Tara and Ramon live in the Washington D.C. area and are having their wedding in Jacksonville Florida. Here’s the catch, their wedding is this Friday! At first she was thinking she wouldn’t be able to get engagement photos and the custom designed guestbook that I make for my clients. I’m always up for a challenge. So, we shot on Monday. I processed the images Monday night. I designed the book this morning [Tuesday] and rush ordered it. So, we had fun making images, Tara and Ramon are going to get a fantastic keepsake from their wedding. Good times! Here are some shots from last night. Enjoy!

Faith and Greg are so sweet and clearly in love. Faith looked fantastic! My favorite part? It wasn’t 100 degrees and dripping from the humidity! I’d also like to give a big shout out to Bonnie for helping me during the shoot. She was my “voice activated light stand”. Ha! In other words, she held my flash. She did a great job! Thanks Bonnie!!!

I hope you enjoy the images as much as enjoyed making them.

Ok… I need to share a little about this next photo (the lighthouse shot). We were pretty much done for the night. There was no light left. Then, we decided to get one more shot. The lighthouse. I’m thinking, No problem. I’ll just light them. When we get there it’s PITCH BLACK dark. Even when I wasn’t looking through my camera, I couldn’t see Faith and Greg standing there. The only thing I could see was the light on the lighthouse and the light from the window on the right. If I can’t see them, my camera certainly can’t see them. Second issue, for me to get even a glimpse of detail in the lighthouse, I needed to crank my ISO (the sensitivity of my camera for the non-photographers) WAY up. So, I set it to 3200. Trust me when I say that’s pretty high. Third issue, at that high of ISO, it also made it so my flash is WAY too powerful, even at it’s lowest power. So, here’s how it went down (prepare… I’m about to geek out):

• First… to solve the flash power issue. Bonnie, Faith’s mom, was wearing a white top. I simply turned my flash down as low as it would go (1/128th power) and had Bonnie point the flash at her shirt. This bounced the light off of Bonnie and back towards Faith and Gregg. Perfect. Now I’m getting a bit of detail in the lighthouse while not turning the happy couple into bright white ghosts!

• Next… how to focus. This was a bit trickier. I got Faith and Greg into position and told them to get ready. I then estimated how far away they were from me. Most lenses have a little display on the top that is in feet and meters. This tells you how far away your subject is. So, I manually set the focus to “about” how far away I thought they were. Next, I “bracketed” my focus. I took a shot, twisted the focus ring a hair, then shot again, twisted, etc… I did this until I had about 20 shots. One was bound to be in focus!!!