In honor of the beautiful weather we’ve been having in Cincinnati this week I thought I would do a quick post about taking better outdoor pictures of people.  Here are two tricks, one easy and the other requires a little more effort.

1. White Balance – All light sources, even the sun, cast a certain color on your subject.  On AUTO your camera tries to guess what color the light is and adjusts accordingly.  Even my super high end camera does a poor job of this most of the time.  So go into your settings and find “White Balance (WB)” or “Color Temperature” and select the best setting for your day.  If its bright and sunny, choose “Daylight”, if it’s cloudy or overcast choose “Cloudy” and if you are shooting a pretty shady area then choose, “Shade”.  This will make your colors pop and appear truer to life.  If you are unsure, take a test shot with each setting until you something that looks most like real life.

I didn't take this picture but it illustrates the point.

2. Reflector – If you are shooting into the sun (the sun is significantly behind your subject) your camera is usually going to expose for the brighter light source, which in this case is the sun.  This will leave you with a really dark subject and a pretty blue sky.  Or even worse, your camera will split the difference between the two leaving you with a slightly dark subject and a light blue/white sky.  To fix this you can try to bounce the sunlight back onto your subject using some sort of reflector.  They make fancy ones, but since you aren’t looking to start a photography business you could try something easier.  Grab  white sheet or blanket and have your spouse, friend or older child hold it at a 45 degree angle as close to your subject as possible without being in the shot.  This will throw some of that sunlight back on your subject and balance them with that super bright ball of gas and fire in the sky.  Needless to say, it’s easier said than done if your subject is a 2 year old who doesn’t sit still:)

Didn't take this one either, but you can see how she is balanced with the sky using a reflector, or maybe an off camera light.

Hopefully this helps a little.  Happy shooting!

Here at Fyrefly, we love handmade. Therefore we love Etsy.com. So we are bringing you the best for your wedding from the best Etsy sellers.

Looking for something to stick on your beautiful bridal head that is a little less traditional than a veil? You might enjoy these:

Rhinestone Headband from Feathers and Frills

Birdcage Veil by Velvet Owl

Feather fascinator by Lucia Bella

Gold flower headband by Everyday Fairytale

Designer Jessica Hirsche has an ongoing typography project where she publishes a new original-design letter each work day.

A few of our favorites:

3 things you could do with these pretty ditties:

1. Print your last initial and frame in an arrangement between 2 wedding pictures.
2. Print out the whole alphabet for your children’s room.
3. Print monogram on transfer paper and iron on to tea towels for a wedding gift.

Find the whole collection right here.

The last few days have been a bit crazy and when things get crazy the blog suffers. I am working on a few posts right now but in the meantime let me leave you with one of the greatest You Tube videos of all time…

I am kind of a stickler for good design.  I am not a great designer but I can fake it with simplicity most of the time.  I knew when I started my business that along the way I would need to have GREAT design in order to stick out amongst the crowd of photographers in this city.  So I started with really terrible logo, then I improved and improved until I had something I was ok with.

Then, by chance, I met Corey at a local coffee shop and we got to talking about life and school and all that good stuff.  Turns out she was a design major at the Art Academy.  I asked her if her class ever took on small businesses as a project and she said yes.  So I gave her my (terribly designed) card and hoped to hear back.  A few months later, she emailed me to say “Our class already has their project set for this year but…” I expected “…maybe next year”.  Instead she said “A friend and I are started a freelance design business and we are looking for projects to build our portfolio and we would like to take you on as one of our projects”.  Best part: “We wanna do this for materials cost only!”  Wow.  Along the way of starting your own business I think you need a couple breaks here and there just to keep you encouraged.  It’s a hard road to say the least.  This was one of my many breaks.

Starting in December I met with Corey and Zach from Yellow Whale Design and ironed out a new logo (which you can see in the header of the blog) and pitched an idea to them for letterpress business cards.  They were stoked!  They have been working their butts off the last few weeks to finish the business cards and I got them today!  I was so excited I spent some time photographing them so you could see the results of their hard work.  If you need some design please contact them through their website…they are just getting started but they are going places so get them while you can afford them:)

Once someone said to me, “Letterpress is so yummy.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself.

No two cards are exactly the same. Pretty nasty (in a good way) if you ask me.

You have to be really special to get one of these...I am getting "replicas" made to pass out to all the people who don't deserve them:)

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Newborn Pictures | Milford, OH On Friday I was lucky enough to meet little Genevieve on her 8 day “birthday”.    She is a sweet little girl who actually gave me a little smile when I said hi to her the first time…it might have been gas but I’ll take what I can get:)  Her parents, Ann and Dan, were so sweet!  They were super relaxed and made my job really easy.  For a bonus, they some great antique pieces in their house that made for some really great pictures.  I love the love seat with he purple cushion!!!!!

Ann and Dan purchased a 1 year package and that means I will get to see Genevieve at 6 mos. & 1 year as well.  It’s always really fun for me to see their growth and changes over the first year.  Here are some of my favorites from the day:

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Round #2 of shooting with a Holga, this time in Downtown Cincinnati.  Last round I wanted to make sure I got some shots so I taped everything and used the insert that came with it.  This time I took more risks so I removed the insert to get the random hard vignettes in the corner.  I also untaped most of it to see if I could get some cool light leaks.  And I went for some more dramatic light situations.  The results were better but I did end up losing 5 of the 12 shots in the process.  It’s kind of weird because it seems I might have one of the few well-made Holgas out there because there weren’t too many crazy things that happened.

Ilford HP5 PLus, ISO 400, B&W, 120 film, shot @ 6×6:

I love the juxtaposition of of old and new here.

Went for a portrait of a parking lot attendant but as you can see the light inside the booth was not good. The sun flare is pretty cool looking though:)

I used to work in an office.  Like a real office with office assistant’s and secretaries and what not.  Every year we would take our secretaries out to celebrate Secretaries’ Day.  Which was well deserved since they were the ones who did all the real work and we got all the credit.  Somewhere along the line it become offensive to call it Secretaries’ Day because it was offensive to call them secretaries.  They were so much more than that!  I know you are waiting for me to go on a rant about how I hate political correctness but…I agreed with it.  The administrative assistants in my office deserved the highest honors and titles so if they wanted to be called “Rulers of the World” I was all for it.

What a really long winded way to say…we have a new product!  It’s the Wedding Story Montage and it would be really offended if you called it a slideshow.  Here’s what it looks like:

Now imagine that on your 42″ LCD screen…pretty awesome! What a great way to tell everyone the story of your day.

*The Wedding Story Montage is available as an add-on to any collection and is included with our Boutique Collection. Email or call us at 513.254.4731 to see our complete collection pricing.

We get tons of inquiries from brides-to-be on a regular basis.  Once a bride contacts us, usually through email, it goes one of a few ways:

1. They book us over email or a phone call – YAY!  (Rarely happens, but YAY! nonetheless)
2. They set-up a meeting with us to talk more about their wedding and how we might fit into their plans. – YAY!, maybe even more YAY! than #1 because it means we get to hang out with them over coffee or food.
3. We get a response saying “I love your work but you are outside of our budget” or we never hear from them again. – not quite YAY! but we understand that we aren’t for everyone.

However, the most popular response by far is: “What can we take out of the package to make it cheaper?” My answer is almost always: “Nothing.  Every aspect of a Fyrefly Wedding is there to make your wedding photography experience AMAZING!  We have options that add to, but we don’t have any that take away from our experience.”

Sometimes we hear back, most of the time we don’t.   I understand…I really do.  Weddings are expensive, budgets are tighter now than they were two years ago and everyone is looking to save money wherever they can.  Even knowing all that, we really do have reasons why our collections are structured the way they are.  Email is a terrible way to tell people why we do what we do.  Sometimes it can feel like I’m lecturing, and the last thing I want to be is a lecturer.  So I thought, maybe a blog post would help…so here goes:

Here are the “anchors” of a Fyrefly Wedding and why they are so important to us…

UNLIMITED COVERAGE. Every wedding is a story.  You hire us to tell your story in pictures, not just take your picture.  The story starts with the bride getting ready in the morning and ends with the couple driving away pulling those annoying aluminum cans.  We want to tell your complete story and if we aren’t there for the whole day your story will be incomplete.

At one of my very first weddings I got a picture of a groom whose pants fell down on the way to his car because he had lost some weight before the wedding day. Earlier the couple told us they didn't care about the "running out" pictures and that we could leave whenever we wanted. We decided to stay for the whole story and ended up with the most memorable shot of the wedding.

DIGITAL COPIES. We see the pictures we take of your wedding as yours, not ours.  Remember, this is your story and we want you to have the whole story, not just the highlights.  So we give you a couple DVD’s with all your images on them to keep and look at forever and ever…and ever.

ENGAGEMENT SESSION. In order to tell your complete story it’s important for us to know you.  We’ve found that the engagement session is the absolute best way to get to know you as a couple.  We’ll talk, laugh, make fun of each other, tell stories and I will learn how you best react to the camera.  It makes the wedding day pictures soooooo much better.  It also makes it less awkward when I walk into the room to take pictures of the bride putting on makeup on the wedding day.  We even wrote an entire blog post on why we LOVE engagement sessions, which you can read here.

A GORGEOUS ALBUM. I love steak.  Especially a medium rare filet.  I’ll only order a filet at a decent restaurant because I know it’s going to be prepared and served the right way.  If I was ever at J. Alexander’s and they brought me a filet on a clean trash can lid I would be grossed out and furious.  The funny thing is that the steak would still have been prepared at the same restaurant, by the same chef with the same oils and spices but it just wouldn’t be appetizing.

Steak and wedding pictures?  What?  We believe your pictures should be prepared well and served well.  The wedding album is the presentation of all the hard work and preparation you put into making your wedding unique.  It is the coupe de gras.   We want it to be something that a couple is proud to show their grandkids 30 years from now.  In addition, we want to be extremely proud of the way our work is presented.  So our wedding albums are GORGEOUS, the perfect presentation of your once-in-a-lifetime day.  For a more in depth look into why we love our albums click here.

We know that a Fyrefly Wedding is not right for every couple.  Whether its the budget or our style we probably won’t even be the right wedding photographer for most.  We’re comfortable with that.  Our clients structure their budget in such a way to make sure that their story is told in the most romantic, fun and engaging way…through amazing pictures!  We love them for it.

So hopefully this helps you get an idea of where we’re coming from.  At the end of it all we want you to have documented proof that your wedding was romantic, stylish, beautiful and fun.  We want people to cry, giggle, oooh and ahhhh every time you pull out your album.  We want you to have the fondest memories of your day.  We truly believe the best way to tell your story is with a Fyrefly Wedding Collection.

*Our pricing starts at $2600 and includes everything discussed in this article.  If you think we might be right for your wedding feel free to contact us for complete pricing including some of the most popular collections.

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It’s no secret among photographers and photography enthusiasts that film photography looks better (if done right) than digital photography. The depth and feel of film as compared to a digital file is so much more visually interesting. Most decent photographers started out by taking a photography class where film was the standard medium they learned on. They may use digital now but they at least have a working knowledge of film and how photographs are made without the use of a computer.

As I have said before on this blog, I am completely self-taught.  I loved what I was able to do with a point and shoot and decided to invest lots of time reading books and practicing to learn how to be a better photographer.  My first real SLR camera was digital.  I learned how to shoot using digital terms and a bunch of automatic settings inside my fancy digital SLR.  I have since switched to all manual and have learned much of what I need to know in order to be a “real” photographer…except that film thing.

One of my favorite wedding photographers is a guy by the name of Jose Villa.  Jose is a brilliant photographer for so many reasons but one of them is because he shoots mostly film.  Recently he wrote an article about why he shoots film.  It was intriguing.  I found myself challenged by it and wondering if I could learn to shoot film myself.  The problem is that I didn’t want to invest a bunch of money into equipment if I had no chance of ever being a great film photographer.  So I decided to figure out what my cheapest option was…and I found Holga.  To learn more about a Holga visit the link but basically it’s a cheap plastic camera that shoots medium format film, which is a step up from 35mm film.  Cameras that shoot medium format are usually hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars so it is rare that a $15 camera used it.  The  beautiful (and the reason why it so inexpensive) thing about a Holga is that they aren’t made very well.  They only have 1 shutter speed, 3 focal lengths and 1 aperture setting.  Basically it’s a toy camera.  But because you are able to shoot medium format film and because of it’s imperfections, you can get some amazing shots out of it.

All that to say, I bought my first Holga last week.  I took one roll of B&W film to see what the thing could do and now I have it back and ready to let you see.  Before you are too critical, let me say it’s my first roll of film on it, I don’t really know how to use it yet, but I am excited about what it can possibly do.

My first roll of Ilford Delta 120, 400 ASA, B&W film shot at 6×6cm: