[Sitting in the room waiting for the photography session to begin, the conversations I'm having with the other early arrivals are making me realize that beautiful bloggers are everywhere!]
The photography session is led by Me Ra Koh of Refuse to Say Cheese, who uses photography as a medium for storytelling. She offers photography workshops and is willing to start at the very beginning - scripting a DVD series for women that tells how to use a camera, tell stories with your photos, and start a photo portrait business.
Me Ra is self-taught, and in the 6 years since she started her business has traveled a success trajectory that would be the envy of any professional. She sees herself as a storyteller as much as a photographer, and focuses her creative attention on the story in front of her camera - what it is, who it's about and how best to frame it.
Here are her top 10 tips for doing just that:
1) Define the emotion, and dump anything in your image that doesn't support it.
2) Fill the frame. (She brings in the rule of thirds for nuance on how to do that beautifully)
3) Less is more.
4) How blurry do you want your background? And here she goes into aperture/f stops, and how the lens that came with your camera is probably worthless because it can't go down to a low enough f-stop. You need to go down to at least 2.8, she says, to get the clear foreground and blurry background that can often tell the story best.
5) How low can you go with your ISO? (that rhymes!) The best color saturation is at the low end of the ISO range, so she's recommending 100 as the optimum ISO for Canon, but warns when the light is low you'll need a tripod.
6) AI Servo. This is a secret that a lot of pros use. It's an auto focus mode that will lock on motion coming towards you or away from you. It's perfect for brides walking down the aisle, or kids running towards you or swinging. Side to side motion doesn't work.
7) External Flash. You want your shots to look like they were taken without a flash, in natural light with no shadows. The trick to doing this is in how you aim your flash. Some people like an oblique angle, so it looks like natural light coming in from a window, but another great solution is to throw the light behind you as a photographer - there's no flash in the eyes, and you have an even natural light with no shadows on the face.
8) Shutter Speed. If the available light isn't working for you, you can use your shutter speed to increase the light, but don't forget that the slower your shutter speed (longer exposure, more light, higher number) the grainier the result.
9) Three things to do in post-process - 1) add contrast 2) decide if the image will work better in color or in b&w & 3) add a vignette.
10) Pick one thing to work on at a time. Don't try to do everything at once. Choose one area you want to learn or improve and play with it. Explore & enjoy it.
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