If you read the post from a few months back, you would know about the friend who does Calligraphy for a side business and how I attempted to take some high quality photos of their stuff for them.
And more or less failed. It was a lot of lessons learned that day, and I planned to not make them again for the second attempt.
So things I did differently. First was approaching the situation with a completely different mindset. Instead of relying on my previous experience. I had lots of experience assisting shooting acrylic, but that was for a very different situation. More of archiving and record keeping. A bit of product for an e-commerce approach but we barely did anything like that at my job. This was very different, these pictures needed to show how useful they were. How colorful and cute it would make your wedding. So obviously instead of just shooting them in a lightbox, we went to a local park.
There were a few different things we were shooting that day. A big acrylic welcome sign was going to be the hardest. I had gone out the day before and picked up a few things to help with the shoot, and one that I’m very thankful to have found cheap was a large wooden easel.
We started with that in a few different spots for nice green backgrounds. As well as the last thing we shot was again the acrylic sign in front of a gazebo. Those didn’t come out because the sun was setting behind the gazebo by the end of the day.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @ 80 - 1/1250 Sec - F5 - ISO 400
I’ll go ahead and mention I’m just hand picking my favorites from this shoot. I delivered 25 edited and finished photos to the client, so she had plenty to pick and choose from or provide feedback. Here I’m just going over the ones I thought came out well and what I did differently.
I think the sign came out looking the best in this one. Unfortunately that was the spot with the least green grass to complement. But all the others it looked very unnatural in the edit. Shooting a big sheet of acrylic in the sunlight without getting reflections. I knew it would be the hardest one and that’s why we started with it. We tried our best, I knew to bring some microfiber towels to try and get the fingerprints off as we moved it from place to place. It was still better than we had done with acrylic before with the lightbox. But it was a challenge, that’s for sure.
The next thing to tackle was a sign for an advice book for the married couple.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @90 - 1/400 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400
I think this one came out pretty damn nice. The cute box and the sprig of branch were the clients, and I picked up a notebook and brought a fountain pen. Again I put thought into it before hand and thought if the sign is meant to accompany the book for people to write their advice in… Just makes sense.
I think by accident the more yellow and dead grass behind it pairs well with the gold on the sign.
And just for fun, I did one in almost all greyscale. Because I thought it looked cool.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @105 - 1/50 Sec - F14 - ISO 400
Next up we did a table setting for two purposes. First was a table number sign. Which we also did with a tile, as people have different choices for those.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @75 - 1/160 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @70 - 1/125 Sec - F9 - ISO 400
And last, but not really last because we did the sign again in front of the gazebo we were now shooting on the table, we had little tiles with people’s names on them. Coasters I believe they were used as. Very cool little ceramic tile with rubber stoppers on the bottom so it wouldn’t slide.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @38 - 1/160 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400 (this was one shot much wider to fit everything and then cropped to take out the lights I had set up)
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @56 - 1/1600 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400
And that’s enough to get the idea. Overall it was a lot of fun, gave me an opportunity to stretch out creatively. And for thinking in a different mindset from the photography I usually do. All for that and hopefully a few good pictures for the client. I think a few of the ones above came out really well. I’m happy with them.
The last thing I’ll mention is because it was a fairly major change I made that has SERIOUSLY helped my editing. I made the move to Lightroom with this photo shoot. Now I still use Photoshop for a lot, especially when anything needs major tweaking or heavy edits. But for the majority of what I shoot, Lightroom was a much better solution. I never tried it before, as the program I learned on was Photoshop. My professional photographer brother always preferred it. Although he did say he used Lightroom a few times when it came to shooting weddings, the idea of batch editing (making changes to all the photos in a collection at once) was very appealing. Especially when it came to a large shoot like the one I did that day. When we wrapped up and I came home to edit I had over 200 photos to sort through. Lightroom made that a lot easier to sort, rate and then edit.
Very happy I switched over and I would highly recommend it to anyone else.