Brandon Malone Photography

So last week, we talked know­ing the three basic ingre­di­ents to light in order to get a well exposed image.  This week I just want to expand a lit­tle fur­ther on using them.  Mainly focus­ing on shut­ter speed and aper­ture pri­or­ity modes of course.

Why would you want to choose one mode over the other, and what does the ISO have to do with either one?  Well, it depends on what your sub­ject mat­ter is and what look you are going for.

If you want to con­trol your Depth of Field (the dis­tance between the clos­est and fur­thers points of focus within your image), then you would choose Aper­ture Pri­or­ity.  Nikon just uses an “A” to rep­re­sent this mode and Canon uses “AV” to do the same.  Remem­ber how last week I related the aper­ture of a lens to the human eye.  If there is lit­tle light around you, then your eyes will be more dilated, which in turns reduces your abil­ity to focus as well.  But if it’s really bright, then your eye’s iris is closed down really small, which in turn makes every­thing seem more crisp look­ing than normal.

So here’s the thing to remem­ber with aper­ture: the smaller the f/stop, the more shal­low of a depth of field you will have, and less light is required.  If it’s really bright out, and you’re really want­ing that smaller f/stop, then you’ll have to increase your shut­ter speed to reduced the amount of time light has to hit the sen­sor.  You can also bring down your ISO to a lower num­ber to make the sen­sor less sen­si­tive to light.

The two pho­tos of the log below help demon­strate what I’m talk­ing about.  In one, you will see a very think line of focus going across the pic­ture, while the other has almost every­thing in focus.  I put my ISO to 200 for both images, and set my mode to Aper­ture Pri­or­ity.  The first was set to f/2.8 and the other at f/22.

Shut­ter Speed is for con­trol­ling the amount of motion in a image.  No image is com­pletely stopped.  They’re just recorded for a set amount of time.  The less time that light is being recorded, the less time for the image to blur.  Shut­ter speed also does some other things for us as well, but we’ll get to those in the future.  I just want to ensure basic under­stand­ing for now.

The below two images are not the great­est of work, but they are only to demon­strate a dif­fer­ence in shut­ter speeds with some­thing mov­ing.  There was mov­ing water where we were hik­ing along the C&O Canal, so that’s what I used.  For the first image, the ISO was 200, and I set the shut­ter speed to 1/500.  You’ll notice that pretty much all the rip­ples and bub­bles that are within my depth of field are frozen in time for the most part.

The sec­ond image required a lit­tle adjust­ing in order to get what I needed for this demon­stra­tion.  I wanted to ensure that there was plenty of notice­able move­ment in the water, so I wanted a shut­ter speed of 1/10.  The prob­lem I ran into was that my aper­ture maxed out at f/22 and my expo­sure was still too bright.  So I dropped my ISO to 100 instead of 200 light the first image.  This helped bring the expo­sure down enough to work with.  With this one, I did bring down the expo­sure a bit in post pro­cess­ing, but only to get the over­all expo­sure closer to the first image, so as to get a bet­ter com­par­i­son of the water.  So look­ing at this image, you’ll notice that the water is much smoother than the first image.  If you really want to get those crazy water flow­ing shots, you’ll want to go to fur­ther extremes that I took here.  For one, you’ll want a tri­pod, com­pared to me bal­anc­ing my cam­era on a log.  You’ll also want some fil­ters to help reduce the light com­ing into your camera.

One extra thing that I want to point out about this part of the exper­i­ment is how the color shifted with an extreme expo­sure.  It is impor­tant to have your white bal­ance prop­erly set before you shoot, but expo­sure will effect your image color bal­ance when not prop­erly exposed.  Using the inter­nal light meter is very help­ful, but it will be effected by what is in the view finder.  A hand held light meter would be more accu­rate.  But if all else fails, use the sunny 16 rule, while I’ll cover in a later post.  For now, I just wanted to ensure that you have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of your most basic tools and how to use them.

Happy shoot­ing!

To cook a great meal requires the right ingre­di­ents, and the knowl­edge of how to use them.  You can have all of the best ingre­di­ents, but the expert chef knows how to com­bine every­thing in just the right way to cre­ate a mas­ter piece meal that you enjoy from first sight, to first smell, beyond the first bit, and leaves you with a feel­ing of plea­sure and sat­is­fac­tion long after you’ve left the table.  If I cooked your meal, you’d be look­ing for desert so you can replace the taste of the dis­as­ter that I attempted to make.  I can do some things with food, but I can’t work those ingre­di­ents like a true culi­nary chef can do.

Pho­tog­ra­phy is sim­i­lar to cook­ing.  There is still a com­bi­na­tion of the tools and the knowl­edge of how to use them to get the desired result.  In pho­tog­ra­phy, our most basic ingre­di­ents are the means to get­ting a sim­ple, well exposed image.  With­out light, you don’t have a pic­ture.  So learn­ing how to play with light in the most basic way is the foun­da­tion when it comes to learn­ing photography.

There are three things on a cam­era that affect and con­trol the light nec­es­sary to get your pic­ture.  These are the ISO, the Shut­ter Speed, and the Aper­ture.  I gen­er­ally refer to these as the com­bi­na­tion of How Much (aper­ture), How Long (shut­ter speed), and how sen­si­tive (ISO).  Each one plays a very crit­i­cal role, and once you under­stand them, you will then be able to learn how to use each to gain the desired look of your final image.  The labels for shut­ter speed and aper­ture can vary between cam­era man­u­fac­tur­ers, but ISO is usu­ally the same for each.  Shut­ter speed is TV on Can­non and S on Nikon, while aper­ture is AV on Can­non and A on Nikon.

Most peo­ple still remem­ber the days of shoot­ing with film.  A roll was gen­er­ally rated by an ASA or ISO, which indi­cated the level of sen­si­tiv­ity to light.  In film, there was a dif­fer­ence in film grain size that affected this sen­si­tiv­ity.  The larger the grain, the more sen­si­tive the film, mean­ing the less avail­able light required to gain a proper expo­sure.  An exam­ple would be 800 speed films.  The trade-off was see­ing the grain in your images some­times.  The finer grain films (say 100 speed) required more light to get a proper expo­sure, but gave a much cleaner image, and could be blown up much larger as well.  Now days, it’s all ISO, and there is now longer the con­sis­tency between num­bers that there was with film.  One camera’s 800 can equal another camera’s 400, and can equal another camera’s 1000.  That’s when you start get­ting into the tech­ni­cal talk of cam­era sen­sors, which I’m not going to do here.  The main goal is to sim­ply learn that ISO is what con­trols the level of light sen­si­tiv­ity of your cam­era.  The lower the num­ber, the more light required.  The higher the num­ber, the less light required, but also the more noise (grain with film, noise with dig­i­tal) you get.

The shut­ter speed con­trols How Long the light hits the sen­sor for.  Thank­fully, this is always the same regard­less of the cam­era.  Shut­ter and aper­ture are both based on frac­tions, so the math keeps them reli­ably the same across the board.  When the cam­era shut­ter opens, it does so for a frac­tion of a sec­ond.  So when you see a num­ber like 250, it really means 1/250^th of a sec­ond.  You can take your expo­sures to one sec­ond or longer, but it’s not rec­om­mended with­out a tri­pod.  It opens and light comes thru the lens, and then the shut­ter closes again and ends the light expo­sure to the shutter.

The aper­ture is what con­trols How Much light at a time is hit­ting the sen­sor dur­ing expo­sure.  The lens aper­ture is sim­i­lar to the human eye.  The larger the iris opens, the more light comes thru at a time, and the smaller the open­ing, the less light at a time.  As I said before, this is a frac­tion.  It’s also rep­re­sented by an f/stop num­ber.  In film days, we had whole f/stops.  With dig­i­tal, we have var­i­ous f/stops in between how.  Know­ing the whole f/stops is very use­ful.  Here’s the list for you: f/1, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22, f/32, and so on.  Every time you jump from a lower num­ber to a higher num­ber, you’re cut­ting your light in half (ie: f/11 to f/16).  Every time to jump from a higher num­ber to a lower num­ber, you’re dou­bling your light (ie: f/11 to f/8).  So if you jump two f/stops, then it’s now four times instead of double.

So now you have the basic ingre­di­ents nec­es­sary to get the cor­rect amount of light in order to have a prop­erly exposed image.  Most cam­eras have a built-in light meter to help you.  Try putting your cam­era in Man­ual mode (M for most cam­eras) and play with these set­tings till your light meter tells you that your expo­sure is about where it needs to be.  Obvi­ously there’s a lot more to cover, but I wanted to make sure you had the ingre­di­ents to start with.  In a future post, I’ll start giv­ing you more insight on how to bet­ter make sure of each of these ingre­di­ents.  But for now, enjoy your new knowledge.

Remem­ber that it’s YOUR day.  It’s human nature to share well intended advice.  Most of the inputs you’ll receive are prob­a­bly going to be very help­ful since your aren’t plan­ning a wed­ding on a reg­u­lar basis.  Other inputs will need to be taken with a grain of salt.  If some­thing some­one says (friend, rel­a­tive, or ven­dor) trig­gers a neg­a­tive ques­tion mark in your mind, then you may want to stop and ques­tion what’s being said.  Is it some­thing that some­one wants you to do to make them happy and they want you to want it so they can enjoy it?  This is usu­ally not inten­tional, but does hap­pen.  You might even find that a ven­dor has a pol­icy or a way of work­ing that doesn’t fit your plans.  You can change ven­dors eas­ier than you can elim­i­nate regret.  Bot­tom line, it’s the only time you can make the entire world revolve around you, so don’t let any­one take it from you.  Don’t give in if it means you’re going to regret it later.  It’s your day!

Here’s some tips for ensur­ing the best pho­tos for your day:

• If pho­tog­ra­phy is a high pri­or­ity, keep this in mind when you select your loca­tion.  Look at the dif­fer­ent areas of a loca­tion and imag­ine what your pho­tos will look like if wed­ding is pho­tographed there.  If you’re only finan­cially in love with the venue, but find your­self wish­ing the pho­tog­ra­pher luck, then you may want to look at other venues.
• Either plan a time to meet with your pho­tog­ra­pher at the venue to plan your pho­tos, or take pic­tures and email them so you can talk with your pho­tog­ra­pher about photo options and plan for your big day.
• Out­door Wed­ding: Aim for late after­noon or early evening instead of mid-day when pos­si­ble so as to have bet­ter light­ing to com­pli­ment your day.  You pho­tos will be softer and warmer instead of harsh and contrasty.
• Indoor Wed­ding: If you’re cer­e­mony loca­tion has lots of win­dows, then mid-day is not as big of a prob­lem.  If all of your pho­tos are indoors, then lots of win­dow light is a bonus.  If you plan to have out­door pho­tos done, try plan­ning your sched­ule so that these pho­tos can be done later in the day when the sun isn’t so high.
• Don’t for­get to smile!  This goes for the entire wed­ding party, as well as the par­ents.  Occa­sion­ally we’ll find peo­ple that are either very focused or com­pletely exhausted to the point that they for­get they should be smil­ing as they are being photographed.
•  Keep the details together.  If bride and groom get ready in sep­a­rate loca­tions, then the bride is pri­or­ity one, which means the guys may not have get­ting ready pho­tos.  In this case, con­sider hav­ing either a brides­maid or rel­a­tive hold the rings so that the pho­tog­ra­pher has access to them when pho­tograph­ing the other details for the bride.
•  Slow, steady, and happy.  To ensure every­one is seen and cap­tured while walk­ing down the isle, have each per­son walk no closer than twenty to thirty feet apart and at roughly the same pace.  If one brides­maid walks down ten feet behind the other, then she becomes hid­den and may not be pho­tographed.  And most impor­tantly, every­one should be look­ing up and smiling.
• Don’t rush a good thing!  Your cer­e­mony is sacred and the entire rea­son for being there.  I know being in front of every­one sounds scary, but almost every­one for­gets the audi­ence once they’re at the alter.  So don’t rush the most impor­tant part of your day.  And if you do, then real­ized that you risk not hav­ing it prop­erly doc­u­mented.  For suf­fi­cient cov­er­age, try to have a cer­e­mony that will have you at the alter for roughly 15 min­utes.  When you cut it short, you cut the oppor­tu­ni­ties for cher­ished pho­tos that can never be staged or repro­duced.  So fight the stage fright and stay at the alter longer.  And remem­ber that walk­ing up and down the isle doesn’t count as part of your time at the alter.  I’ve seen “ten minute” cer­e­monies that were less than seven min­utes at the alter.
•  Stop and kiss.  When walk­ing down the isle for the first time together, stop mid-point of the crowd and embrace each other one more time.  It makes a great photo.
•  Have’em ready.  You either have or will receive a list of basic group arrange­ments and the order they are pho­tographed.  You can tweak it if you wish.  Share this with those that are to be in cer­tain pho­tos so they can be ready when it’s their time to shine with you.  Hav­ing every­one aware and ready will help reduce the “cat herd­ing” expe­ri­ence and get every­one to the recep­tion faster.  You may also want to con­sider doing all of your pho­tographs pre-ceremony so you and your guests can go straight to the recep­tion.  Every­one that has done this with us has been glad they did.
• Keep’em look­ing’ and smilin’.  Whether walk­ing up or down the isle, or when being announced into the recep­tion, the entire wed­ding party needs to remem­ber to look up and smile when it’s their turn to walk.  Nobody wants the only pic­tures of them­selves to be look­ing at the ground, so a men­tal note can help counter-act this ahead of time.
•  Where is the cake?  When coorindat­ing your recep­tion set-up with your coor­di­na­tor or plan­ner, try to ensure that the cake is not in a loca­tion that the photographer(s) can’t posi­tion them­selves to get the shots they need for you.  Things to avoid would be square tables pushed against a wall or into a cor­ner.  Usu­ally a round table, or a table pulled a cou­ple feet from the wall will make it so the pho­tog­ra­pher can posi­tion them­selves appro­pri­ately and that the guests can observe and enjoy as well.
• Bride: before throw­ing the bou­quet, give one or two fake tosses first.  This gives you more pho­tos, and lets you play with your anx­ious ladies.
• Groom: be slow and sexy as you remove the guarder.  Maybe even make a game out of it.  It’s relly the only time you can climb up your woman’s dress in pub­lic with­out being arrested, so enjoy every inch and sec­ond of it.
•  Don’t for­get the pho­tog­ra­pher.  You paid good money to have your day pho­tographed.  Make sure you don’t jump into some­thing need­ing to be pho­tographed with­out ensur­ing the pho­tog­ra­pher is ready when you are.  Also, if you think of some­thing that you think is a good photo, or a group photo you specif­i­cally want, or just some­thing fun you think of on the spot dur­ing your day, be sure and com­mu­ni­cate that with your pho­tog­ra­pher so you don’t regret any­thing being missed.
• Con­sider hav­ing all of your for­mal­i­ties dur­ing the first two hours of your recep­tion.  After­wards, you’ll be able to focus on danc­ing while guests that need to leave early won’t feel like their miss­ing anything.
•  Push it fur­ther.  Every­one wants a unique day.  Some want it sim­ple while oth­ers want tons of fun things.  I rec­om­mend check­ing out the tons of tra­di­tions that can be found in other coun­tries and cul­tures.  I expe­ri­enced this when pho­tograph­ing my broth­ers recep­tion for his wed­ding in Ger­many.  They incor­po­rated many fun lit­tle games that added amaz­ing pho­tos to their day.  Adding some of these tra­di­tions to your day will make it more fun, mem­o­rable, and unique for both you and your guests.
• Con­sider hav­ing some spe­cial pho­tos taken just before putting on the dress.  These can be put into a small black accor­dion book as a sur­prise for your spe­cial man.
• Have all of your pho­tos taken prior to the cer­e­mony.  This not only saves a ton of time and stress, but gives you more time with your guests that came to cel­e­brate your day with you.

Through­out each year I receive emails and phone calls from aspir­ing pho­tog­ra­phers, or the par­ent of a young future pho­tog­ra­pher, look­ing to me for help or oppor­tu­ni­ties.  Of course I’m not able to take on assis­tances or pro­vide con­sis­tent educ­tion.  I wish I was able to, but I can’t.  What I can do, though, is pro­vide some very valu­able resources and some lessons learned.  Each of these resources are extremely valu­able in their own way, and I strongly sug­gest every pho­tog­ra­pher look­ing to learn and grow at least looks at each of the resources I’ve listed.  I’ll talk about some of my lessons learned in a future post.

Pho­to­Vi­sion is a source of video educ­tion cov­er­ing just about every­thing for a pho­tog­ra­pher.  They visit with tons of other pho­tog­ra­phers where you get to see actual shoots, post-production, learn about sales and mar­ket­ing, and more.  They have a library of dif­fer­ent col­lec­tions of videos, plus they have their annual sub­scrip­tion, which is only $49 for PPA mem­bers.  I’ve had a sub­scrip­tion with them for years.  I learned about them from another pho­tog­ra­pher, and I con­tinue to rec­om­mend it as one of the best edu­ca­tional invest­ments avail­able.  Even at reg­u­lar price for non-PPA mem­bers, what you get for your money is unreal.  You’ll never get that amount of vari­ety and edu­ca­tion for that price any­where else.

PPA (Pro­fes­sional Pho­tog­ra­phers of Amer­ica) is the world’s largest non­profit asso­ci­a­tion for pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers.  Their mem­bers enjoy the best ben­e­fits and pro­tec­tion avail­able.  As the lead­ing cer­ti­fy­ing agency for imag­ing pro­fes­sion­als, PPA’s Pro­fes­sional Pho­to­graphic Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram is rec­og­nized through­out the industry.Those who have earned the Pro­fes­sional Pho­to­graphic Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion have passed a com­pre­hen­sive writ­ten exam mea­sur­ing their tech­ni­cal exper­tise, and have suc­cess­fully sub­mit­ted their work to a panel of judges for review and approval.  This is the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion that I carry and have to main­tain through con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion and a improv­ing port­fo­lio of work.  PPA also has Imag­ing USA, a week long con­ven­tion packed with tons of classes and hun­dreds of vendors.

WPPI (Wed­ding & Por­trait Pho­tog­ra­phers Inter­na­tional) is another amaz­ing orga­ni­za­tion pro­vid­ing indus­try lead­ing edu­ca­tion and resources to pho­tog­ra­phers around the globe.  I receive my Rangerfinder Mag­a­zine from them.  They also have their WPPI Con­ven­tion every March in Las Vegas and is sup­posed to be the biggest in the indus­try I believe.

Joy of Mar­ket­ing was cre­ated cre­ated by Sara Petty of Sarah Petty Pho­tog­ra­phy.  Sarah come to pho­tog­ra­phy from a strong mar­ket­ing back­ground after work­ing with Coca­Cola.  Thank­fully she has seen a need in our indus­try where her pas­sion for busi­ness is greatly needed since most of us pho­tog­ra­phers started because of our love of pho­tog­ra­phy, not busi­ness.  Of course, we have to be stronger at busi­ness than we do our pho­tog­ra­phy if we want to suc­ceed as a busi­ness.  Using The Joy of Mar­ket­ing, she makes avail­able the largest amount of pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness educ­tion I’ve seen to date.  I’ve even par­tic­i­pated in one of her spe­cial groups called the Pho­tog­ra­phy Mar­ket­ing For­mula where she drowned me for months with more infor­ma­tion than I can recount.  Because of Sarah, I have made tons of changes to my busi­ness so as to make it more sus­tain­able and prof­itable over the years.  Oth­er­wise I was at risk of being one of the many that fails due to unsus­tain­abil­ity result­ing from not charg­ing enough for my time and prod­ucts.  I also learned bet­ter sales, mar­ket­ing, net­work­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and more.  Def­i­nitely a must for pho­tog­ra­phers that aren’t strong in the busi­ness arena.

Can­non Learn­ing Cen­ter is a cre­ate site that Can­non has put together.  It has also made many improve­ments and changes over the years.  I’m not a Can­non user, but they do make great equip­ment.  Most peo­ple either for­get or don’t real­ize that Can­non is pri­mar­ily a research and devel­op­ment com­pany, not a cam­era com­pany.  So they are able to do amaz­ing things.  But I still say Nikon blows Can­non away in low light sit­u­a­tions (yes I tested my the­ory).  But all of that aside, they are amaz­ing, and this web­site is full of videos and tuto­ri­als for all kinds of how-to edu­ca­tion for pho­tog­ra­phers and video­g­ra­phers.  Since I’m work­ing on learn­ing how to make use of the video abil­i­ties of the newer cam­eras, this site has be very helpful.

ProS­e­lect  is my sell­ing soft­ware.  I use it to project view­ing and sales ses­sions for my clients.  With it, I can show slideshow which include my logo and a song of choos­ing.  I can then eas­ily review images on my 64″ pro­jec­tion screen, show­ing images at actual size from 60″ down to 4x6” with frames.  There is also a fea­ture that allows me to put these images (with or with­out frames) on room views, which can either be stock images or images of a clients actual room in their home.  With room views, my clients can see exactly how an image will look on a wall to the exact scaled size.  There’s really tons of things this soft­ware can do.  Some of my other favorite things includes lay­outs, album design­ing (which dra­mat­i­cally improved my work­flow by cut­ting design time by 75%), and detailed invoic­ing.  It really is the indus­try stan­dard, and no online image gallery will ever com­pare to this.

Lynda.com is an online library of how-to videos for just about every ver­sion of every soft­ware avail­able to the com­mon pop­u­la­tion.  There’s some free clips here and there that you can find so you can get a taste for the site first.  Even these free clips can be help­ful.  If you enjoy the site, you can either sub­scribe on a monthly basis, or for the entire year.  Of course you can also pur­chase DVD’s of some of the courses.  One of my favorites has been Pho­to­shop train­ing from Chris Orwig who is a pho­tog­ra­pher and an instruc­tor for Brooks Insti­tute, which is the best pho­tog­ra­pher in the coun­try.  But as I said, they have just about every­thing.  Any ver­sion of Pho­to­shop, and tons of top­ics for each ver­sion.  If you’re want­ing to know more about any soft­ware you have, then you really should check this site out.

Quan­tum Instru­ments Light­ing Equip­ment is what I used for my pri­mary light­ing source for event pho­tog­ra­phy.  So when peo­ple see that huge round light above my cam­era, it’s the Quan­tum Trio.  Quan­tum makes some of the best portable light­ing equip­ment, and they cus­tomer ser­vice and tech­ni­cal sup­port are the best I’ve ever expe­ri­enced.  I love the light­weight, ver­sa­til­ity, reli­a­bil­ity, and amaz­ing qual­ity of light I receive from my Trio.  If I could afford three more units, I’d buy them and use them for loca­tion portrait/fashion work where more than one light is needed.  For those look­ing for a small nugget or two of light­ing edu­ca­tion, they do have that as well on their site.  I doubt I’ll ever buy another speed light again since they’re less reli­able, less con­sis­tent, more restric­tive, not as good a qual­ity of light, and don’t last near as long as Quan­tum lights do.

Collages.net is who I use for my online image host­ing for my events.  No, my por­traits do not get posted online for sales.  You’ll never make any real sales to make a liv­ing with by try­ing to sale por­traits online.  Events are dif­fer­ent since the main profit is made before the event, com­pared to after as with por­traits.  Col­lages offers an amaz­ing site for host­ing my event images with, mak­ing them flashy and easy for my clients and their guests to view, order, and share.  Col­lages has always offered great prod­ucts and ser­vice over the years that I’ve been with them.  Some pho­tog­ra­phers almost exclu­sively use them for prod­ucts as well since they offer all kinds of print­ing ser­vices.  I only use them for my event can­did prints.  I use other ven­dors for my other prod­ucts, but there’s noth­ing wrong with using Col­lages.  As I said, they are a great com­pany.  They really go out of their way to work with pho­tog­ra­phers and bring them new prod­ucts and improved ser­vice all the time.  There are other com­pa­nies that do sim­i­lar things as well, but Col­lages has remained my pref­er­ence over the years because of their qual­ity of ser­vice and prod­ucts, and of course price as well.  You really can’t beat them.

As far as my prod­ucts go, that’s entirely dif­fer­ent ket­tle.  Prod­ucts are like equip­ment.  They can change at any moment I deem it nec­es­sary to sat­isfy the job.  If I don’t do my job right in the first place, no mat­ter of equip­ment or prod­ucts are going to fix it for me.  So in the end, get the edu­ca­tion and prac­tice till you’re at the point you can start work­ing and charg­ing as a pro­fes­sional.  When some­one that isn’t an edu­cated and proven pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher enters the mar­ket and starts com­pet­ing with those that are, it ends up caus­ing dam­age to the mar­ket.  Peo­ple start look­ing for “good enough” instead of qual­ity if it means they can save some money.  But those that charge next to noth­ing won’t be able to sus­tain them­selves over the years and will likely be a short lived name in the mar­ket, leav­ing their clients aban­doned.  So it’s really a dis­ser­vice to both the indus­try and the clients that hired them.  If you want to learn and grow to become a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher, start with the resources I’ve pro­vided, or oth­ers you may find.  And then when you’re ready, start work­ing pro­fes­sion­ally.  Of course, I know money needs still needs to be made.  Just be hon­est with peo­ple and let them know where you are and charge appro­pri­ately, if any­thing at all.  But don’t give your work away either.  Fare work deserves fare pay.  Just be hon­est about your skills and abilities.

I hope all of this infor­ma­tion is a help to you.  Please let me know if there’s any­thing else I can talk about that can help you.  Best wishes in your adventure!

I just wanted to share that my pho­tos from a wed­ding last year at Sot­terly Plan­ta­tion were used in an online pub­li­ca­tion called Rus­tic Wed­dings.  Here’s the link for you to go and read the arti­cle and see the images: http://rusticweddingchic.com/real-rustic-wedding-hollywood-md-sotterley-plantation

Amanda and I come across some great books as we work to grow our­selves and our mar­riage.  Here’s some favorites:

Mar­riage books:

• His Needs Her Needs
• His Brain Her Brain