Pardon my shameless Breakfast Club reference, but I’m fully aware that I’ve been MIA for longer than I’d care to admit.  So please, I implore of you, don’t forget about me ha.

Cliche as it may sound, but my new job certainly has my ‘me’ time on lock down so my picture taking has taken a bit of a back seat as I’ve gotten acclimated to my new routine. But despite the lack of free time, I’m still doing what I can to look through the camera lens.

Shooting weddings is certainly a dream of mine, and Andrew’s sister Kendall was kind enough to think of me when it came to her gorgeous big day.

This is one of my favorite shots of her. Can you say wedding day glow?!

Even though it’s so 27 Dresses, my favorite part of any wedding is the groom’s reaction to his bride when he first sees her walking down the isle. Well shucks, Nate doesn’t disappoint.

The details of her dress were just gorgeous.

And they lived happily ever after.

Nothing like sunshine, gators, fan boats and a camera to make recipe gold for some awesome photography opps. I threw technology inhibitions into the Flordia breeze and just shot away this past Thanksgiving week. And luck would have it, I captured some of my all-time fav images. Check. It.

Oh yeah…and I captured some monster gators too.

…I hope. Last weekend a great couple friend of mine and Andrew’s was kind enough to let me take a crack at their engagement photos. Despite the nerves of a first time ‘professional shoot’, this experience undoubtedly confirmed my dreams to make photography a career rather than just a hobby.

As cool as I tried to play it off, I had butterflies like you couldn’t imagine last Sunday. I did some Pinterest research naturally to peruse common poses as well as blog reading to get a sense for what couples are looking for in their engagement photos. After all, they serve as a timeless keepsake for this happy happy moment. The one thing I did want to keep in my mind was that I didn’t want these to look posed. Granted, it’s an engagement shoot, posing is a part of the deal. But it’s the unnatural, awkward posing I see that makes me cringe. My wish is for my photography to capture those moments that are similar to those you feel you missed out on because you didn’t have someone to click the pic. Have you ever been sitting on a bench with your partner in crime in front of a beautiful scene and wish someone was there to take some pictures of that candid, private moment? How about a sweet afternoon hike where everything just feels perfect but there’s no one around to capture that emotion? That’s what I want my photography to reflect…the moments you don’t want to miss that are perchance, that aren’t filled with pretense.

Technically, this was a great learning experience from head to toe. Learning the art of positioning throughout the shoot, helping to direct couples to pose naturally, what feels natural, what’s natural to them, lighting, and of course the editing afterwards. This is where shooting in raw would have been helpful but I think I did great in regular ol’ jpeg. (I’ll get there, I’ll get there). I have to consistently remind myself how far I’ve come and what I’ve accomplished because there’s still so much to learn and I feel like I’m still at the base of Photography Everest.

Not too shabby though – that background wasn’t blurry in the original photo (pats herself on the back), I’ll take it.

So what’s my next move. I’ve set a few short term goals for myself – an online photography class (bought), shadow a professional shoot, and most importantly, try to start outlining the arsenal of equipment I want to get and what that means for my pocket book (ouch). That’s like a whole other Mary Poppin’s bag deep can of worms that I can’t even…can’t even.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a babe!!

My dear friend was kind enough to lend her cutie of a kid for some photo practice this past weekend. I know the only ticket to becoming a successful photographer will be to practice, practice, practice so practice I shall. There were a few things I noticed while shooting that were great learning experiences.

• Lighting – especially with the sun – can be quite a challenge. It went from bright to dark real quick when you’re shooting from different angles and while aperture priority helps quickly solve that I also find that being able to manually control my settings, which sometimes means not the ‘perfect exposure,’ is what I prefer
• Backdrop – vital to the composition of your image. There were a few times where I wasn’t noticing the back drop while focusing on the lighting and such, which resulted in some retouching to create the over feel I was striving for. No biggie but in my opinion the less retouching you have to do the better.
• RAW vs JPG – a very new concept and intimidating at that. BUT would have been super helpful for editing afterwards. There are a few photos I would like to have better control over in terms of overall brightness, highlighting, etc.. and I know RAW provides those capabilities. That’s on my to-do list, or to-learn list rather.
• More-the-Merrier – I’m sure it’s a no-brainer to any seasoned photographer, but the more pictures you take the better, which requires you to be fast. That’s how you get those treasured few.

Here are some of my favs

There’s nothing like meeting with marketing consultants and agencies at work to make you feel green and unaccomplished in your own photography initiatives. My rational self reassures me I’m young, I’ve just started, I need to be kind to myself. My competitive, inner perfectionist favors instant gratification over a learning curve.

The culprit for my self-loathing, inner freak out was when one marketing firm asked to view our media library to take a gander at what they’d be working with as far as quality of images. Fair enough. And I thought hey, I know I’ve got some great shots of projects. Well much to my dismay, I learned the valuable lesson of shooting raw rather than in jpeg. Now in my self-study, I’ve come across the important of this but I kind of placed it on the back-burner until I start to get my barrings about me as I progress in skill. I thought the main advantage of raw files was more about the editing aspect afterwards rather than the file size and quality in raw. In other words, for high-res, billboard, top-of-the-line printing work, jpeg just doesn’t cut it. BUT…”you’re images are great ‘b-roll’ material, so that’s good news.” And to a prideful, competitive individual, those words were like daggers, completely deflating my balloon.

BUT…with the constructive words of criticism also came words of praise. “You’ve got the eye, you know what you’re looking for, you know what works.” Ahhh, and she’s back in the game! I like you John Smith (not his real name, could ya tell?), good save.

So that’s what keeps me going. The confidence that my eyes are always the camera lens and I’m learning how to translate that to actual prints. I know what I want. I can see it. I can envision it. I just need to hone it. And so as a reminder to myself that ‘I know I can’, this featured image is of 2 things I’ve successfully made. The lemon plant you see here was grown on a whim. I just popped a lemon seed from a fresh lemon into the soil (without much confidence from some who shall not be mentioned that it would grow might I add) but with a little hope and a healthy dose of water, well there she be. Next to it is the homemade sunscreen I made. I’m super excited about this and really looking forward to using it.

Cheers to I know I can!

My bestie got me this great book Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson (3rd edition) when I first bought my camera 3 years ago. Truth be told, I started to read it and take notes, being the good academic I am. And immediately after the first few pages, I was completely overwhelmed. And that was that. Closed the book and on the shelf it went. It wasn’t until I started to really take pictures and get frustrated that I couldn’t capture subjects the way I was envisioning that the book started to look more appealing.

Open, re-read first and second sections. NOPE – still intimidating. I guess I was afraid that once I started to mess around with the oh-so-scary manual settings I would break my camera and wouldn’t be able to get it back to my trusty old auto. I know, silly Maddie.

A few months ago I dusted it off again, threw out my old notes, and started fresh and determined. But it wasn’t until I had a lovely afternoon with my great photographer friend that finally got me over the hump. She let me play around with her cameras (Nikon D800 and D700) and all of a sudden, this wasn’t so intimidating!

For me the key has been practice, practice, practice and of course, reading the book. It’s really great at walking you through different exercises and concisely explaining how all the camera functions correlate. I think what I like best about the book is that the author offers tip and tricks of the trade coupled with his personal opinions, sort of like a must-see list from a friend that’s been where you’re about to go – you trust their opinion.

This image of the fireplace is from a company shoot a few weeks ago. We’ve launched a new sector to our business that features pre-fabricated units and we’re in desperate need of lifestyle images. Since I’ve become the resident photographer over the past 2 years, it’s been a great forum to practice. But this shoot was the first I dared to try manually. This was by far the best shot of the day. The sun was presenting to be quite an issue and I was getting increasingly frustrated, but the timing and settings for this image made it all worth it.

Don’t mind me while I… toot toot beep beep!

One of my biggest struggles in starting this blog was figuring out where and how to start. So many thoughts as to how I should go about getting this under way. “Should I wait until I get a bit better at shooting manually?” “I should design my logo first.” “What the heck am I going to write about that people are even going to want to read this?”

So I just started. After all, the best place to start is at the beginning! Fortunately enough for me, I’ve been able to start a concentrated effort on my adobe suite skills, specifically illustrator and photoshop at work. And thus, my logo was born. Many thanks to those who post instructional youtube videos without which I’d be lost. And choosing a name? Well, that took a better part of a month. And after all my idea boards, word association exercises, and Google searches it wasn’t until I went to actually start my blog and discovered what URLs were available that my name came to be! I swear it always ends up being something that comes about per chance in regards to such things. It just hits you.

So really this is a beginning of a beginning. My journey to honing my photography skills to the point where someone might want to pay me for them (fingers crossed). Personally, my absolute favs are the candid shots I’m lucky enough to snap every now and then. Yet, I know it takes so much more than that. So hop on board and join me as I start to bite off more than I can chew and try to learn the technical side of this art and along the way, get lucky with some great candid moments.