this great view of the couple and their friends what came on the cruise to come to the wedding.

This one was just up a couple steps on the same level as the couple do it is less of an areal view. I fount this on the first day I was on the ship and immediately knew I wanted to shoot here. The wedding was held the first full day on the boat so the day we got on when we explored the boat I kept an eye out for good spots to shoot. I don't think I ever really stop working I made little mental notes everywhere I went.

Most poses were thought up by Crystal and TJ and I just staged the shot at got into the best position to capture what best represented what she wanted. A main thing about shooting a wedding is knowing what they want out of the pictures, if you know that you should be pretty set in how you can conduct the photoshoots. The last few pictures were taken at the end of the cruise on the last full day at sea we had so much fun because we didn't have to worry about the ceremony and we got lucky and no one was near us so I didn't have to worry about yelling at strangers, only family lol.

These are some of my favorite shots of the wedding but there are so many more I would love to show you all but I don't want to make this post super long and everyone lose interest. I will post more on my Facebook page when I get a chance, now that school is over I should have a little more time on my hands to do these things! I hope you like these pictures as much as I do! Till next time :D

I Hear Wedding Bells!

So my cousin got married right before spring break and I figured this is a good opportunity to cover more event type photography.

It was a small civil service with a couple friends and family so it wasn't anything huge and there was so reception to worry about but there was the sun. The sun is your mortal enemy when shooting manual because you cant just keep shooting without looking at your preview screen every now and then. The day started out really cloudy so I figured it should be a little better for the people with no squinting but the weather never does what we want it to it does what it wants to.

The clouds cleared and the sun came out which makes for better background sky than grey. Since the sun came out i had to be a bit more diligent about checking to make sure the sun didn't peak its head out from behind a cloud and make the shot over exposed. For most of my shots my settings were at shutter 1/250, ISO 250 and f-stop at 4.5. This worked for pretty much all of my shots but there were a couple times I had to adjust a little in photoshop. There is no shame in adjusting a couple images in photoshop as long as you are not trying to adjust an image that is really really dark because it will come out grainy and the colors will be off because it wont have all the ranges of color that you would usually have.

Shot wise for weddings you do want to do a wide variety of shots like closeups and further away. Even if they don't want the close up printed you can use it in the back of a collage or in an album if you are photoshoping it. Like the image to the right, I love this image but it doesn't mean I would want an enlarged image of it so you can take it and do something like this:

The only thing you do have to watch out for when doing something like working a wedding is watch your f-stop because lenses will change the f-stop when you zoom in more than likely if you are working with a very low f-stop then your f-stop will go up a bit when you zoom in so just watch that because it will darken your images.

Last but not least I do not recommend shooting manual for a wedding because if you are going from inside to outside with the ceremony or reception you will have to adjust quickly and you might miss something. This wedding was an easy one for me since everything was in the same place but for a regular wedding I would recommend working in shutter preferred or aperture preferred. Which is probably what I will go over in my next post which will be on FRIDAY! 

Yes I am doing a second post this week because last week was spring break and I was busy with work and not being a typical college kid ;p So keep a lookout for the next post on friday :D

Color Me Rad!!!!

So todays post isn't necessarily a how to, this past weekend Color Me Rad happened. For those of you who don't know what Color Me Rad is it is a 5k run that has color stations that throw colored cornstarch at you. So essentially you end up a colored mess and it is awesome.

But this is a perfect time to cover outdoor event photography specifically without flash. One thing you want to remember is that the sun creates shadows, and the shadows are hard to illuminate without flash. The upside is that you can use a much faster shutter than if you were using studio lights.

For some closer up shots you can definitely use flash to help like I did in this shot. But when you get to the group shots or wider shotes it is hard to use a flash strong enough to cover everything.

Things like this shot where you have more people in the front and the background. For this image specifically I had my camera set at 125 ISO since the sun was bright in the sky with no clouds at all in front of it, my shutter at 1/250, and my f-stop at 13 yet again it was really bright. It took me a while to get to this point where you can see their faces and the sky isn't totally blown out. it really is a trial and error thing because some days the sun really is brighter than others. this is where my camera stayed most of the time. The one thing that did change more often was my f-stop because being outside the sunlight does fluctuate so you have to be aware of that. If you aren't aware of that your images will be darker in some and lighter in others. So in this case I just changed my f-stop to compensate for the lighting change.

At the very end of the race, thats where I stationed myself the purple color station was the last one the runners went through and as you can tell it was pretty effective there was a purple haze all over.

Last for the final hurrah they did a group color toss. As you crossed the finish line you were given a color packet for the final toss, you could also buy color packets to toss at your friends or whoever. 

Another fun thing they had at the run was fire extinguishers full of color.

These were pretty effective and made for some pretty good pictures. Next year I plan on funning the Color Me Rad run instead of sitting on the sidelines, you should too!