FREE 2.5 HOUR Wedding Photography Tutorial | Behind The Scenes at 10 Full Wedding Days

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] was that too aggressive that felt too too aggressive let's try this instead welcome to the tutorial i'm taylor jackson i am a wedding photographer and have been for just over 15 years now i've probably photographed about a thousand weddings at this point i haven't counted because it's a lot to love to count that up but i photograph anywhere between 60 to 70 weddings every single year and i have a lot of fun doing it i honestly think that wedding photography is the best job that you can have as far as time freedom goes it's amazing because yes you do have to work saturdays but the main benefit is that you now have monday to friday free you kind of inverse the nine to five job and then you're also working for yourself too that when you are working nine to five or you're working for someone else all those hours you're putting in are benefiting somebody else in the future benefiting a company benefiting a ceo when you're working for yourself as an entrepreneur any of the hours that you put into your business right now just actually pay off for the rest of your life so if you spend those hours now it is an investment that will continue to pay off both in time freedom and just in general fun i think as well like my big thing is time freedom followed by interesting experiences that are unlocked by doing something so i think getting into photography and getting into video is a way to unlock those unique and interesting experiences and then beyond that financial freedom is is kind of nice to have as well that you don't have to be too stressed financially and i feel like the the margins in the wedding photography industry quite honestly are pretty high so um yeah amazing business to get into today we're going to be going to wedding what i realized though is that i initially wanted to make this just a full day in the lifestyle tutorial where we just went to a wedding and i talked about every individual element but on really any individual wedding day you don't get a full mix of the elements wedding photography really is a culmination of all other styles of photography so when you're out there you're a landscape photographer you're a product photographer you're obviously a portrait photographer you are a fast movement in low light you're setting up flashes you're you're doing everything in regards to photography i would say the first 10 weddings are very very stressful you will leave them feeling completely depleted because you've just worked mentally so hard and you've just i'm very introverted so it's very difficult for me to just talk to people all day and talk to large groups of people and when you come home from those first weddings you will be just depleted of all energy and you will need to sleep after about 10 12 weddings you will have problem solved at least all the technical aspects of it and weddings will become a lot easier from a technical standpoint if you're introverted and quiet it's still going to be difficult to do the social element of things but to not have to do the technical problem solving on the day and to know that you can just go in and you can create amazing work in any situation really does just give you a lot of confidence and a lot of motivation and motivation to try new and creative ideas as well which is um something that like in the beginning it's you just want to get everything done you want to make your couples happy as you move forward you can get a little bit more creative and you can spend some time doing some some ideas that you might not have had the confidence to do early on to punch in here for a moment i wanted to let you know that there are chapters in the description below so you if you want a specific topic you can bounce around um also all the presets you're going to see are my presets also links in the description below they come as part of the member site as well so if you're interested basically what you're going to learn today is all the photography skills required to go and photograph a wedding a lot of the courses that i have over on the member site that you have access to if you sign up you get all of them are more focused on actually booking weddings though there are things like the off-camera flash guide and introverts guide to posing those are courses that exist there but primarily i would say it's mostly business content so if you're interested in learning how to actually book weddings um the big thing for me is that i wanted to be a second photographer and no one would ever hire me so i had to kind of just figure it out myself so all the content on the site is kind of from that perspective to just go out and build your own business for yourself that no one else is going to be the person that's pushing you that you do have to be self-motivated enough to go out and make this happen for yourself and now back to the tutorial we'll do one of those slides first we're going to talk about gear and the gear that you need to photograph a wedding i primarily use a nikon kit now you'll see in the video that this is my canon kit as a youtube individual i also use sony and fuji quite often so i do have a pretty good perspective of all brands out there and and how they would integrate into wedding day i will do my best to keep an updated list of gear that i would currently recommend in the description below but know that all companies have professional grade products that i would be totally happy to use at any wedding day i just happen to be a nikon shooter primarily here's the canon gear i guess welcome to the gear section of the video we're joined today by my usual wedding kit in a peak design messenger bag inside this peak design messenger bag there are two camera bodies we're going to talk about them first then we're going to talk about lenses then we're going to talk about flashes it is important to have two camera bodies as a wedding photographer or potentially even more the main thing and the main reason being that you want backup of backup of backup and for that reason i also use cameras that have two card slots so as you can see inside here there are two sd cards that is absolute best case it is possible to use a camera that only has one card slot older cameras typically have one card slot if it's something like an xqd it's very very secure and there's a very minimal chance of anything ever happening that said it is nice to have a second card slot and every camera manufacturer right now both in their digital slrs and also their mirrorless lines all have cameras with two card slots so if you can get one pick that up instead these camera bodies are the canon r6 um i am personally using for the first time ever two of the exact same camera bodies in the past i've never done that i don't think it's 100 required in order to shoot weddings if you're shooting a lot of video content it's nice to have the same bodies just for color matching it makes your post-production process a little bit easier i find with photography it doesn't really matter that much as long as you're kind of shooting within the same brand usually you might see me break this rule on youtube but for the most part if you can shoot the same brand and roughly maybe the same release time so within plus or minus maybe three or four years usually the colors will be close enough out of the camera the reason that we have multiple camera bodies is for backup so if something were to happen if you were to drop one if one were to get stolen that you have a backup camera body to go to we'll talk about the nice to have bag in a moment which is actually another camera body that i keep in my car in case the absolute worst case happens and both camera bodies happen to go missing during a wedding day or they're stolen or whatever um again backup of backup of backup we're gonna be talking about a lot of backups throughout the this entire tutorial as far as camera bodies go honestly there's not a whole lot to talk about the main thing we'll get to this in the setup stage that you want to be able to shoot raw which every single camera that's come out really in the past number of years can as well as you want to have access to manual control settings within your camera again talk about that in a little bit so really any camera body that has been released within the past five or so years is great for wedding photography a lot of the advancements that you're seeing and the reasons to purchase new cameras all come with video upgrades and if you're photography only you you don't need those which means you get to save a lot of money purchasing cameras that said make sure you have backups of backups of backups now onto lenses as you can see my two cameras here i have a 35 and an 85 millimeter lens i love to have two prime lenses on a wedding day getting into photography it is the most cost effective way to get really phenomenal quality out of your lenses as well as that really nice shallow depth of field if you are looking at something like a 24 to 70 you're gonna have to spend a lot of money to get one that's of quality if you're looking at the kit lens that comes with your digital slr or mirrorless camera make sure you really dive into how good that lens is and how well it performs in non-ideal lighting scenarios when you're outside in the perfect shade a lot of these cameras are going to do really well with their kit lenses but when you get into significantly more challenging environments with lights hanging around the room or spotlights shining into your camera you are going to start to experience some difficulties with lesser quality glass including ghosting and chromatic aberration and all kinds of other issues that you can find so i would say begin with prime lenses one as a way i think to really hone hone your craft first i feel like i'm always a little bit more lazy when shooting with a 24 to 70. with something like a 35 millimeter lens you consciously have to frame every single photo or an 85 millimeter lens and there is a significant separation between both of these lenses you can tell when an image is shot with an 85 and you can tell when it's shot with 35 so your end gallery has a little bit more pop if you are somebody that enjoys the 50 millimeter focal length which is generally i would say kind of the more quote unquote normal focal length in the past at least i personally because of my introverted nature enjoy the 85 focal length i can be back from people a little bit i don't have to be all up in their faces if you are someone that is just fine with that a 50 millimeter lens might be the option for you and that kind of splits the middle here and if you are doing something like a 50 as your main lens you might want to look at something a little bit wider on the wider end of things for your second camera body or to just have in your bag i would say wedding day i never really go wider than 24. if i ever do need to go wider than 24 the workaround to that is that you just turn your camera sideways and you make a quick panorama so say for instance we've found ourselves in this room and i have to do a group shot with 35 people if that all doesn't fit in my 24 millimeter lens view or 35 in in the case of this at that point i will just turn my camera sideways i will make a panorama with everybody smiling facing the camera i'll probably do it a few times to make sure nobody blinks and then i will build that in post production make sure you try that out before just doing it on the day but know that it is possible and it is a possible work around so you don't have to have the the really heavy super wide angle lenses in your bag all day this is honestly this is this is what i bring to wedding day in a minute we're going to be talking about the nice to have lenses and the lenses that would be the the next step in this but for now i'm going to keep showing you what's inside this bag inside this bag i have a backup lens which for whatever reason if this lens just stops working this lens stops working i'm able to still continue my wedding day one single backup battery and a charger uh depending on the battery life of your cameras you might require more than this with this specific system i'm good with it with a nikon zed series which is what we're filming this on i'm good with just having one single backup battery for that system as well and a lot of the newer cameras you can actually charge by usbc which means that you can bring a usb c cord and just a cell phone charger and you can charge your camera kind of as you go some of them will only allow charging when the camera is set to off some of them will charge all of the time but know that that is a possibility find yourself running low on a wedding day and now moving into flashes i have one flash i have a backup flash in my second bag which we'll see in a moment this is the godox or godox v1 and it is a phenomenally powerful flash and as you can see the the battery in it is quite significant which means if you're shooting this at a very high intensity uh that you will just be you'll have access to use the flash over and over again um and also it will last you all day no problem keep the charger in a second bag just in case something does happen but i would say it is going to be a very rare circumstance if you can get through an entire battery in this flash throughout the day they all come with modifiers so this is the v1 c for canon if you're a nikon shooter v1 n if you're a sony shooter v1s fuji shooter v1 app and almost 100 of the time i'm always going to be using this on my camera we're going to talk about off camera flash in a moment but i would say as long as i can get away with using on-camera flash especially the newer camera bodies that you can just really you have access to a lot of a lot more sensitivity as far as iso goes than we had in the past so you have to rely a little bit less on flash and as long as you have good quality of light which we're going to talk about throughout this tutorial you're likely going to find yourself creating really fantastic images really just in any situation without a flash so know that flash comes in as something to enhance the scene rather than something to just light the entire scene in my peak design sling i have two items that are nice to haves that are not required and there might be a third item we're actually filming with it it's a 24 to 70 f 2.8 quite expensive but worth having i think if you are somebody that if you're finding yourself in a lot of challenging and also small environments and in tight spaces with a lot of people uh most of my weddings i find that i have enough space to move around that i'm not too worried about something like that happening that i'm just like really kind of in a corner and i have to make a bunch of frames from that corner what i find myself doing and using a lot more is this 70 to 200. i use this for pretty much every ceremony that i ever shoot because of the versatility that i can be from 70 to 200 which means i have enough zoom to zoom around the scene rather than to run around the scene and during a ceremony definitely important that i don't want to be the center of attention so if i'm able to just get around that that room with this that's going to make me a lot happier and make the guest experience a heck of a lot better so expensive but definitely worth it if you are just starting out and you don't have the the capital to buy one of these uh there are a number of companies that will rent them and they'll ship them to you in pelican cases and they'll just arrive at your door and you get to use them for the weekend um personally i would spend a lot of my profits from my first wedding to rent this one you're gonna get significantly better photos for your couple and two selfishly because if you are in the early stages you're building your portfolio and if you can build your portfolio with the best professional gear it is going to just make that process of starting to book a lot more weddings a lot faster so 7200 definitely put it on your list at some point until then you can definitely get away with an 85 or you can buy a 135 or a 105 but i would definitely put this on your list of nice to haves in the future the second nice to have is an camera flash trigger this is for the the godox system it is the x2t and just like the v1 it comes with a modifier based on the first initial of your camera company and basically what this means is that i can trigger this so i put this on top of my camera and i'm now able to trigger my flash wherever it is in the room in my real life experience i have never put the flash in a place where they haven't been able to communicate doesn't require line of sight that it just goes out and it just finds that flash and it makes it trigger that said again don't use the flashlight the entire scene unless it's absolutely necessary but it is nice to have maybe a little flash to illuminate the podium so that whoever speaking if for instance if you're on that 7200 and you're zoomed in way across the room the best practices to have your light as close to the subject as possible so if you can have your flash somewhere right here and somebody's speaking on a microphone right here you can run anywhere you want in the room and they're still going to be in great light so something to think about there's a lot to be learned about off camera flash and there's actually a number of videos if you type in taylor jackson off camera flash you'll probably find a number of videos that at least kind of go through my process for off camera flash which we're not going to get too heavy into throughout this tutorial but basically my strategy is that i don't set up any soft boxes octo boxes really anything at all that i set up a single flash the v1 on a light stand and i'm bouncing it off of items around the room so the ceiling is great if i was just pointing the light at the ceiling that it would just give a nice kind of natural light to the scene or off this wall if i wanted something more three-dimensional and directional and i find by doing that it one it makes a learning curve a lot faster and the fumbling around to set things up time just doesn't exist anymore that you just set it up and point out a thing and and that's it rather than being inside a soft box trying to set your light up and going in and modifying things it's just on a wedding day unless you have someone dedicated as an assistant it just makes it very difficult to actually use in the field so i find that this works better for me i feel like it just generally as far as guest experience and couple experience goes to have one single light on a light stand is a lot better than setting up a huge softbox somewhere in the room it still feels like a wedding and it doesn't feel like you're being too obtrusive to the scene that is all for nice to have gear with all of those i am quite happy to go out and photograph any wedding day and really that combination of gear is everything that i've used to photograph the last i don't know thousand ish weddings that i've done and i've been very happy with it so that's all for the gear section of this video moving into the camera settings that i changed on the physical settings so this isn't talking about kind of manual photography this is talking about what i actually changed within the menus and i'm going to keep it general for all brands the thing that i changed first is that i set my camera to raw mode a lot of them come in jpeg for some reason and i just set that immediately to raw in wedding photography i like to shoot raw plus jpeg what i use that jpeg for when i get home at the end of the night it's very easy to upload to the cloud a bunch of jpeg files that maybe takes an hour an hour and a half rather than trying to upload all the raw files for off-site backup that might take depending on where you live might take a couple of days uh and i find that that's just kind of something that fits into my workflow and gives me a little bit of uh it relaxes some anxiety that at least end of the wedding that i have an off-site back up somewhere even if it's just the jpegs number two is to make sure that your camera is shooting to both memory cards it is important as a wedding photographer to have two memory cards in your camera uh make sure that it's shooting to both uh the one time so basically i would want that shooting full backup so that it's shooting the same raw and jpeg file to both cards the one time that i may change that up is if you're shooting hybrid coverage so you're doing both photography and video if you need to be switching very quickly between photography and video modes sometimes whatever the slower card is in there will hold you up a little bit if it's trying to write raw and jpeg files to it so in that case i'll actually set it to be raw to the main card and jpeg to the secondary card but that's a very specific thing that hopefully you won't have to worry about and third um i guess this used to be a thing that i would change on all my cameras but moving forward into how good the mirrorless cameras are that are coming out now i don't really do a whole lot so in the past i would be changing my digital slr to autofocus continuous and setting it to single point so i actually move my single point autofocus around you can do zones you can do whatever you're comfortable with but i personally would use that single point and i would be setting my focus point and what autofocus continuous does is basically if that focus point is on somebody and i'm half pressing that is tracking back and forth with them with the newer mirrorless cameras i am pretty happy to let them run on full automatic mode but i do like to have a quick override setup so you just have a single button that for instance if you can set one button to either add or remove the facial recognition feature so eye and face autofocus it is important to have on most of the time i would say i leave it on 98 of the day but there are some moments and some quick situations that you find yourself in that you need to quickly disable that and you don't want to have to go into the menu so if you can set a button to do that it's way easier one situation that would come to mind for that say the couple is doing the ring exchange and they're up on a bit of a stage and the priest's face is in the background and it just keeps trying to focus on the priest's face and not on their hands that would be a time that would be just quickly disable that and actually just focus on their hands beyond that while it is nice to have my nikon at least my nikon z62 i set one of the front function buttons to actually cycle through autofocus modes while it's nice to have that i find that leaving it on full auto mode all the time and whenever you do need to override something by just touching on the back um the lcd to actually focus on whatever you're touching on i find that to be a better system i know you have to pull your camera away from your face to do that but i found that it's not really that big of a problem and i can very quickly override any situation um in the field no problem and that is really all i change when it comes to uh setting up my camera the the benefit i guess of most cameras these days is that they come straight out of the box pretty much ready to go which is not something that could have been said a bunch of years ago so enjoy not doing a whole lot if if you discover obviously something that you could do to make your process more efficient obviously include that but for the most part default buttons are going to be pretty good and they're probably labeled as well so they're easy to find if you're just out in the field and you're like oh like where's my white balance button if it's labeled it's a little bit easier to find than if you've buried it under like c5 or something like that i guess you could always make labels and put them on if you wanted but i don't know maybe that's a topic for another day when it comes to actual photography settings i'm going to walk you through a little bit of my process so i shoot everything in manual in full manual mode uh it is i would say realistic to shoot in aperture priority if you're on a digital slr you're looking through an optical viewfinder you're not really seeing what the images that you're getting but if you're on a mirrorless camera i'd be a lot more comfortable on aperture priority because at least you're seeing the decisions that the camera is making in real time um i personally like shooting manual because it speeds up my post production at the end of the day that if i'm shooting aperture priority everything's kind of a little bit all over the place it's all pretty close but it's all going to be the exposure is just a little bit different if you're shooting manual especially for the family photo section of the day that everything is just a very easy batch correction rather than small adjustments on each individual image i also personally just kind of like having the full control of manual when i walk into a scene my lens is usually set to wide open or near wide open i will shoot pretty much every lens wide open all day unless given a reason to stop down that reason could be for family photos if we're adding a second layer of people that i need to make sure that focus goes all the way through but i would say on a normal wedding day that that's maybe five percent of the wedding day or even less maybe like two or three percent because of that manual is kind of very easy for me that one of the variables is already kind of locked to being wide open the other variable of iso the ideal is to keep it as low as possible high iso and new cameras is no problem anymore but it still is good practice to keep the iso as low as you possibly can so basically i'll walk into a room like this my f-stop will already be set to wide open i will have my iso maybe at 100 or 200 and that will kind of tell me what shutter speed i need i want to make sure that my shutter speed is higher than my the millimeters of my lens so if you're on an 85 millimeter lens it's probably good to be at like at least one slash 100th of a second or higher if you have stabilization in that lens or in your camera body you can kind of go a little bit lower but also always be aware or at least in the case of when you're photographing people during a wedding day that people move and if you're photographing them at 1 30 of a second that you're going to start to get a little bit of motion blur whenever they're moving or on their microphones giving their speech that if they're moving their head a little bit you're going to start to see a little bit of softness and kind of all of their facial features but maybe their bodies will be crisp which would be a little bit of a weird thing so then as my shutter speed if it has to come down to let in more light say it's night time in here so as my shutter speed comes down and i hit that maybe i'm comfortable at 1 100th of a second on my 85 millimeter lens at that point i'll start bringing in iso to make sure that i'm kind of shooting the exposure that i want um that's kind of i don't even know what this exposure it's not really even a triangle anymore just kind of like two elements balancing off of each other but that's kind of what i do and that's the way that i've found that it works the best for me i like having that manual control and knowing exactly what my camera is going to do in every situation that if i point my camera towards a light that it's still going to be exposing for the people that i want the scene rather than making the frame a whole lot darker because there's now this big light source in the scene there are a number of settings on photos throughout this tutorial but there are i would say all of the the later wedding days that i've done the full wedding days they will all have settings on them as well so if you want to see a full wedding day with all the settings on it there's a whole lot of them over on my channel if you choose to shoot aperture priority and i would probably recommend that for at least the first couple of weddings uh it is much easier you literally set whatever your f-stop what you want it to be if you're if you're shooting a good quality lens you can shoot that wide open for sure if you want to be adding a little bit more depth of field or if you're nervous because you're shooting at 200 millimeters and there's two people in the scene and they're not their eyes aren't on the same plane of focus at that point maybe it makes sense to stop down a little bit but i would say that i'm pretty happy and pretty comfortable with the both the aesthetic look as well as the versatility of the fact that i can go into any room wide open for the most part and have that as a starting point um you'll find that if you're out in bright bright sun even if you're at maybe f 1.4 f 1.8 i don't think it'll be a problem at all but one point four one point two um you'll maybe at some point max out your shutter speed so if your camera only goes up to one slash eight thousandth of a second for shutter um you may max that out and you might not be able to make it uh the shutter speed any faster at that point is another time that i would maybe bring the f-stop down a little bit but i would say that that very rarely happens that happens when i shoot lenses are the the 1.2s but those are expensive and not really that necessary for wedding photography that 1.4 1.8 or f2 is more than good enough in pretty much every case that i have ever found myself in throughout my career of many many many weddings go to the rings tree beautiful day for some photos um i knew that the last light was going to be happening over here so we scheduled towards the beginning of golden hour so that we knew for sure that was still going to exist so that's me the first location my couple's hotel is conveniently located right here four minutes away i feel like four minutes means there's only 500 steps remaining in this journey do you know that walking downstairs actually burns more calories than walking upstairs that's not true i just made that up this is amazing all right i might um i might bring you guys over this way just like one or two steps that's perfect and same deal just get really nice and close together engagement sessions used to be something that i would do for every single one of my couples but i'm noticing that they're becoming a little less common uh at least now i'm not sure why that is but it's something that i've definitely noticed what an engagement session is is a an excuse for you to get it with your couple to do photos of them to get a little bit more comfortable with each other before the actual wedding day so it kind of all depends on if your couple actually has a use for those photos or wants to do those photos if they're both people that really are hiring you just to be a photojournalist for the day there's a pretty good chance that they're not really going to want to do that session that an engagement session something that forced feels a little bit weird if you are talking with a couple that's a little more down that line you can always suggest something like we actually go out and do an activity they can they can go to the pub or have a picnic or whatever it might be and you can just follow along and document i found that to be very successful in a very good way to actually show people's true personalities which is kind of cool that you're able to show up for that hour window and actually capture who they truly are and i would say that the only way that i was able to do that with people that really weren't did not want to do an engagement session was by coming up with something that they would just want to do had i not been there with a camera and then coming and documenting it with them and then if you are able to get them in front of your camera prior to the wedding day selfishly you get to build a little bit more portfolio with them and you get to deliver them images that are not in their wedding attire which i think are equally as valuable to the actual wedding day images in a lot of cases and then you all get to become a lot more comfortable with each other going into the wedding day that no longer are you the photographer that's arriving and you're meeting for the first time the morning of the wedding that now you have some sort of rapport and then the other benefit is that couples get a chance to actually see themselves in your photos so they know if there's anything that they do weird that maybe they don't want to do or if there's any constructive criticism to you as a photographer of what like what we really love what we didn't quite love it's always nice to have and i honestly do welcome that before the actual wedding day because going into the wedding day that's kind of a one shot you don't get to redo that and the more information i can have on their expectations leading into the wedding day the happier i am overall engagement sessions we literally just kind of go for a walk around uh we pick a nice spot to begin and we just go from there i would say that the 85 millimeter prime is my go-to lens for this shoot you'll see a lot of my 35 which is on there right now uh and i'm going to roll a little bit of the behind the scenes so you can hear what we talk about yeah even if you want to come this way just like a little bit more like that's good and then exactly the same thing you're just kind of doing there then we stopped at a fruit stand where the owner directs all the photos he knows that do you want do you want to join for really though he doesn't let anyone else direct photos he just uh this is this is his life this is his passion not fruit if you ever absolutely have to shoot with direct sun i just never have people looking directly at the camera this is ridiculous so good and maybe put an arm on each other get really nice and close walking shots i always shoot really fast because i always get awkward foot positioning so take a lot of photos pick the best ones this is me on the piano by the way i don't like to brag but i'm a pretty famous pianist i'm gonna have you right about here and if you just want to hold hands just kind of look out that way there's a lot of dynamic range in the scene which kind of makes it feel not as cohesive as it possibly could but i still really like the photos all right looks good if you guys want to turn around and come back this way and yeah you can look at each other only regret on this shoot is that we didn't spend a whole lot of time in the streets because we had so many amazing scenic locations to get to might have you guys in the center of this ridiculous incredible scene if we just have all to ourselves so just in the center of the the one thing we did do really well was time this in a way that not a lot of other tourists and people were around while we were taking photos uh which is my favorite time to take photos let's go there can you look at each other [Music] one thing that i touched on in the intro section is being an introverted photographer and i really do believe that wedding photography is kind of the perfect job for an introverted person it might seem counterintuitive it seems like you're controlling people you're doing family photos you're yelling and screaming getting all kind of you're hurting cats essentially and as it turns out 90 of the day is just kind of all candid that it's whatever you make it that you're setting up the shots you're doing those detail shots that you are in the vicinity of people for the entire day but most of the day is just going to be pure photojournalism that you're just kind of trying to make the best you can out of whatever situation you're currently in so i have personally found that by being an introverted photographer and and finding myself in the wedding space that yes there are definitely times uh specifically during family formals and during the wedding party shots that really are out of my element but the rest of the day i feel very natural after going to a few weddings the first couple of engagement sessions were very difficult it took me a long time to get myself to a point that i was comfortable just talking to people and setting up shots and asking them what to do for poses we're going to talk a little bit more about posing within this tutorial but there really were a few kind of key things that took me from making okay work that i was kind of happy with to actually creating work that i was very happy with and really enjoying the overall experience as well which was something that in the beginning was very difficult for me that i didn't really leave any session being like wow that was really great this is what i was born to do but pretty quickly after the first maybe 10 15 sessions i really did start to get comfortable and i really did start to feel like it was a lot of fun so don't take introversion as a negative getting into this industry know that you will start to feel at home eventually and it it will get there it just takes a little bit more time it's not the end of the world and you can create amazing work and if somebody's telling you that like this isn't really the career for you they're wrong people people always tell you that they'll always try to tear you down and not let you become successful so don't stress too much about that and now we're going to get a coffee and we're going to head back to the wedding so the getting ready section of the day happens pretty much at most weddings i would say there are elements that i'm i'm seeing disappearing over time the getting ready and the details i would say is one of those elements that looking back even five years ago i do a lot less and my clients request that i do a lot less that they're not looking for five shots of the dress hanging they want that that one single shot um and a lot of my couples don't even care about that and they tell me that in the first meeting that they're like we don't why do i want a shot of my dress hanging that's weird so really get a good understanding of what your couple's desires are for their wedding photography in the first meeting or the first phone call or skype call or whatever it might be because it really will set you up that if you walk in right now and we start photographing all kinds of details and that is not something that my couple wants immediately there's going to be a little bit of a disconnect there and the trust element isn't going to be as strong as it could be whereas if you show up and you know exactly what they want you to do that you can just get right into that and you can just kind of keep the day and the momentum going my big thing for wedding days is to never add any additional stress and to try to solve any possible problems that if you see something arising if you can solve that without telling one of the members of the couple if you can solve that with a venue staff or maybe with the mother of the bride or somebody that's not the couple always recommend it so now we're gonna go in we're going to do some details another thing that i really like to do at this stage is that typically as a new human being to all these people i don't want to just arrive in the scene and just immediately start taking photos and candids of everyone i feel like that's a little bit too much of a hard start so i go in and i actually photograph i'll do some flat lays or i'll photograph the dress or the shoes or whatever it might be but i always want to make my presents known and to make hopefully a couple of the members kind of involved in that so they start becoming a little bit more comfortable to the fact that there is this random weird photographer in the room that's eventually going to be taking photos of them and once you make that transition from photographing details like the rings or the shoes or whatever it might be to photographing the people it feels a lot more natural and it's more of a soft start and maybe one more thing i think it's very important to be conscious of what people are currently looking like that if they're half done with makeup or their hair is done and their makeup's not done don't just start grabbing candids of them wait until everyone's pretty much completely finished i would say as far as hair and makeup goes bride included that all very rarely if ever photograph kind of forward-facing shots of a bride getting her makeup done because it's always half done so i'll usually start the gallery or i'll usually start my photo coverage maybe with some more abstract shots of over-the-shoulder kind of some hair and not just direct shots of of somebody's face that isn't quite finished in makeup yet uh and then i'll usually ask the makeup artist and the hair stylist like whenever they're done let me know i want to come in and usually what they'll do is they'll just grab some powder or even just a naked brush and just like do some kind of fake brush strokes and well i know it's not a real moment it's a staged moment it is basically it saves you from just photographing somebody getting their makeup done for 35 minutes because i don't know when makeup's finished usually so it's much easier to come in and just kind of make that a known thing to be like hey can you let me know when you're finished and i'll come in and i'll grab the three or four shots that i need and then you start the gallery strong i think it's also important that when they when they're clicking through their final image gallery if it starts with a bunch of photos that they're just not super comfortable with themselves in it's going to set off their experience for the rest of the gallery so start really strong when possible and i would even say include less images from the getting ready in order to make the images that are there extra strong you've never even been to the wedding yet this is the first you've seen a wedding really in this tutorial so far uh so arriving at the wedding day uh what i typically do first is i will go to wherever the reception space is or the ceremony space and i'll be there a little bit earlier than i i'm telling the the couple that i'm going to arrive at and if the space is completely finished i'll talk with the floor so the venue to make sure nothing else is going in the room i'll actually do all my room photos first so i don't have to rush to get them before guests come back after the ceremony and start going into the space um that is kind of one concern that i usually have i want that big empty room shot and it's kind of hard to get when you're the only photographer at a wedding sometimes so i'll go do that first before the couple expects me to arrive and then i will head over and if it's a male female wedding usually the the female side of things is a lot more of an experience as far as getting ready goes so i spend a lot more time there and i'll maybe spend 10 15 minutes with the guys when i first arrive i do detail photos first so i don't just appear and then instantly have a camera in front of everyone's face another thing that i think is very important that i don't hear enough about kind of on the internet is that when a bride or even the bridesmaids or the mom or whoever is getting their makeup done if they're kind of half finished there's no reason really to photograph that i'll photograph from the back and do some artistic or some abstract shots but i'm not going to really photograph the entire process of them getting their makeup on i think it's a little bit weird so i will just arrive and ask them like hey any details you'd like me to take photos of usually we've talked a little bit about kind of expectations with it i guess leading up to this that if i know that they're just they only want photojournalism usually i'm arriving a lot tighter to the end of getting ready and i would probably also stay a little bit later into the reception because that would be a little bit more important for that couple typically for lighting i'm always putting people just in good window light i'll walk into the room and i'll actually turn off all of the lights in the room if they're having any sort of weird color casts and i will use the window light as my main light if that's not possible i might add some flash but usually i would say in 98 percent of circumstances i can always get away with ambient and then at the end of the getting ready section i'll usually do just a few photos with the bride or a few photos maybe with the people that are there if they're completely ready to go and from then we head on to the guys getting ready there is no official rule whether you go to the guy's place first or the girls first or i guess this is also speaking to a male female wedding if it's a same-sex wedding a lot of my couples choose to get ready in the same room or in the same space and do kind of a first look somewhere within their home or hotel or whatever it might be and if i can give any sort of kind of time frames for it usually i would say if we have 20 minutes with the guys that's enough assuming that everybody's there and everybody knows that they're they're going to be getting ready at that specific time and also all the presets that you're seeing are presets that are already out so even though that's october 1st it's actually out over on the members site and for the girls side of things usually i like to have about an hour with them total that i can do some detail photos things tend to run the schedule isn't as specific usually as far as hair and makeup goes that there's an approximate time that they're going to be finished but sometimes it doesn't line up with the guys it's usually you show up they know to do this sometimes it even comes down to the fact that you have to arrive a little bit too early so they'll actually get dressed and then they'll get like undressed and back into their regular clothes just to hang out for a bit and that's not something that's super uncommon that's something that i actually unfortunately encounter a little bit and it feels weird from a photojournalistic mindset but it makes the wedding day possible as far as photography goes and the same rules kind of apply that you're just looking for great light in a space and you whatever good light you can find that's kind of where i camp out and make most of my shots moving into another wedding day just to give you a little more visibility if i arrive at a house usually there are a lot of details around that house that i want to be capturing things with the wedding date on the calendar and things that actually mean something when i'm in a hotel room i don't really care too much about that stuff also this is maybe out of scope of this video but i also do a video as well as photography so do hybrid coverage which is very much a topic for another video one thing you'll encounter in homes is you see this kind of green tint on all the photos and all the videos is that's because all the light is bouncing off the grass that's right outside of the window so one easy way to get around that is to just physically go outside all right so walking into this room it's very apparent that there's just a lot of bad light on the dress so i'm going to turn the light off and then i'm going to use my godox v1 to light this up and get the shot that i actually want all right off camera flash set to 1 16 plus 3. that on this guy actually the whitest thing in the room is kind of this chaise lounge and uh i'm gonna try to use this as a main light using a chaise lounge as a softbox the direction of light could be better but there's no real better way to make that happen within this environment and you never really know what you're walking into on a wedding day if you want to know where the best natural light actually is it's it's actually just on the toilet so if somebody's over here sitting on the toilet they're perfectly lit unfortunately i don't think that's something that i can ask really anyone here to do a little bit of nervous energy today it looks like it's going to rain if you don't have a weather program like accuweather is great for in canada it'll pretty much give you a minute-by-minute uh readout on when it's actually going to rain so today it's going to rain allegedly from 4 20 to 4 40 and the ceremonies at five so i'm gonna send out some emails and see maybe if i can get them to uh bump the time up to finish the rain at 4 30 so that uh we're not too nervous walking over the guys now and taking some photos of the trees as you do you can't see that one because it wasn't very good i don't want to show it to you it'll be the test subject boom so this is my subtle preset on this image and this is the image started to camera not sure what type of sorcery nikon is up to but they're making some really incredible files one of the reasons this image actually comes together is there's a little tiny piece of sun poking through and they're actually looking directly into the sun it's over my back shoulder usually i'm the opposite way looking for some way to bounce that sun but today things are different i like to switch things up i don't ever really shoot photography with a 35 since the porsche trip really was the last time i could think of that there's a full documentary on my youtube channel if you're interested in cars and driving across san francisco all the way back to our hometown of kitchener ontario canada which is funny for mike's car because he had to bump start it the entire seven days home because race car back to back to the wedding day here we are the the golf cart section of the wedding day i'm gonna take about 15 frames here and one of them is good [Music] got one i prefer to take photos while things are kind of happening i was waiting for them to show up kind of in this natural frame but i also would have taken a great reaction in a less good frame overall as a photo as well on a wedding day you don't really know how things are going to shake out so i would rather just overshoot and make sure that i have enough coverage rather than waiting for that like one exact perfect shot to line up like street photography style uh because if it doesn't come together then i don't have anything i'm gonna do a quick round of detail shots uh now that everything's all set up but i know that my couple want more photos of people specifically their daughter and them rather than the stuff so i'm not going to selfishly spend a lot of time here by selfishly i mean i know that you get into magazines whenever you kind of overshoot details because that's all they want to see so i am much more in the mind space of making my couple happy with the photos rather than potentially getting them publicity from their wedding so getting into wedding photography i really wanted to second shoot i thought that the the way to get into wedding photography was by working for somebody else and i pretty quickly realized that i emailed everyone in town that i could possibly find as well as everyone just kind of outside of my my direct city as well and not a whole lot of people got back to me and zero people got back to me with offers for second shooting jobs and i was a little bit discouraged and it was a bit of a learning curve to get over the fact that i actually just had to go out and i had to just start building my own portfolio and if i can give you one piece of advice right now it is to not worry too hard about what other people can do for you and to just get out there and to just start working on your own portfolio um the big thing with weddings is basically that if you if you go out and you shoot that dream portfolio right now and you get started on it you're going to start attracting your ideal clients a lot faster and those ideal clients that you are attracting are going to be attracted by the work that you're creating and that you're putting on your website so by creating what the work that you want to exist it will mean that those couples are coming to you looking for that style of work which means that you basically get to create your dream portfolio every single weekend hopefully if if that all comes true so if people are not letting you second shoot for them if they're not getting back to your emails know that i was in the same boat i sent out so many emails and no one ever got back to me so don't worry about that part of wedding photography right now just worry about getting out there to build your own portfolio and hopefully that this is at least a little little push of motivation i'll keep hammering this home throughout the rest of the tutorial but it's um it's definitely an important piece that took me way too long to understand and to learn when i was getting into wedding photography moving into the first look usually the way that goes if i'm at a male female wedding typically i'll have the groom standing with his back facing off into some foliage or something which is a little bit weird and kind of a mean thing to play on somebody right before they they see their future wife for the first time and then i'll have the bride come up behind tap them on the shoulder or i'll have the bride stop a little bit short and have him turn around and she just kind of will cue that the way that i do first looks for the most part is i find a good piece of light so something even like what we're in right now that i know when the groom turns around that he's not going to be just facing into the sun you're basically setting up kind of a little tiny on location portrait session so when they turn around you want them to be in the best light i am always photographing the groom's face with his reaction first and then going around to the bride if you have two photographers with you then it makes it easy because you can kind of both focus on one but the groom's reaction is usually the one that i focus the most on i also focus on this during the ceremony as well when the the doors open at the end of the aisle for the first time but we'll get to that in a minute then typically after the first look because they are they've just seen each other there's an energy and an excitement in the air uh usually we'll do a quick photo session just with a couple and it might be five minutes total uh before all friends family and anyone that's there kind of arrived to just like kind of hang out with them then we can do family photos if we want or photos with a bridal party or whatever it might be but use that energy right after the first look to get some images and to get those romantic images where they just really are hyper genuinely excited to have seen each other and that all of the nerves are melting away and if you're there to capture that i feel like it's pretty it's pretty good moment all right here we are in mexico and victoria is coming down the stairs to uh i guess not really surprise hugo he's pretty aware that she's coming with all of us pointing cameras at him i would say that the first look is definitely maybe the one of the more forced emotional moments of the day uh so there is an element of kind of weird strangeness to it uh but usually people are pretty into it and they if they don't want to see each other for the first time at the ceremony they know that this is kind of a necessary weird part of the day i'm actually going to get hugo's reaction on video i'm working with tim at this wedding and tim is doing both photography and video coverage and i am just going to do hugo's reaction on video it was also important to have somebody running crowded interference up at the top of the stairs to make sure nobody in in bathing suit tried to chase victoria down the stairs so there it is it is that simple put your couple in good light so that when they turn around that they're not just going to be facing into the blinding sun and everything should be good also be on an 85 or something a little bit longer so you're not just all three feet away from them during that moment except be a little bit weird too and cue the first look jessica running down the aisle at 74 miles an hour about to touch nick with the force of three g's that happened at least double or triple the speed that first looks usually happen at so uh i'm gonna hustle over here to get a few different angles because i'm all by myself today and i need to make it look like i'm five people i'm stuck in the chairs now please send help i know back steakhouse you didn't think i got anything but i got a lot i'm everywhere all right let's start with a few here you guys look amazing thank you oh and everything looks so good contrary to popular belief this is the only image that you for sure have to get at every single wedding if you don't get it people will complain moving into the ceremony i'm actually going to change my lens to a 70-200 it's what i use for pretty much every ceremony maybe with the exception of if it's a smaller 10 12 person wedding i might stay on the 85 but to have the additional reach of the 7200 which again you can rent if you can't afford to buy one because they're very expensive it's definitely the lens i would say for ceremony coverage just because you can stay completely out of the way and you can get all the shots that you need without becoming the center of attention because i have a lot of space to move around i'm actually doing something that i don't usually do and i kind of parking myself right behind the efficient so i can get more of a centered shot i'm just going to kind of experiment with this for a little bit but i do know that whenever jasmine starts coming down the aisle that i'm actually gonna have to get reaction shots so i'm gonna have to move at that point even though i am the only person here i find more comfort in being on a 78200 well i love the images from the 85 or 50 i think just the flexibility of being able to get kind of everywhere at once with a 7200 without having to run around the ceremony location is a huge benefit to my couples i know that all of them are pretty much just after like primarily candid coverage with maybe a 10 or 15 minute posed photo session so the more images i can get in good light right now uh the happier they're going to be with their final image gallery i think one of the most important things you can do as a photographer during a ceremony is to just be as respectful as possible and to not stand directly in front of the mom as her daughter's coming down the aisle and to be very aware of that and while i know that you could probably get an amazing shot shooting at like 16 millimeters laying on the ground while the bride comes down the aisle um i don't think that's something that anyone should ever be doing because it really does just direct all attention at you when the ceremony specifically and the rest of the wedding day entirely should be about the couple and all eyes should be on them rather than you uh doing weird stuff to try to get photos and be experimental and and create work essentially to impress other wedding photographer friends on instagram uh because a lot of my couples they're a lot happier and i can see through the download stats that the more experimental i get and the more interesting things that i think i do uh that make me happy usually result in less downloads or even no downloads in some cases in the actual wedding day album that said i do think that it's important to also be creating some work for yourself but don't focus the entire day on just curating instagram content for yourself really put the couple at the number one spot they're the ones that have hired you to come and create this work for them so do the best by them not the best for for you personally going into the first kiss i'm always just kind of like i locked my focus point and then i just stand there for like a minute and a half it's uh something that i haven't really been able to get over because i i do know when it's coming but i also don't want to just be like putting my camera up quickly to try to capture it so i just stand here like a little tiny statue and uh get as much as i possibly can it's also really challenging to even if the officiant tells you where they're going to go during the first kiss you always have to kind of start tight and get a little bit wider um as they kind of go into frame at least in my experience that's been the best also you probably noticed but i didn't mention it i changed back to my nikon d850 for the ceremony so that i have two cards of backup uh and now that they're coming back down the aisle i'm back on the z6 with a 24 millimeter lens to kind of get everybody and also the architecture and everything into the shot uh because i think there's a lot of cool stuff going on here [Applause] all right welcome to the ceremony the ceremony is i don't know if it's the hardest or the easiest it's a part of the wedding day um that's my official review of photographing a ceremony a lot of my frames are vertical because i do try to minimize as many distractions as i can in the frame so if i am shooting a horizontal image there's gonna be a lot of people's faces and just like three of those people's faces not facing into the scene i feel like really distract from an image and i have to get into cropping and all kinds of craziness like that i would rather just shoot vertical get the people in kind of full focus and get full length shots of everyone coming down the aisle i feel like this is a time to just kind of document as the day goes rather than trying to create anything like really crazy and artistic uh i'm not going to set up an off camera flash here to do anything and i don't suggest that you do either there's actually an off-camera wedding day in this exact same space where it was night time and i had to shoot everything at 5000 iso so if you're interested in seeing this in less ideal conditions there is a video on my youtube channel and i think there's like 25 or 26 full wedding days now so you can get your get your fill of the of the wedding days and a lot of them involve music videos for some reason i'm not sure why but i can't change them now because they're online and that's that's how they live forever you can't update videos here unfortunately that's my review back to the wedding day i was photographing off to the left there but my 360 camera just kind of stays pointed straight it's one of the many benefits of the 360 camera the main negative is that it takes me about 100 hours now to do maybe not 100 but it takes me a long time to do these full wedding days with the 360 camera because i have to reframe everything and i have to first collect all the footage and put it back to you don't care you're you're here you're watching the video i shouldn't complain to you i appreciate you being here here's all the images of everybody coming down the aisle again as i said just basic documentary coverage full lengths are nice vertical frames to keep everybody out of just kind of the sides um looking weird or looking at different people or distracting from the the scene or even just looking at their watch or their phone or whatever also i lied to you those are not full length shots um for the guys i rarely if ever get the full length shot because it doesn't it's not really as important for the girls i try my best to get the full dress because i feel like they care about that i feel like all of the interest in a guy's suit really kind of ends just above the belly button so usually that's kind of where where my frames end with them whether i'm shooting vertical or whether i'm shooting horizontal i never love just kind of standing up here at the front but it's kind of a thing that i have to do i would much prefer to be hidden somewhere but this is unfortunately the frame that i have to get um from everybody because it's the it's the shot so i can't not be here all right as i said full length ish for the girls when possible here's a full length ah not quite almost getting closer i feel like that's kind of a more proper crop though um with the guys i'm definitely a lot tighter than that i'll let this roll for a minute so you just kind of see the the things this is one of the things that helped me i think the most when i was first getting started i watched jerry gionis do a few of these that just had a person just kind of rolling coverage he didn't talk over it at all it was just like as the wedding day happened and it made me a lot i don't know just happier going into a wedding day knowing what a wedding actually looked like because prior to photographing a wedding i had not been to a wedding since i was like essentially the this kid's age five or so um this is me shooting over to the left of the groom just his reaction um i know that tim is getting the shot of the kids and i want to do my best to get the groom's reaction shot when he first sees his bride for the first time um so i got that shot and i'm going to get another shot while they're out in kind of the bright sun again capitalizing on those times where the light is bad i'm going to just photograph whatever is good or whatever's possibly good within that scene um well kind of catching a few safe shots to make sure at least that i have something in case i need it um so this is photographing over here it's kind of cool that the camera stays just pointed that way i can see what i didn't see in real life um and a lot of time i'll actually shoot kind of over my shoulder so if i have to like peer around a corner i'll be kind of photographing the groom uh like no look style and waiting for the bride to come around especially if it's a short aisle so that i can just quickly flip around and get a shot since in this case like her her dad um are kind of the most important i know tim's up front there so i'm gonna do a little little waxy down the aisle i feel like this is the only time that i really kind of go in that front aisle space is um when everyone's standing and i feel more comfortable doing it um getting this shot here tim's getting the close-ups of people's faces and i like this shot because it kind of frames everyone and it shows that there's something going on once everyone sits down it's just kind of like i don't know it just it's boring i guess it's a very ceremony-esque shot here i feel like there's there's more going on so i do the best that i can to photograph everything in that moment than i possibly can getting shots my key shots to get now whether i'm shooting photo or video are usually kind of just a wide shot of all the girls standing a wide shot of all the guys or if it's a guy's girl side or guy's guy's side whatever it is i want everybody standing on the left and everybody's staying on the right in kind of a one photo and i'm usually cropped in just on the groomsmen or bridesmaids rather than including the the bride and groom in them um then i'm doing all variations that i can possibly think of that it's not really something that i write down it's just that i want a shot of the like good shots close up of the groom looking at the bride in this case and the bride looking at the groom so all kind of go from side to side as you'll see and i'll get those shots and i do my best to i'm fortunate because i know a lot of the the people that officiate the officiants the priests the ministers and i kind of know where their jokes are a lot of them kind of say the same things over and over again so i know and they're kind of gearing up for a punch line and when i know that that's coming i get myself in a position to first get that one shot that i want of of the bride and that one shot of the groom um so i kind of wait for those and that's something that just comes with experience and time but usually you can kind of read a ceremony and you can get a feel for somebody and if they're a little bit of a joke teller um this is such a weird 360 camera angle little face crunch there um you can usually get a feel for it and you can usually kind of predict when people are going to laugh and smile so that you're not just like behind your camera pointed at people waiting the entire ceremony and because as i kind of punched in earlier to talk about um the video guy is in the center of the aisle here but we actually talked about it before and i was like can you just give me the first like 45 seconds and then post up um or in a better situation a better life case would be if they were able to just have a longer lens and to sit at the far back with a tall tripod above everyone on a 7200 that is the most ideal obviously but not everyone comes prepared to do that from this angle here this is my shot i am all the way in at 200 and then i actually go into crop mode within my camera so i'm shooting kind of at 300. i feel like i'm a south park character whenever i can see myself in the 360 frame uh for the first kiss i'm always focus point and focus locked on exactly where they are and i'm just sitting waiting for that to happen and then i just grab the frames that i need and then they walk back down the aisle usually and to give you a sense of how i'm handling that bright light that's behind because they're in the shade and it's just bright sunny day outside and specifically on that piece behind them um is that that's i'm just doing the best i can with it because it's really a photographically challenging situation but now it's a little bit cloudy and it makes my life just just a little bit easier and i would say working with a video team this is probably the most challenging part of the entire wedding day is just when they're coming back down the aisle um tim also already feels awkward about it kind of stepped into his usual spot and it's like oh can't be there because they're gonna track back so i'm gonna do the best i can to kind of get that shot from where i'm at and dodge this person with her phone and just kind of do the best that i can in that scene and tim's getting that wide shot and i'm kissing fortunately because uh i missed it that's why it's important to have well i got it but i got it from way too close so that's why it's important to have a second photographer and if you are a second photographer that's why it's important to just not stand on top of your lead shooter if you are photographing and be in a different spot and if possible be on a slightly different lens like if you're both shooting at 7200 and you're both at the exact same spot there's really there's really no need for that all right no rain flowers up here lake out there wedding about to happen here i am going to stay on my 85 millimeter lens here i could go to my 7200 but i feel like the shot over here isn't really that good the shot that i'm gonna want is here but i'm not gonna want the extension cord going to the dj down the hill there um to be too much in the shot so i'm happy to let the background kind of entirely go um so i'm gonna do my best to say centered right about here when the when the uh the bride is coming now not right now i feel like uh my stance is always to be as off center as possible just so i'm never the the person that is attracting the most attention so in an outdoor ceremony space hey man um i can be a little bit more centered and i can be kind of behind the actual altar uh also shooting afc autofocus continuous always single point afc i don't really use groups i'm starting to experiment a little bit with it but for the most part i feel like i just have the most control over a single point afc and it makes my life a lot happier just knowing that i'm going to get the shot and nothing's going to happen that can be outside of my control which i think is really important for something that's kind of a once in a lifetime moment but also i feel like on a wedding day there's a lot of different once in a lifetime things and i feel like that's anything to do with photography that you're always capturing something that as soon as that moment is gone it's just gone so always you want to be prepared for it and you want to be able to capture it in the best way you possibly can all right good light behind iris and our daughter walking down the aisle that really works well but the other direction um on justin doesn't really work that well so i'm switching to my second body which is a wider lens 35 to at least capture a little bit more so the intricacies of bad light aren't as pronounced when it's sunny and i know it could get cloudy i kind of play this game where i don't really shoot as many photos as i usually would when it is sunny and then i kind of give it maybe another three minutes and if it gets cloudy then i'll essentially just shoot all the content that i would usually shoot with an entire ceremony in that like single cloud but today it stayed sunny which is awesome because it didn't rain but it does make things a little bit more difficult as far as just making it look like a perfect magazine spread it's uh it's not quite that today but it is what it is and i documented it the best way that i possibly could uh within the given scenario today here's a quick little comparison so the 85 that i was shooting from way back if i if i have the space and ability to go way back i would prefer a shot from a telephoto lens that looks like a wide angle then a wide angle lens up super close so here it is with the wide angle lens here it is with the 85 again the 35 here's the 85. i like the 85 shot a heck of a lot better than the 35 shot uh just something to think about if you're out there in the field photographing weddings and you're like wow 85 is is way too telephoto but you made a wide angle if you try hard enough the part where i actually come up to the front near the front or at least i am the closest to the couple is usually for the ring exchange and i've never maybe once in my entire career of wedding photography i've had like a bang on like wow that was a great ring exchange photo um it is one of those photos you're gonna try over and over and over again and you're never gonna get the perfect one in this instance iris actually covered the rings with their bouquet and it's not something anyone's thinking about and i'd like the end of the day i don't even know if it's that important of a photo for couples to have um i would say that it's very rare that that photo ends up if i am printing an album so uh take that for i guess what it's worth but that is my experience in the value i guess of that shot so don't stress out too hard if uh if it just doesn't ever go as planned exactly like don't crawl over people or run in front of behind the couple to make the shot happen uh because in my experience at least it's not the most important shot of the entire wedding day the first kiss though is important i think to people and that does end up in wedding albums so uh do a good job of it and talk with the coordinator before in this case tracy i believe her name was uh we talked and she was like i'm gonna pop out of the way and she actually coached uh the couple to to smile at each other first while they gave her a second to get out of the way so she didn't actually have to like straight sprint and it worked out really well and their daughter came and joined them and i think that worked out awesome i'm quite happy with the results and i'm always happy when a story actually comes together in real life rather than me coaching it into the actual wedding day here we go back to the uh the uh telephoto lens makes a better wide-angle lens or at least a more interesting one in my opinion and i am way back because i have the space to do so and as they come down the aisle uh i am kind of starting with more depth of field and as you get closer to me i'm actually dialing it back so i'm getting kind of a variety of different things i personally really love the look at one four but i know that that's not something that everyone is going to agree with so i'll shoot a few at 2.2 to make sure they get more or 2.8 or whatever just because i know that well a lot of the images are important for me to enjoy it is more important for my couple to enjoy and because we haven't spent our entire lives together i don't really 100 exactly know what they want but i do have a pretty good idea most of the time moving into family photos uh you can either stay on the 70 to 200 or you can go back to your 85 i find that shooting images i know that these are the key images for a number of family members and i know that they are the ones that are going to be passed down over time so i really do even though they might just seem like the uh like we have to do these i feel like they are something that wedding photographers should take a little bit more seriously and and make sure that they are as good as they can possibly be so i try to keep the environment as relaxed as i possibly can uh usually it's right after the ceremony we will go and we'll do the family photos first so that family can go back to cocktail hour and i get everybody in a big group and we just essentially start with the largest group available we put them together and then we work down smaller groups from within that the easiest way is to ask your couples for a list of the photos that they would like the family photos that they would like usually in the first meeting or the first phone call i kind of put out this expectation that if you have a lot of family groupings please give a list to myself and a list to somebody that knows who everyone is so they can help and they can call out names i would say in that case even if we have 30 40 people and different combinations within that that we can typically get through that in maybe 10 to 15 minutes total it's a lot faster of a process if you approach it without a list and you have one in your mind you can download my suggested list there's a link in the description below and that works well most of the time but there is a potential that somebody might come in like an aunt or a mother that really just wants to direct the photo session and then that session slowly becomes what they want and they're calling out names and they're putting together groupings that really aren't that important for the couple to have and that those photos we easily could have taken during cocktail hour or some other time so to be a little bit more organized and to have a bit of a list to run from at this moment i feel like is definitely a positive thing and it will definitely make the session run as efficiently as it possibly can and i'm kind of all about efficiency when it comes to this part of the day all right looks good and everybody have a look over here towards me today we're lucky it's cloudy very easy to do these big family group shots i'm actually shooting at 5.6 which is not something i do but multiple layers of people and got to keep everyone in focus i use the 7200 at this point because i like to be able to zoom around elements in the background rather than photoshopping them out or moving them i just find the versatility in this circumstance is a lot better some of my most stressful moments especially my early weddings were definitely doing the family photos section of the day it's a lot of people for me to organize and it's um just it doesn't it's not a thing that comes naturally to me the main thing that i always want is a big patch of shade like everybody's in right now even though the sun is kind of firing down the barrel of my lens a little bit uh everyone's faces are in the shades so they're gonna look as good as they possibly can if you cannot find shade have the sun at people's backs if uh if possible i guess that's always technically possible the downside with that is if they're in the sun and the sun is at their backs that if anyone's blonde or they have maybe a bald head you're going to have some really difficult reflections to deal with so that i guess comes with experience in knowing kind of where to expose and to sometimes maybe underexposed knowing that you're going to bring up and you're going to develop for the skin tones essentially in lightroom i usually shoot all these images at something like f 2.8 or f4 uh so it's very important to get everyone's eyes on the same plane of focus which basically means that everybody stands side by side i get everyone to angle in a little bit towards the couple typically and then just kind of smile towards me and once everyone's set up and in the spot that they think they're going to be in i do a quick scan to make sure no one's holding sunglasses or holding a bag or a mask or something that shouldn't be there so i do that's kind of my quick final scan and after that i will just start taking photos i typically would take maybe five to ten fifteen photos of each individual combination knowing that sometimes people blink and sometimes they alternate blinks and i would rather just choose a frame with everybody smiling facing the camera with their eyes open than trying to build one by photoshopping heads around in post-production so i have no problem if there's 15 people in the in the photo i'm gonna probably take 15-20 images to make sure i get that one clean shot if there are too many people and i have to add a second or third row what i'll do is i'll bring my f-stop down so i'll start out at 2.8 if everybody's in this in the same plane of focus and then maybe a second row i'll go down to 5.6 and then if there's a third row probably down to f8 and that makes sure that everybody's in good sharp focus all right that's great this right here look at me all right a few more over this way [Music] family photos are always a little bit of a struggle when there's lots of people around so just do the best you can you're not trying to do anything revolutionary just clean photos this is a photo chairs one thing that i've actually noticed with couples when it comes to the bridal party sessions is that they have been shrinking in terms of both numbers 10 years ago bridal parties used to be like 14 people on each side it was a little nuts it is shrinking in terms of numbers which makes it a lot easier to work with as well as expectations at least as far as my couples go tend to be getting a little bit smaller that it used to be that we would have two hours to do the bridal party session and all kinds of different creative combinations and now they kind of are just looking for more of the basics that they would like to have one nice photo with everyone one photo that's maybe laughing everybody's smiling facing each other and then a few more candid ones and i feel like at that point as long as you know that you have all those photos and they're all in good light everybody's looking good i am pretty comfortable saying that that's like all i officially need and then asking the couple like do you guys want to do more photos at the bridal party and if the answer is no bridal party is free to go and that's usually again maybe a 10 to 15 minute experience total all right so my must have shots this looks like a lot of text but it's not really a lot of text when you put it in real life because it's real life it's not text that was a bad joke i didn't know where that was going basically what i do is i start with the full wedding party smiling facing the camera i make sure everyone has their flowers level usually i talk kind of belly button height and make sure that no one has them kind of up in front of their face and then like way down too low or whatever um just a balanced boring image everybody's smiling looking good take a lot of frames of that so that you don't get anyone blinking or if you do that you can just go to the next shot rather than photoshopping something together similar to the family photos after that i just get them to all look and smile and laugh at each other it's super awkward and everybody laughs from the awkward and uncomfortableness of it and then i kind of do that same breakdown with both sides of the wedding party so whoever wants to go first i'll begin with them usually i'll structure it that if say for instance it's a bride she has six bridesmaids i'll bring those three of the bridesmaids over to the other side and i'll just do kind of a group shot again same deal smile face camera then interact with each other move over to side number two do the exact same thing look at the camera smile interact with each other and then individuals as well is something that i find is pretty important that if you just do a quick little like almost assembly line style that the bride groom um basically every individual wedding party member on their side in a photo with them as well as i ask if there's any other smaller groups if they went to school with a couple of the the girls or the guys or whatever um or if there's kind of mixed sets from other sides that they would like a group photo together i'm pretty customizable in that time so what does that look like in real life you're about to find out can everyone look over this way here uh hold your flowers down a little lower that's good there perfect and can i make everybody just like kind of walk towards me over here and just pretend that you're just like going for a casual walk in a parking lot yeah just look at each other could maybe two of the girls come to the other side just to kind of balance it out yeah and every year perfect hold your flowers down like a little bit lower that's good there these are all my safe shots just in case it starts to rain that way we have kind of everything that i need to at least tell the proper story of their wedding day and get them all those key shots again when all the family members and all the key individuals are around i'm always shooting candids especially when i'm in good light and today is also good light right now in this specific direction always shooting into the sun so that you get that nice warm kind of wrap around halo and stay away from the the bad sun on people's faces all right so for the formal section of this as you can see reflected in the glass behind them you're already kind of seeing a lot of the chandelier and everything ideally i would like to not have any real reflections in the glass but i after a few test frames i realized that it's actually kind of adding a little bit of depth to the image that wouldn't otherwise exist it'd kind of be just floating in black space which is not the most ideal photo so i kind of like the reflections in this case and i just have to be conscious to hide myself so that i'm not just like standing beside them in all of their wedding photos in the reflections so that's something to be super conscious about when you're photographing into class at night which is again kind of like the worst case situation uh but there's really no other great option this is a warm option because it's very cold out right now and it is an option that there's just not a lot of people around i've stopped down a little bit but i'm staying at 5000 iso so i'm kind of using my flash to mitigate that gap to add a little bit more light to the scene and to be able to stay at 5000 iso i could go to 6400 but i feel like after 6400 i'm kind of getting into space that i haven't really processed files in this style so now i know that 5000 is totally fine 6400 would be totally fine so i can next time in the future press a little bit higher but i don't really like to experiment and just kind of shoot blindly before i've actually tested something properly and honestly going into this day i didn't expect to have to be shooting at 5000 iso for the couple session by the time it actually comes to the wedding day hopefully you've already done an engagement session together maybe you've already done that five minute session around the first look they're going to be pretty comfortable at this point and the couple's session is actually a lot easier on the wedding day than a lot of people would expect engagement sessions always a little bit weird you're going out to a place to obviously take photos wedding day same idea to to get some good photos it becomes a lot easier uh just for people to actually be themselves with kind of the energy of the day as well as all their friends and family around so usually it's much easier to get real reactions and to break down that wall of when people show up to an engagement session my goal is to just get them to be as normal as possible as quickly as possible on a wedding day i feel like they just start pretty much normal to themselves and and pretty comfortable so a couple sessions wedding day a lot easier for couples photos as well as just larger groups like family photos bridal party i always want to find good open shade like this uh but there are different levels of goodness when it comes to the shade so what i actually like to do is i'll show up to a scene and i'll turn on this the selfie camera and i'll actually do a quick little spin to see if there's any little light spots that i should be aware of or where the best direction of light is so right now i would say that this is kind of the most optimal direction whereas if i'm facing backwards like this i technically am in the shade but as you can see there's a pretty extreme color cast something like this is a little bit more natural so just pull out yourself you can do a quick little spin whenever you think you're in the best light and find the absolute best direction of light before your couple gets here and you're just like moving them around trying to figure it out then you just figured out in a couple of seconds yourself here starting off with the most key image to get on a wedding day just a full length image of the couple smiling facing the camera make sure you get this shot at every single wedding and this is a side-by-side comparison so the left is obviously in the sun the right is when a little cloud came over the sun and just gave that perfect light for a brief window i personally very much prefer the one on the right and i am always looking for that open shade whenever possible or if i see a cloud coming we really capitalize on that moment so basically the the only negative or the only negative that i can see uh when it gets cloudy at this time of the day is that you lose a little bit of the saturation from everything so if you're in a big open field you're gonna lose a little bit of that green because the sunlight just brings out the green in a different way when the sun gets all the way down to the root of the grass and there's just more color there but i think overall for the i guess like my thing is that i always i want to make people look as good as they possibly can and soft light open shade open shade specifically when you're not in a forest if you're in a forest and it's we'll talk about that in a few minutes here um but just like this nice shade with all these kind of neutral textures around that are bouncing light and making it nice and essentially building me a nice little studio with kind of all the direction of lighting that i want um i'm very happy to have that and here's an example of when it gets a little bit sunnier i think the main thing to do when it gets sunnier like this is to go a little bit wider i'm still on my 7200 only because the video team's doing some work here but i think by going really really nice and wide getting all that blue sky getting those clouds in really does kind of make a better image overall and it's kind of the best that you can do within these conditions given and if the couple's very small and they're not looking at the camera like the the worst case would be to just have them trying to face into the camera and smile and look at you when they're being bleached out by the sun but if they are kind of small and just kind of hugging each other and just nice and close together you can get away with a lot more i don't know what the official gray area response is if a video team is setting something up i'm going to shoot it because i'm there on the wedding day if i can get extra images i don't care if it's their setups i feel like morally maybe there's some sort of artistic license there that people might get upset by that like if there's say for instance there for whatever reason there is two lead shooters i probably wouldn't shoot what they're shooting because i feel like that's a conflict and more of a theft but when the video team's just setting stuff up um i'm happy to photograph as much as i can within that scene that they're trying to do and it's always going to look a lot different and i'm kind of waiting for almost the in-between takes moments so if they're asking them to do something when they stop is when i usually am kind of taking those images when they're actually interacting with one another all right so the big thing for me is to photograph with as much light coming into the scene as possible i don't want them facing into the forest i want them facing out of the forest to get the best possible light so uh in this case they're backlit which is nice there's this huge piece of sun that's reflecting a little bit of light back and we're kind of at the entrance to this uh forest here so they're not just all in green now you might be asking yourself what does it look like when you add off camera flash to an outside scene in the forest and add an unnecessary light that doesn't exist in real life this is what it looks like and i'll leave it to you to decide whether you like it or not it's a it's a thing um i went for it today because i've been using a lot of off-camera flash and i feel like it still fits within uh the gallery of the set of the images on a normal wedding day i just wouldn't bring this out of the blue and just use it out of absolutely nowhere but i am happy with that image i am probably a little bit more happy with the image without that flash so we didn't spend too much time experimenting with that if you are in a forest situation it is the absolute best case to be near the exit of the forest something like this it becomes a lot more difficult to work with color this scene is a very nice scene but the green cast was very difficult to work with in post-production i feel like with wedding photography it is very much an efficiency based thing that if you're shooting a lot of really difficult scenes in post-production it's going to become very incredibly more difficult than it could be when you're shooting in a scene like this that everything is just good that the light is coming in from the correct direction and you're also getting a little bit of bounce back onto them the images just come together a little bit better and a little bit easier and they're pretty much ready to go straight out of camera and while that's not a tip for i guess couple sessions i would say that's a tip for pretty much the entire wedding day whenever possible uh the downside is though that you don't always have control over situations but when you do have control over situations uh do the best you can with it and an example of that is always shooting at golden hour when possible tell your couple's in the first meeting that i'm gonna bore you for 10 minutes during sunset that's perfect and if you want to turn around and slowly walk back towards us and you guys can look at each other and pretend we're not just obviously here creeping and be really unreasonably happy with each other awesome cool and if you want to stand there for one second perfect and even if you want to kind of close your eyes and kind of turn into them i don't know if that's super weird but i promise it looks like perfect magazine amazing i might move you guys just to the back kind of center there right there is good and if you just want to put both arms around each other and get really close one more time you can dip her if you want you're feeling confident yeah next we're going to be moving into an allotment and during an allotment the entire day is essentially the couple's session which is awesome that's good perfect these are so good yeah i'm super happy i am absolutely overjoyed by the quality of light bouncing up off this apron and lighting the scene perfectly all right so you guys are good yep now buckled in great jeff and the pilot are actually having a conversation about the fact that we might not be able to land on the island that jeff has scouted um through jeff scouting services also available um as an audition for your wedding edition edition anyways it kind of cleared up and uh we got to land on this island really close to the cliff there uh tails hanging over the edge 10 out of 10 landing um kept us all on the edge of our seats uh this is a presidential portrait again uh pete souza shout out all right getting out of the helicopter i figured that i always get the limo scene and i'm trying not to fall off this cliff and into the shallow water um then trying also not to get hit by the propeller blades and jeff's just uh i don't know what just what's jeff up to he's got his 360 insta 360 1x pro uh because he has a professional insta 360 videographer as well so uh as in addition to his services he'll deliver you a 360 video that's actually a true statement but he will give you that it's actually a really nice addition and it's usually a surprise i thought about staging that more properly but i kind of like the way that it naturally organically happened another dilemma do i like the silhouette or the in color version this is the same photo all i moved was the shadow slider up quite a lot and it makes a completely different image so i'm okay to deliver both of these i feel uh because they are so different and then can i have you guys hold hands and maybe take a few steps towards us over here i know that it's kind of challenging but just go really slow and yeah i feel like kind of walking through it and you can look at each other and pretend you're having that great time that you're having uh now we have a basket there's champagne we have props this is again doing video you forgot that i was doing video but i'm still doing video gotta deliver that highlight and i'm very happy they brought props because it makes it it's basically something to do we're trapped within like they don't really move more than like 20 feet in any direction so the fact that we actually have something to do for at least a little bit of time let the sun get a little bit lower um the downside with using a helicopter is that you have to get out before sunset otherwise you have to stay the night and this would have been an amazing location once the uh once the sun went completely down uh the life of a billionaire [Laughter] here's jeff delivering donuts from the aircraft the sun is kind of in the perfect spot right now uh i'm just super happy with how this day has turned out it has widely exceeded all expectations and uh the video looks amazing this is with nikon d lighting on extra high and then they pose themselves in the best way ever you can kind of see sorry i missed that this is with the 24 and then i was just like hold that don't move i need to get my 85 and do it again and it was two of my favorite photos from the day and they were literally just kind of walking around so sometimes you don't know exactly what you want until you see it and when you see it you can kind of capitalize on it and make sure that you get it exactly as you want i've stopped down a little bit you'll see my settings in a second here just to get a little bit more depth of field i figured that this was going to be one of those like images that end up getting blown up really large somewhere i don't know if they'll blow it up or if i will um for like a wedding show or something but either way it's gonna be good quality and a big print uh if i would have shot at 1.4 it would have been fine as well but just a little more detail kind of shooting it at 2.2 these frames are absolutely ridiculous i can't believe that this is a real life thing that happened and i'm so happy that we were here on this day and that jeff uh jeff the offician was actually the dude that put all this together and uh he got sarah and josh to somehow agree to this to be their wedding and i am so happy and thankful that he did and that he involved me so we're loading up into the helicopter to head back um jeff is going to give his uh guided tour on the way back i'm sure his tour services as well uh you can't really see what i'm doing but i'm taking photos of them in the back seat and then i'm gonna actually do some outside of the aircraft as well before we take off because i kind of like this but i knew that from outside without the seatbelts and everything kind of all lit up the same as them that i could do something pretty cool and also it's a little bit of a surreal feeling with the tail hanging out over the water there uh it's it looks like you're on a much taller cliff than you are or that you're even like airborne um rather than just like being parked right here so super happy with that photo super happy with this day and here we go taking off this is my gopro with my hand out the window i'm happy i didn't drop my gopro because then i would have had to have uh asked him to go back to get my gopro which would have been a very challenging and expensive procedure maybe i don't know i'm not i'm not i'm not a helicopter pilot z6 is working pretty well with the 85 but i want to make the building in the background look a little bit closer so i'm actually going to go on to my 70-200 and go way in the background so that i can make the building look like it's right there i was trying to do a little tree vignette but it turns out it's better without it what you're doing right there and you can just kind of very slowly kind of walk this way towards me and you look at each other all right this looks good this is the drake spot i guess we needed a dog to complete it absolutely again if you want to look at each other for one or two perfect and i'm gonna make you walk one more time kind of just over to my left here and you guys can just look at each other and just pretend here next up we're into cocktail hour cocktail hour is the time usually between the ceremony and the reception that everybody just goes and has a drink or some appetizers or whatever uh or it could be if the ceremony's off site that it's kind of the time that everyone's told to arrive at the reception i am usually pretty photojournalistic during this time but tim has a different strategy and here's tim to tell you more tim what is your strategy for the candid session up here on the rooftop um candid stuff i usually look for groups of two or more otherwise just taking photos like individual human beings and that's that's kind of sad during cocktail hour when it's supposed to be a sociable hour i'll look for a group of like three or five and i'll do this move this candid patented move hey guys what's going on do you want to get a quick photo great don't do this awesome thanks that is timothy he's a as candid photographer extraordinaire here's a bunch of photos that tim took while he was up here on the roof very nice tim thank you also when people ask you for cell phone photos i'm happy to do that i also just grab one on my camera like tim is about to do right here and same kind of rules apply that if they ask for a photo don't just like snap it really fast and just be like there you go um actually spend the time to get a good photo on their phone they're gonna appreciate you and hopefully maybe in the future once they actually see your name on something that they're going to remember that you were the photographer and maybe that'll become one of your points of contact um these are all my photos from just lurking around with that 85 1.8 tamron i am a lot more comfortable doing this rather than actually just approaching groups um i feel like i also kind of need somebody so it makes this a lot easier when i do have tim you could see tim kind of off to the side of the frame there um when i have somebody do is kind of stand with and take these images rather than just being like clearly the photographer standing in the middle of the room alone so that is one of the benefits of having two photographers at cocktail hour even though it might seem a little bit weird the reception details part of the day usually begins with the exteriors of all of the places that i actually have to go throughout the day i'm always creating detail shots of anything that i feel is important for the couple or that they would maybe like to have i usually use the venue exteriors as just kind of an establishing or a transition shot from the getting ready location or from the ceremony to the reception and in this case here i'm shooting everything with an 85 millimeter lens which i kind of enjoy the the look and feel to it rather than getting the same photo with a wide angle lens when i get into the actual ceremony space i typically will do a lap of the room with both of my lenses so usually maybe it's a 35 and an 85. i'll begin with one of them doesn't really matter which one i'll photograph everything that i can and then i'll switch and i'll go around the room one more time i think that there is a balance here for getting details so basically if you want your wedding to be published you want to go really heavy into photographing details and because of that if it's not the dream of my couple to have their wedding published i almost feel a little bit guilty of that so i do photograph all of the details every individual item that they've brought in but i also do know that there's a limit and that a lot of my couples do want photos of themselves and their their family and their friends and if the couple was at the venue they're not here yet but if they were here that my time would be better spent probably closer to them actually documenting their day rather than documenting the stuff so usually i would say and maybe the reason you don't see the behind the scenes in a lot of my videos on youtube is because my second photographer typically does it and i am usually more in a place doing the photojournalism side of things that all said it is very important that you capture all the details of the day so make sure that it does get done you can see my f-stop in the top corner there it is at 1.4 i shoot a lot of my details very shallow depth of field so 1.4 1.8 maybe 2.0 unless i have a reason to stop down if um basically the the reasoning for that would be if i'm very very close to a subject and it's just a small item that i want to capture uh i'll need to bring my f-stop down in order to actually capture that but when i'm further away you have a little bit more depth of field with your lenses um i also like shooting wider angle shots like this with an 85 millimeter lens i feel like it looks a heck of a lot better than getting up super close and kind of distorting those foreground elements i feel like it looks a lot more wetting and elegant and details are probably the easiest part of the day but also if you want to get published they're a super important part of the day look at that spoon that's my favorite spoon i love that spoon for the reception entrance i usually use the first few people that come in as kind of the tests of the day if if the couple is the only people that are being introduced it makes all the pressure on that i know that these images aren't going to win any awards their documentary images and you can do the best you can i would 100 recommend asking the venue staff for the wedding coordinator like exactly what door they're going to come in and where they're going to go usually they'll have some visibility on that but unfortunately uh it never really 100 works out exactly as they expect this is one of my favorite times to grab candids of everyone hopefully at this point you know kind of who everyone is uh also fortunately family members are usually the closest to the dance floor just as far as the floor plan goes so it makes it very easy to get candids of all the important people at the wedding uh i am on autofocus continuous here and just tracking with them and trying to get as many frames as i possibly can and at this point i would say about half my couples actually do their first dances now um they are eventually going to go into their first dance i'll use that in a couple of minutes here but i would say half my couples are now doing it at this time rather than after dinner which i would say five years ago that's pretty much when all of my couples did it uh now people are kind of switching it up a little bit uh entrances can be very challenging this looks very nice the light is good but when everyone comes in in a straight line it's very difficult to get a good image of everyone like you're going to see in a second here so again plan the best you can but know that it's probably not going to go exactly your way and you're not going to end up with the greatest images of the entire wedding day during this part but do the best you can and just work within the the bounds that you're given i feel like that's kind of all what wedding photography is so as i mentioned a lot of my couples are rolling kind of introductions into their first dance uh if we're only there for a limited time say for instance if we're not actually staying for the entire reception uh i would say 100 of my couples do it especially if they've ordered a highlight film i kind of push them in that direction in that case otherwise you can kind of make the best you can with the first dance uh sometimes it's a little challenging sometimes you can set up off-camera lighting sometimes if you're in a space where it's just impossible or in a barn or something you have to rely on ambient uh we'll talk a little bit more about kind of the variables with that in the next section here but if i give you one more piece of advice for entrances it's to use your best judgment so the ideal is to be where the couple is eventually going to go but in this case i wouldn't have been able to get that first initial entrance shot which is what i wanted so tim is over on the other side and i'm kind of back getting that initial entrance shot which i felt was going to be a better shot and he can kind of come in and get what i missed out on over there so rolling right into first dances this is obviously a pretty ideal environment where every the ambient light is just more than good enough for me to operate from i would say in a number of cases if it is one of those early first dances uh usually i try to go ambient and i stand near wherever the light source is if it's windows typically i'll just kind of stand there and i can get that really good lighting very easily and i'll have a few examples coming up in a minute here of what to do whenever it's just not the easiest first dance of all time my strategy for first dances is obviously get the the clean just regular shots that they would expect but then also to do a few laps around the room and to get some images that actually integrate them into the day such as this really relying heavily on the shallow depth of field one because i think it looks just aesthetically nicer but two it'll also add enough blur to people in the background that if they're looking on their phones or they're not looking at the couple um that they're not going to completely distract from the image but if i'm shooting at something like f8 you're going to have pretty crisp detail on everyone in the background and it's um they're basically pulled into focus of the of the image whether the first dance is something a little more simple like this or something a little bit more complex when they move uh usually you know going in you've heard something during the day that they've been practicing some sort of choreographed dance uh and in that case i usually try to center myself if we're doing video coverage i actually usually do a rolling shot of the entire or i get my second to do rolling shot of the entire dance itself which is kind of a bonus extra that i give to them if it's more of a simple dance like this where they're just kind of in one spot i will usually set up if i have to set up lights i'll put them in one specific spot and i'll kind of have one angle that looks the best and then i will rotate around that so i'll set up the safe shot i'll get all those frames and then i'll start rotating around and i've found that i usually end up liking kind of the half-lit shots the best but i can't exactly i don't know what that looks like until i actually shoot it so uh for instance there my off-camera light is actually coming through them rather than being kind of a backlight like it is for most of these shots here but the decision to set that up is not something that's 100 required by any means uh that this environment lights itself very nicely so it's uh quite easy i wish they were dancing right where i'm standing actually that would have been a very nice kind of spotlight on them now moving into a slightly more challenging first stance i'm actually setting up an off camera light to bounce off of kind of this wall and the ceiling above uh it's kind of coming from the direction of the dj lights so i don't find it to be the most distracting thing that if it's going off that's totally fine and it's adding that main light that you see on that image there you could definitely shoot this ambient with a lens that is something like an f 1.4 1.8 or an f 2.0 lens but my thought process is that i want to add a little bit more to them so they stand out from everyone else but as you can see my flash is kind of spilling a little bit everywhere there so i'm using uh depth of field to kind of isolate the couple another example is this that i tried to set up the off camera flash and i'm actually bouncing off of the the roof over there the uh i guess the garage door that's up but it turns out that ambient actually is much much better than anything that i could have done with the flash so i just leave it at ambient one important thing to do is talk to the dj before and figure out what they're going to do if they can only do white lights for the first dance i am usually the happiest that those make my photographic life so much better uh if they're going to do something crazy like this i have to almost start to overpower the light so i actually have my flash up way more intense than it usually would be and i'm actually kind of cancelling out a lot of that light because i don't want them to be in the crazy uh disco lights that he's had set up um so something like that feels a lot better than if it just looked like it was um all random colors of light the random colors of light i definitely use when the actual dance floor opens and i'll usually do more photos of the couple kind of in the center of that but during the first dance i like to keep it kind of as simple as possible here we have a bounce off of the fireplace that's to my right it's the only thing that's not wood colored and that's the style of light that comes off of it which i very much like having an off-camera light allows me to be able to move all around the room and to keep them in that great light so that's kind of why i choose off-camera flash if i do need to light a first dance like that using an on-camera flash is always my first choice if i can in this situation here we're in a tent so the entire ceiling is just a perfect bounce for my flash so i can kind of be anywhere and also the quality of light is actually really good here that even i'll show you some clips right here from video that even without flash it is by it's good enough i'd be very happy with those photos what the flash does is it adds a little bit more dimensionality to your images as you can see there and it really is up to you if you decide to include that for speeches i will use an off-camera light more often than not simply because i basically i want to set up good quality light on the podium which rarely ever exists naturally but i also don't want to stand super close to the podium if i had my off camera flash so now i can be kind of wherever i want to be in the room and people kind of within the the beam of the light are well enough covered it's not going to be perfect lighting at every single seat but it is good enough kind of generally to get me close enough to what i want that image to look like another example of that is just putting a simple light in front of the head table you basically get all coverage of the entire head table as well as the podium and now all of a sudden you can go over here and you can get that shot where everybody is well lit at the head table and there's kind of this natural vignette of other people kind of in more shadow around them and as you can see that's just one light right at the end of their uh table there so not even close to the podium also this is a great spot to stand for speeches because the person at the podium is always looking at the couple so if you're standing behind them you're usually getting the most eye contact when they're not staring at their page trying to read i will also leave an off-camera flash in the description what i'm currently using currently at least now i'm using a godox v1 which i'm super happy with this is the older version of the godox system that i was using but same principles it makes light and light doesn't really change a whole lot i would have been super happy on this older system but i find that with the godox v1 that it makes it can basically do anything that i could ever require from a flash and it works all the time as you can see the light from the flash making very nice good quality color of light on the couple and then everyone else is a little bit more yellow and affected by the actual ambient lights uh you can also go the other way where you gel your flash you put a colored gel on your flash that actually matches it with the scene so everything's super consistent as i mentioned before this space with the overhead lights uh this is just straight-up to camera video uh everybody looks good even though it's kind of dark through the gopro or in real life that through photography at least you can bump up specific areas of the photo and while i have a pocket wizard on my camera right now i'm not actually using it it's not triggering a flash because the lighting in here is more than good enough for me um i have one usually set up just as kind of a backup or as something that i like to just kind of play around with and see like is it still looking the best it can be but ambient wise it's very good uh so now moving into a thing that i only actually have one clip of this is the only time that i've actually done it probably in the past couple of years when i've been rolling these behind the scenes videos uh sparkler send-offs so my recommendation would be to shoot a sparkler send off in this style uh it's usually the easiest if you kind of make that little tunnel of light you can also just have people with sparklers behind them uh i would say that in this style of kind of tunnel sparkler send off having something like a 50 millimeter lens or an 85 will really work well for you um the hard part is usually getting everybody to actually like their sparklers at the same time so maybe a tip for that just get everyone to light sparklers off of each other if they're trying to light them with a lighter it's going to be a really hard time if everyone just lights sparklers off of each other it basically goes a lot faster um so as they're coming down towards me i think this is my 24 or maybe my 35 and it's a little bit too wide i'm getting too much of the foreground and a situation like this they have to be moving if they're stopped they're literally probably going to get burned by sparks um so you want to keep them moving and with the 24 it was a good shot but it wasn't as good as it could have been so basically the idea is that they do it a few times they go back and then they come back towards me um that's a shot with the wider lens and then when i switch to my 85 it looks a heck of a lot better and it just kind of makes them seem closer and it makes a more romantic feel i think overall so that kind of wraps up the wedding day or at least the usual elements that i would see on a wedding day now we're going to talk a little bit about posing so i always start my couple sessions with people walking i feel like it's the easiest way to get them just normal and comfortable and then into the basic boring and just smile and face me full-time even like that looks really really great and if you guys want to kind of angle in towards each other and you can put both arms around each other and get really nice and close and cuddly and if you want to look at each other you can look at each other and i'm gonna make the old hands and walk towards me uh one more time here and i'll walk into a scooter maybe that's great and look at each other and just be unreasonably happy with each other that wasn't good and reasonably happy i always keep my shoots moving especially engagement sessions because it's a little more awkward than an actual wedding day uh we're always moving and we're always finding new locations and we're never really staying anywhere past like maybe a minute or two and i found that that really helps my couples relax and just be closer to their normal selves rather than just the photo shoot version of themselves that's great perfect and you know what even if you want to put an arm at each other while you kind of walk towards me that looks good and you can look up at each other and just pretend you're going for a nice little walk here and this isn't a specific tip to posing i guess but shooting with an 85 millimeter lens does help me create better images it helps me get a little bit closer to my couples without physically being that close and making things a little bit weird it also creates an amazing depth of field separation when shot wide open as you've been seeing as you can also see i have a number of poses that are kind of my go-to poses but the lighting in the situation kind of changes them or the look and feeling completely uh if you are nervous about that or you just want a refresher or you want to have something on your phone you can either make a pinterest gallery of a bunch of images and poses that you like or you can get an app like unscripted that'll actually have a bunch of those poses for you so happy with that and i'm going to make you guys kind of hold hands and you can slowly walk because i feel like this ground's a little sketchy let's see then if you want to kind of hug his arm like you were doing there kind of both arms around his arm yeah something like that's nice and you guys can look at each other and just pretend you're amazing this is kind of pre-golden hour it wasn't really supposed to look like this but for some reason today the way everything kind of came together it all worked out i really love this natural frame of green space here and the way that even the pathway kind of leads up to it everything leads into this image the sun is at their back and that's where i like it at this time of the day so it gives that nice warm wrap around light and the light overall kind of feels a little bit like california today where the there's a cloud just kind of softly diffusing all the light coming from the sun and i'm into it amazing this looks so good and i'm going to take a quick little walk that way and turn around and come back towards me one more time perfect and you guys turn around and come back this way and same deal as before it is nice and slow and you guys can look at each other perfect so as you can obviously see i shoot a lot of frames and that is because when people are walking that i want that perfect shot with their their legs or arms or hands or the lighting to flare at the exact right moment so i don't mind overshooting it to make sure that i get kind of that exact image that i want and maybe one complication that you'll find on an actual wedding day is if there's a dress that's a little bit too large or you don't want to risk it getting dirty before the ceremony i reserve a lot of the movement-based shots until after the ceremony or maybe for the golden hour session but rather than doing them before the ceremony and if you guys want to just look at each other again i'm just having a great time it looks incredible this is the most green space photo i've taken super happy how all this came together and it's not something you could really plan like you can't go and scout this location and be like we're gonna do this shot you just kind of have to let it come together on the day and be prepared and know when to double down on something when it's working and i'm going to have you guys one more time just kind of walking just slowly towards me over here and i might make you do this a few times because this is like the perfect so that is a little bit about my strategy uh in the member site there is a full introvert's guide to wedding photography posing that goes into a lot more detail of of what we're doing out here um my main things that if i can tell you is that don't overthink it um to have a few poses in mind and a few go-to's but usually the way that it comes together at least for me is that i will have a few things in mind and they will do them a little bit differently and i'll see that they do something good and i'll review that on the back of my camera and it will be a better image than i had in mind and we'll kind of keep pivoting from there i think it's important in your job as a photographer to get people as normal and comfortable as fast as possible and i found for engagement sessions specifically that movement really does help that process and gets people feeling a lot more normal a lot more quick is that the correct grammar i don't know closer you get what i'm trying to say booking your first weddings um i'll speak through my experiences and what i kind of did uh there's a whole lot of content about this specific thing on the member's website so if you're interested in that sign up for a month and see how it goes there's 100 money back guarantee if you're not 100 happy let me know and i'll send your money back there are 20 plus courses on there um also in the kind of newer or at least current economy of things weddings are kind of slowly getting back in some countries so we're seeing a lot more allotments and a lot smaller of weddings overall so there are two courses there's an allotments course as well as a micro weddings course up there as well if you're interested in that i would say that allotments are definitely here to stay and i would also say that allotments generally unlock cooler opportunities as far as where you get to go with a smaller group of people but there are so many courses on specifically booking kind of more standard style weddings on there as well so to speak to my first experiences getting into the industry i i tried to reach out to every single photographer that i could to be like hey i'd love to second shoot with you and i didn't get a whole lot of responses and until i was actually shooting weddings on my own i didn't start to really see referrals from other photographers i think it's very important to be to befriend other photographers and to be kind of in the same circles because kind of what happens this will work in the commercial side of your business as well the jobs will come in and they will be priced so far below what that photographer is currently charging and they'll be like yeah i can't do that but i can send you to this guy that's just starting out maybe he'll be able to help you out i got a lot of my commercial first commercial jobs that way and i got a lot of my first weddings that way as well my very first weddings though i actually had to go out and get on my own so the first one i got off craigslist of all places i listed like hey i'm at the time i was a concert photographer i had done a few styled shoots and a few engagement shoots around town here i was like here's my portfolio love to come out absolutely free shooting my for my portfolio we'll give you i think it was like 100 final images as well as i'll be there for two to three hours um please please get in touch and i figured i'd be like oh like i have like 25 people that are all going to be stoked to have me and it turns out that only two and only one ended up working out and it didn't really work out that well so that was a stressful wedding and not a whole lot of fun and while it worked i don't know if i would go that route again but it was just i just wanted to get out there and shoot weddings uh the more fun version of i guess what happened next was that i actually booked a wedding for a friend of a friend that they just didn't have the budget for a photographer so i'm like yeah i'll absolutely come out and i'll do those photos so my two first weddings were absolutely free that they were just all for portfolio i was also reaching out to them essentially i wasn't the one that was like getting an email like hey taylor we'd love to have you shoot our wedding that just wasn't realistic at that time i was also very young which made another level of difficulty as well just social gaps between myself and my couples that were 25 and i'm like 17 18. so those are my experiences i don't know like i'm happy that they worked out and they were kind of all i had at the time looking back what i could have done a lot better is that i was on the right track whenever i set up those first shoots those first preview shoots in order for me to sell my services i wish i would have kept more with that i see the value of it now i didn't really see the value of it at the time i would spend a lot of my time just convincing every single couple that you possibly can to go out and do a shoot with you and to really build your portfolio one you'll become a much better photographer when you actually have to interact with people and figure out kind of what looks good and what lenses you like and which lighting scenarios really came together well you learn a lot but then you also just get really comfortable working with people and you build your portfolio out at the same time so i would say go out as many shoots as you can possibly set up do that um i would say to also bridge that into doing wedding style shoots as well that uh one of my most successful times that i laid off it as soon as i did it was that i convinced a couple that was one of my friends they got married very young and i was like hey i know you didn't really love your wedding photos you got from your photographer can we go out and can we do a session around town and we went out for a walk and we did a bunch of photos and those photos were in my portfolio for probably about seven or eight years before i was kind of like ah i find i don't know if the canted angle is is in maybe that has to go now but that was definitely a huge success and looking back that was probably the point that pivoted my career for people to actually start contacting me and to start getting in touch and people would still ghost me and do weird stuff because i was just as brand new photographer but it was very much my first kind of entrance into really looking like a wedding photographer online i think it is more important especially now than ever to have as much content as you can possibly get on your own um to start marketing yourself and marketing your own business with that if you sit around and you wait for that to organically come to you it's going to take a very very long time but if you get out there and you start connecting with people or say you actually you've booked a wedding and you've done a wedding and you know a makeup artist or a hair stylist or a florist or maybe you're close to the venue or maybe your friend owns a restaurant and they want some restaurant style wedding photos for them to use in their own marketing efforts kind of whatever opportunities you have go like explore them and figure out how you can put together wedding style shoots from there that if you say to a makeup artist like hey love to do a style shoot with you happy to cover your hard costs of makeup and i just want some images from my portfolio all of a sudden maybe they're going to know somebody and they're going to know a location or maybe they're going to know a couple or they're going to know a wedding dress shop and things come together a lot faster than you kind of expect so make sure that you're in control of your own portfolio at all times rather than just sitting back and waiting for it to come to you because it'll take a long long time if you go that route so to book your first weddings definitely start building your own portfolio today and you will organically attract them along the way and you'll find these opportunities and your name will get passed along in weddings and engagement shoots will come up over time as well as you can use all of the content that you're creating for paid facebook ads paid instagram ads or ticktock ads whatever you want to do if you're creating all of this content and putting this in front of the right people you will book your first wedding no problem welcome to the editing section of this video i'm going to walk you through my editing process it's a bit of a three-tiered process we do photo mechanic first followed by lightroom followed by photoshop um i guess photo mechanic maybe we'll talk in a minute about it but it's not 100 necessary for you to purchase if you don't yet have it um maybe taking a step back even before then the night of the wedding so i spoke in the the camera setup that i shoot raw plus jpeg whenever possible so i'm actually shooting jpegs and when i get home i back those up to either dropbox or smug mug or wherever you host your jpegs and i put everything up there so that it's very quick it's very quick easy backup and within a couple of hours they're usually online and have an off-site backup my other backups are my local backups i have this drive here that is just simply a backup drive so all it does is store backed up images and i never actually touch it that it's if i need to go back and reference it i can but i never edit i never do anything on this drive and what i do is i actually drag the entire um i don't have a memory card in here but i drag the entire folder as you can see from the memory card over to this backup folder and then when it loads over i'll have a quick scroll down to make sure nothing's grayed out if finder crashes out or on a mac if finder crashes uh it might not tell you it'll reboot but it might not continue actually loading things in there are programs that you can use to assist yourself in the ingest process but i've found that i like just having full control over this specific thing um i will either verify by right clicking and get info or i will go down here if there's 2692 items in this folder that if i see that on the card i'm pretty happy then i go back to the card and i copy everything over to my working drive so i'll make just a specific um folder just for them and i'll copy everything over if it's just myself there and it's like a two camera shoot i'll put everything in one folder if we're doing photo and video coverage i'll start splitting it out by cameras after that usually the next day i'll go into photo mechanic down here um lightroom is pretty quick at making selections but i find that photo mechanic is just so much faster i also personally like having a little bit of a separation in my mind that okay i sit down and this is my selecting time and then when i finish that i can feel some sort of reward and then i move over to lightroom from there so it's internally at least like it keeps me a little bit happier but basically and a super fast way to make your selects rather than going through lightroom that is traditionally a little bit slower overall and might slow you down that it might just not be able to keep up sam hurd if you're not familiar with sam he shot our wedding actually um he has a lot of tips for how to make your lightroom super fast and it does make it really great but i still like the reward of kind of having that like i've completed this task now on to the lightroom section um and with that yeah on the lightroom section the the way that i use photomechanic basically everything that you take on the entire day you load the folder in again working from the working drive and then you just go through and you just make your selects um your cameras will probably just load in uh by file name first so if you want to switch things to chronological order you can um here's my i think i was probably walking while i was doing that but basically you just cycle through and whenever you find an image that you like you stop on it and hit either one two all the way to nine or zero uh and it'll flag it with a different color um usually i'll make the red just kind of my general selection that like that image yes i will edit that and then i'll also do a second flag either a two or three for something that maybe i'm going to put on instagram or that in the past that i would have blogged from there i select all the images that i want and then i just simply drag them like this over into lightroom um file you can't see come down here import photos and video and then everything just loads in this is a bit of an eclectic mix of different photos that i've taken in different lighting conditions i figured it was important to show you just kind of a general overall of kind of what a wedding day looks like for me i'm always trying to shoot in the best lighting conditions i can but sometimes you just don't have complete control of it when you load into library mode so there's one secret hidden feature i guess it's not secret hidden but i didn't know about it for a very long time it does these global corrections over here which right now doesn't really matter like i'm not going to be adjusting all of these by one stop of exposure a little bit of warmth in temperature but if you're editing at night time and you load the gallery up the next day and everything is just a little bit too cool or a little bit too warm or a little bit too overexposed you can actually come in here and you can globally adjust it in develop if you're syncing the settings you're making all the settings exactly the same what you're doing here is you're actually moving things based like on if it's set to you've adjusted to exposure plus two and you hit this it comes down one third of a stop rather than setting it to one third of a stop so um hidden thing that i didn't know about for a long time that really changed my life i use it for white balance a lot that i outsource a lot of my post production so when i get a gallery back sometimes it's just a little bit too cool or it's a little bit too warm and i want to make that quick adjustment and this allows me to do that so double clicking brings you into the full view of it this is also the easiest place if you need to rotate images hopefully your camera does this automatically but if it doesn't then you can easily spin your images around in here so moving over to develop i really only ever use develop mode i don't use anything else within this strangely enough um we have all of my presets here so if you're a member you have access to all of these presets um and even though i wish i wouldn't have named them with like 2018 because even though it is a 2018 preset i'm still super happy with it and i would still be like more than happy to deliver an image on that and sometimes it just fits the gallery a lot better i would say if you are a member or if you purchase this preset pack go through and figure out maybe the five or six that you like the absolute best and put them and just drag them into a different folder and make that kind of the ones that you choose from if you're using every single one of these presets in every wedding or every every portrait shoot your work is really going to be kind of all over the place so the more you can kind of simplify it into just a few the better and happier i think that you're going to be with your work long term that everything always looks awesome in the moment but five years from now if you stick to something that's a little bit more cohesive i think that you're going to be a little bit happier overall so the spring 2021 presets are my newest and i would say that they work the best for mirrorless cameras up until that point i was on digital slr so um in even the 2020 presets i'm still super happy with the main 2020 but it's definitely something that works slightly better on my digital slr tones that said even though this is from a nikon z6 i'm actually going to edit from the from the main today so if you're not familiar with lightroom all of your simple basic controls are here for wedding photography typically i'm only ever touching kind of these right here so i'm not ever really going too much into texture clarity dehaze vibrant saturation these are kind of what i will do we'll talk a little bit more about the advanced things you can do within lightroom and then the the more advanced things that you can do in photoshop that lightroom can't do or doesn't do as efficiently but what i will usually do at this point is i'll decide like okay this looks good on the opening image should i sync this preset across every single other image and usually what i'll do is i'll hit command a or control a and i'll select everything down here and then i'll hit command shift s or control shift s and i'll actually pop this up and i will just sync everything so i won't sync white balance but all of the other settings i will sync across everything for today's demonstration i am not going to be doing this but usually this is what i would do and i would edit from this um kind of that profile makes my life i guess just easier i don't have to click a button every single time i load into something so an image like this what i'm looking at basically is that it is in good light but it's kind of backlit right now and what i want to do is i want to bring a little bit more light onto their faces and save the background just a little bit so something like that i would be pretty happy with i'm always doing my best to expose four skin tones and to make people look as good as they possibly can so i might even do something kind of even crazier like this and maybe even bring the the shadow or the highlights down a little bit more um you can also if you are looking so basically this is this may be a very difficult image to begin on um but if you're looking at bringing back kind of what's going on back here you have a few options you can either paint it in manually so you can come over here to the adjustment brush and you can go and set it to to minus 0.5 exposure and you can paint everything and you can try to mask out around here but what i usually do in kind of volume based batch settings is i'll come over here to the graduated filter and i will set something like maybe a very very small exposure and then something maybe a little bit more extreme for the highlights and i will come down here like this so basically what this is doing you can kind of see it now so that it has full effect up here when it hits this line it starts to fade out and by this line up here it is completely gone so to bring back a little bit of that background something like that feels a little bit better so it doesn't look overall like it's been i guess these flowers so everything is a balance and again this is probably a hard photo to start on chronologically it came first though all right so something like that i feel like balances correctly i'm happy with them specifically which is always the most important followed by the rest of the scene i am very happy with as well so moving over here um if it is the same image we'll talk about this a little bit more throughout the gallery but if it's a similar image and you just want to copy all the settings you're going to hit this previous button here it's right there and you will just copy everything over so usually it's a good starting point what it did basically that it was a completely different lighting scenario and it was a very different exposure so i'm going to adjust that back and i'm going to adjust the crop so this is your crop tool up here and i'm just going to reset that since it was a little more straight and something like this looks pretty good and i'm going to do the same thing i did last time where i kind of pull in a little bit of highlights from the from the side here but try not to overdo it and leave it at something like that as i'm sure you probably saw this lady up here i don't specifically want her in the photo so the easiest way for just quick spot removal is actually coming here to this button here and this works most of the time and just by painting them out like this i also usually use a tablet but i'm using a mouse today so it might be a little bit slower but usually by doing something like that you get pretty close in this case it didn't really do it like wide shot you can definitely see that uh looking at it for the first time a couple probably won't notice it but for me it's definitely something i notice um so what i'll do is i'll try one more time i'll move this just up a little bit and because that doesn't quite work for me i'm actually going to load this image into lightroom and i'll be doing a specific lightroom adjustment in that basically in lightroom you can do a content aware fill where you just quickly grab exactly what you want and you hit shift delete and then it'll pop up a box and you just hit enter and it will i would say 99 of the time give you exactly what you want and make that object disappear you can also move objects in it too so you can do a content aware move if you want to move her and add her 10 more times across the screen so i'm happy with that image there nothing else that i would be too worried about adjusting moving over into this image here so one of the i guess the benefits of this summer preset here is if you are in a backlit environment that this summer preset will typically add even more warmth to the image um in this case because i am a little bit underexposed it's doing some pretty crazy things to skin so i'm actually going to go back to my main preset and we'll edit from there i'll actually be increasing the warmth as well i find that when i am in an image that um is naturally very warm that my camera never really reaches the level of warmth that i want within the the actual white balance settings so i think something like that i'm a little bit happier with overall cool happy with that moving into another sunset image again same deal that i'm going to maybe increase the uh the white balance a little bit here and i think that will be all right and i'm going to try this summer again looks like from the preview that it's going to be a little bit too harsh and a little too uh that looked alright so the preview lied to me and it's actually a very very nice shot overall so your shadow is definitely having a huge effect here from absolute silhouettes to i guess this is the power of raw i don't want it to be a completely properly exposed image i am happy with it somewhere around there and then you can even come in here to the graduated filter again and maybe pull down the the sun a little bit or you can even kind of warm it up that might be too much i feel like it's important to make sure your edits kind of hide that the more natural you can leave it usually the better and i think that's something that that's i'm pretty happy with all right now moving over to paris even straight at a camera i'm super happy with this image with the exception i'm always on this like weird one degree slant so making the image straight and maybe come over here to main and something like that i'm pretty happy with already so the reason i brought highlights down is because it's a very overcast day and any little detail i can get out of the sky i'm happy to have highlights in this image they don't really have a huge effect on the skin tones as you can see um they do have a little bit of an effect but um i think that by doing it just to like bring a little bit of this guy back and to make it a little bit more gray rather than just white um i am happy with you can even do something like that i guess to make it even a little more i like the way that this natural vignette is creeping in you can also use a graduated filter to add like vignettes if you're interested in that so basically you can kind of go maybe something like this and you can do something like that and you can actually add kind of little vignettes to to help frame your subjects so if you were to add a vignette in lightroom it would be very just circle it would be a circle that it just kind of tries to frame if you're adding vignettes with the graduated filter things tend to hide a little bit better and it feels a little more like a framed image rather than just like a weird edited vignette so this looks pretty nice pretty happy with that um all the presets are designed for skin tone so they basically are to do the best they possibly can within weird lighting conditions to fix skin tones and to make it a little bit easier on your editing i will also find that certain camera systems are a little bit easier when it comes to editing as well that um when i am shooting with something like my nikon my z62 or my d850 that i used for a bunch of years prior to this that those files are super easy to edit that i find that within a couple of seconds i can or even within one click a lot of the time that i'm already pretty close to where i want to be but i have found a few camera systems that are a little more challenging so make sure that if you do find yourself in one of those situations that maybe you modify this preset based on kind of what your camera naturally does if it's a little bit too magenta all the time or a little bit too green to build that into your presets so you're able to just quickly edit and with some level of efficiency so uh maybe i'll mention on the last one i didn't really do a whole lot hit click click main brought the highlights down and just made it kind of balance overall no faces in this one so it's a little bit easier overall so this image here like that i'm pretty happy with it's almost getting a little too magenta for me so i'm going to warm it up just a little bit to kind of hide that and i am very happy with that overall if you want to add a little bit of face light you can actually just kind of come in here if you want to lighten anything in images i will always recommend that you bring the contrast down and the shadows up rather than just cranking the exposure and doing something like this adds just a little bit more and as you can see it kind of hides perfectly in there this is well it's a very lovely image i found that this was maybe the most difficult session that i've ever had to edit in my entire life i don't know what the deal is but it was very challenging and i couldn't get like the straight out of the camera jpegs were actually what i was happiest with that i ended up just like i think everything that i posted online is actually straight out of camera jpegs or straight out of camera with a little bit of contrast added because of the fact that these magentas were just really challenging to deal with that like i want it because i want the the magenta kind of all in the sky like it naturally was but whenever i make their skin tones correct all of a sudden i lose that magenta from the rest of the scene i could come in with a graduated filter and and kind of add that back if i wanted um but overall i found that the jpegs that came off the nikon that this was a z6 were actually like what i wanted the final images to be which is kind of funny so this image here like this is even the raw file i'm super happy with when i actually come over here into my presets um i'm actually not quite as happy with it overall so that means i'm gonna have to find a different preset maybe my v2 my computer is going extra slow because i am both processing in lightroom which is very challenging and then also doing a screen record something like that i'm a little bit happier with overall but it is by no means um as good as it was straight at a camera so maybe take that as a note that if you are shooting jpegs specifically if you're a fuji shooter and those jpegs look incredible to you there's no reason to go in and mess around with them that if they're just what you want those images to be by all means just like that that can be the final the final edit and obviously shoot the raw files too to make sure that you kind of have that in case you need them but other than that like i don't know i i definitely for family sessions i'm going to say most of the time i'm editing from my jpeg files because i know that family sessions completely controlled environments controlled lighting that i'm getting what i want and to just package those up and send those out makes my life a lot easier on the post-production side of things so i like this but i kind of even liked it a little bit underexposed like that i should have been a little bit more centered in my camera and my physical location over there i think i was i think i got a few that were perfectly centered but i liked this one kind of the best once i got into it there's a little man over here if you want him to disappear this will be a bit a little bit of an easier edit than the other one maybe these things here too can go away so most of the time you're going to be able to hide what you need to hide with that tool but sometimes you got to move into photoshop as well i think even though we just watched it happen that looks a little too extreme and you want to go in you want to modify i can just get rid of that as well do you want to modify that but i don't think that anybody's going to kind of be looking over there images like this i definitely want even more warmth in the image than there was originally there like i'm going to push into like over 10 000 11 000 kelvin um and then i'm going to come into probably this preset here i can actually dial it back a little bit that made it very very strangely magenta so i'm going to knock down the magenta to green a little bit and then bring this up and correct for my my one percent angle and that's something i'm pretty happy with all right last image from this shoot 2020 main if you are into architecture photography i'm sure you're aware that this image that will eventually load is maybe not ideal you can see as the the flowers go up here that it very much isn't square that looks like it's descending on a extreme angle which it isn't um you can actually go into transform if you want to fix that you can try auto sometimes it works today worked got close enough didn't 100 work it also clips um because of the basically what it has to do it kind of crops their their feet so i would maybe find a different image and run that on it um because i do like how that looks a lot better than something like that although richard and riley they're taller and in the non-transformed version so they might be a little bit happier with that image so maybe something to consider and something to balance that if your couple looks as great as they possibly can maybe don't worry too much about the background at this point i'm actually going to do this 2020 main as i mentioned and i'm going to sync this across everything so i'm going to come to the end of the image set and shift command s all except for white balance and synchronize so that'll take a second but it'll give me a starting point that will kind of speed things up a little bit overall i would say that efficiency is kind of your best friend when it comes to processing weddings and with that preset loaded up i'm kind of free to just do simple corrections like this we'll get rid of this um lovely fire alarm you can probably get rid of it try again will lightroom go zero for three it's hard with specific lines because you have to make sure the lines exactly line up okay so there i missed a piece of it with a brush you can easily fix that but that looks pretty good so one for three for lightroom today moving over here same deal i'll get rid of that fire alarm although in this photo it doesn't really look like it's anything so you know what looked better just being in the frame we'll get rid of that in photoshop something like this is usually how i would more likely be editing images where i'm just kind of adjusting for the most part the exposure um and when you can get kind of in a flow like that a lot of this does actually come with shooting everything as correct as you can in camera so if you're shooting with the correct white balance and the correct exposure that you want to be editing to uh it makes things a lot easier like an image like that i'm just kind of happy with it as it is um i think as photographers we definitely have a tendency to maybe over process and to make things as good as they possibly can be but for the most part the more real to the scene that you can leave it i think at least my couples the happier they kind of are with that obviously if you're way underexposed or way overexposed it's a little bit weird but as long as you're making it feel like reality um i think that my couples will be pretty happy with that and hopefully yours will be as well so again something like that with the preset already added i'm pretty happy to just kind of leave that as it is again same deal just move into next this i'm a little slanty i'm a little off center and it's not quite warm or bright enough so i'm going to have to go in here and do a quick little adjust um the other thing maybe is that you have to be aware of everybody else that's in the frame so something like that might end up being a bit of a better scene when it comes to kind of the final album dave and alma coming down the aisle and i'll have to pick a better one sorry for the i was just randomly selecting from the thumbnails um david has his eyes closed in this one nonetheless we will edit the image and something like that i'm pretty happy with when they come into situations like this i do usually add a little bit of warmth and a little bit of exposure what i find that if i do underexpose something is that you either have to add a little bit of vibrance or saturation back or you actually have to add warmth i find that adding warmth usually solves the problem most of the time and that also gives me something that i can just click the previous button down here with and jump to like that i'm just happy with that there flower bloat a little bit but i don't mind that this the background is a little bit blown out it's kind of the best that you can do on the day without bringing in huge lights to actually offset the entire sun which is a little too much i think again the white balance up just a little bit you can also get a product called loop deck or you can get some sort of other midi controlling device that can actually make all of these into tactile adjustments i've found that with just a simple tablet and a keyboard that i'm usually pretty happy overall i've used a loop deck for a couple of years but i find that it's just um it's as easy with my tablet and my keyboard all right so again simple adjustments most of them i'm just bumping up the exposure here a little bit as well as a little bit of white balance too making a little bit warmer something like that and then this one i'm going to correct for the uh for the angle that i always shoot at one day my camera will just that's the only thing that i need is that if i can do like gopro has their linear stabilization and every shot that you take with a gopro will be exactly linear if you set that to on so i'm waiting one day for my camera to get there or maybe i could just learn to not shoot on an angle all the time but i don't know 15 years in and still shooting on an angle so if you shoot on an angle too know that you're not alone it's just it's life all right again just white balances and exposures um this is a bit of a i guess a dynamic scene in regards to if i'm aiming towards the back of the the church it's very very warm light or not church outdoor ceremony space um it's very very warm light but as it gets closer to the front it gets a little bit cooler so that's why when everyone was coming down the aisle that it looked beautiful and then it quickly kind of moved to something that wasn't exactly ideal so this is a situation where i would like to keep the background as best as i possibly can so by just kind of cranking down these highlights and then moving up these shadows you can kind of balance the best that you can um but know i would say for the most part that if you are happy with the way that the couple looks in the photos that is what they're going to care about the most and if the background goes a little bit that's not going to be something that they're ever going to be too concerned about um a little bit of warmth here i feel like the moral of this wedding is that i just shot it not quite as warm as i should have here we go moving the cocktails i've now adjusted my white balance to actually be what it was in real life shooting candidates like this i typically will just find the people that are in good light and i will just kind of focus on them and get the shots that i need rather than trying to get photos of people that are in bad light i'll just sit near the good light and wait for those people that are in the bad light to hopefully come to the good light at some point so for white balances and challenging settings you can actually use the dropper so the dropper kind of hides right here and you can just click on something that's white fortunately she's wearing or holding a white piece of paper you'll also notice that fortunately for us as wedding photographers that there's usually somebody wearing a white dress or a white shirt and it's very easy to white balance off of them i will say that at least from my preference that lightroom tends to white balance a little bit cooler so i made it just a little bit warmer than that and again corrected for a little bit of my slant so i'm going to try just hitting previous and see how that goes as you can see maybe not the most ideal we can try hitting if you're just kind of at a loss for it you can always try hitting auto and i would say that auto is pretty accurate most of the time and something like that i'm quite happy with at the podium um i think the lighting is actually kind of what i want it to be and i'm quite happy with that so without the preset that's kind of what it looked like there with the preset as you can see in kind of a maybe non-ideal lighting scenario the preset actually really kind of helps you out and makes your life a little bit easier for an image like this i would say for kind of your favorites to do that um gradient little hack for um making a vignette that i talked about um so you're actually making it feel a little bit more romantic it almost looks a little bit too bright um i guess i also have tint on here too so i guess it's a very bad their lighting color is purple so it kind of matches it there's a fortunate mistake there um so i would be just adding a little bit of vignette um when the scene is a little bit too bright if they're doing their first dance during daytime or if your flash is just kind of everywhere or if the ambient in the room was actually extremely bright so something like that looks good i'm going to reset this and add a few more of these just to make the rest of the room a little bit darker and you can kind of add as many as you want really so something like that i'm a little bit happier with um that's the straight camera image that is loading loading there so that's all right i think that looks a heck of a lot better um just with a few quick seconds in photoshop so my camera struggles definitely with this specific i guess lighting so when you're in a very warm environment and in a very um warm setting it is very important that you lock your settings to exactly what you want them to be because if you're shooting automatic you will get colors that do not they're not exactly what you want and they're not really true to life again a few quick clicks there when you're shooting a writing camera it's it's pretty easy to do the dress is a little blown out ah no we're good you want to make sure that there is detail in the dress um kind of at all pieces of the dress and also a shirt as well but i'll kind of use those as my my markers so if i'm making the dress a little bit too white and it's becoming a pure white which means that it's clipping on your histogram up here and you see that there's a little line all the way up here um or it can kind of go the other way too that if i am way too dark into the shadows a lot of my presets actually don't have a pure black in them they have kind of a mid i guess a darker gray but if you see that like all of a sudden there's this huge group of color um kind of down here towards almost black you know to kind of balance out that image um reading a histogram is a bit overall i guess not necessarily misleading but you do have to learn how to read it um simply because it can tell you like some pretty crazy things but if you're looking at the image and it is a silhouette image with a single rim light or something all of a sudden like that's kind of what you want it to be actually and you don't have to edit for the histogram correctness when the histogram is telling you kind of what is going on in the in the image that you shot so a little too contrasty but by just bringing up the exposure i'm thinking that it will remove a little bit about that perfect i'm pretty happy with that i'm going to add a little more um a little pump to the shadows here this is kind of a natural vignette i would say that it just kind of the scene just naturally frames itself but i will say that to balance the the front chairs up here with them or with the with the trees will make it a little bit nicer so an edit like that looks pretty nice you can also bring the shadows way up and get a little bit more color in the trees if you want there's no real right or wrong way to make your edits which is both the positive and negative because you can never be finished when you don't know that somebody's not like this is exactly what it needs to be there's never that point to edit to you just kind of have to do the best you can so this is an example of kind of more challenging side lighting i just kind of lit this a little bit wrong i should have had them rotated but i kind of did like this background you can do kind of the best you can in a scene like this my main concern would be make sure that there's no pure white on the side of his face here if that starts to clip to white at that point you have to kind of reevaluate how you've done the edit if you ever are in a situation like that you can definitely do some things where um there's a few presets in here that do not have anywhere close to a pure white that's it's more of a gray and i'll find that if like i need to kind of save something if it just doesn't balance that if i use a preset like that that i'm actually able to kind of save the image in a lot of cases so i'm going to use the previous button down here to kind of basically the i guess the the positive of the preset button is that it also saves you time but it also makes things a little bit more cohesive from image to image so if you're editing a full set or editing all the family photos that everything will look pretty much the same and waiting for lightroom or maybe i'm just i've already done it and i'm waiting for myself so that's all right i like the other images better this might not be one that i would 100 deliver just because of the non-balances of a little bit too much brightness up here on michelle's shoulder and not quite enough in their faces naturally as it comes together you can obviously go in and edit those but if i just have a different one with them kind of in the same pose from a different angle it's a little bit easier for me to to deliver that so one click i would consider that to be done with the exception again of my slant just waiting there we go happy with that next image maybe a little too dark so i'm going to add a little bit of exposure and i'm kind of happy to let the windows go like that and just kind of retain that um the full image there the full image hadn't loaded so it looked a little blurry um that's another thing that kind of trips me out sometimes when i'm trying to make my selects in lightroom is that um the full image sometimes doesn't actually load and i'm looking at an image i'm like oh that one's soft and then it turns out it just hasn't actually loaded yet so this would be an example that should be very very easy for lightroom to get rid of this and yes there you go pretty easy to just kind of get rid of small details that you just want to disappear like that um i guess i didn't get all of that just do it again i also use a brackets keys so brackets um this side of bracket makes your brush smaller as you can see there it's shrinking and then the other one makes it a little bit wider so a lot of the time you can kind of just put whatever you want to select in a single click and it will usually make it disappear as well it looks a little bit better if you wanted to add so overall i think the scene is well exposed but i think what's lacking is that there's just no light really kind of on this section of the flowers so i'm going to paint this in settings are currently wrong but i'll probably do the uh the old contrast down shadows up just to bring out a little bit more of that and your florist will be a lot happier with you than if you just kind of crushed all the colors together down there and our non-linear edit of the day i guess this camera was set a little bit different um situations like this where it's overcast and it's harsh overcast um for first looks i'm always setting it up so when whoever it is it's going to be turning if there is somebody that's turning when they turn they're actually in the best light so a lot of the time they're set up kind of against that best light um so i do the best i can to just kind of add a little bit more light and to to lighten up kind of the harsh shadows under his eyes there so that when they actually do turn and do the first look that it's um in the most ideal lighting that it can be that image didn't even quite load and we're already done with it that should be hopefully your efficiency after a couple of weddings that you can be making the edits before the full image actually loads and it looks sharp to you um say for instance right there that i'm pretty much happy with it and the image hasn't loaded we'll wait for it patiently there we go that looks nice all right and into the last image here definitely too bright something like that a little bit better and then add that so that all the colors don't just uh kind of all crush together all right that is the lightroom section of the day for my actual lightroom export settings i will do a select all again the command or control a and select everything come over here to export come down here um i really don't change my settings too much i found that quality of 76 seems to be as good as it possibly can be i found that with 90 i can't tell the difference between i would say 65 to 90 if i'm looking at a jpeg side by side i can't tell the difference when i go in and i start trying to edit from that jpeg at that point maybe i can tell the difference but for the most part these are kind of the final images so i just kind of i'm happy to let them be at this 76 percent you can also do i guess 300 would be more typical for your pixels per inch and then if you are shooting a camera that is shooting like 105 megapixel files for some reason you can always resize it if you want so that everything is maybe something more like 5000 for the long edge and beyond that i don't actually touch anything at all everything else is as it is and i click export but if i click export right now it will blow up my computer because i'm doing a screen record and i have lightroom open after this we're going to move over into photoshop i'm going to show you quickly what i do there but it's honestly not quite a whole lot so now that we're in photoshop the only thing that i really do here and i'll actually i have a batch action set up to do this in filter i actually have imagenomic portraiture 3 and what portraiture 3 does is it simply does skin smoothing so anything that it detects as a skin tone it's going to just kind of smooth it out and i found it to be very very quick for doing that specific thing that's all i needed to do and it's very very fast i have it set at default and then i'll actually click ok and when it loads which is only a couple of seconds which is kind of crazy so as you can see there um i'll show you the histogram history um so that's how it opened and just a very slight adjustment there but completely automatic i didn't have to do anything um and i'll actually dial that back a little bit and then i'll go to edit and i'll actually fade portraiture 3. so i'll bring this down to something like maybe we'll say 70 percent so it's a little a little more natural it hides a little bit more and then actually what i've done and you can do this yourself as well so basically what you what you do is you start recording an action and say for instance my action that kind of exports from photoshop all it does is it adds that portraiture comes up here into image down to image size and we're actually going to make it 98 so i'm going to unclick this and i'm going to shrink the image just in width wise down to 98 percent so it is exactly the same height wise but i'm going to just kind of shrink it this way a little bit the idea is people that will hopefully just enjoy themselves a little bit better and they won't really know why um or if you've just shot at an incorrect angle um i feel like cameras always just kind of don't really capture exactly how people believe that they feel um so i feel like that kind of does it makes people a lot happier their images overall it's a very subtle thing so skin softening 98 portraiture and then i close it and what that basically does is it builds you the ability to come up here into file and you can go file to automate to batch sorry that my settings of my file edit image and stuff are all clipped off up here um and then i'll actually come down here into tj and it's literally my only action that i have set up 98 plus portraiture you pick whatever folder you want to send this at and then you just click ok and it will just automatically go through the every image of the entire gallery and i process every single image with it even if it is not an image with a human face in it i just kind of let it go throughout the entire gallery you could go as far as to just like tag all the images that you want with a different color with the involved faces but i found that adding skin softening to things that are not faces that it just doesn't have any effect at all most of the time so um yeah so i have that so now it's just very easy and basically when you're batch processing it like that all it's doing is playing this and you have to put a little close at the end of it so basically when you're recording your thing um maybe to walk you through how i would build it you basically open up you start recording here and build a new one so what i would do i've started recording right here i will come up here into portraiture 3. i'll run that and then i will come over to image image size 98 i will save it popped up on my other screen and then i will actually hit command w and it will close the image now one of the tricks is that you're now like oh no i'm stuck still recording you got to come back and you have to quit it here and then you drag this and just to garbage and all of a sudden you have your new action um so now whenever you click this button it'll shrink it to 98 it will add your imagenomic portraiture um you can also use um skylum luminar 4 is also very very incredible i found that for batch processing it is just a little bit slower with portraiture all it does is skin softening so like i'm happy to kind of use that all the time for it so yeah that is all that i do for editing after this it just goes on the internet and goes out to the couple thank you so much for making it to the end of this tutorial i hope that you found it helpful there's a lot in there if you have any specific questions feel free to put them in the comments and i will do my best to get back to them or even create new videos based on maybe things that were left out of this that you felt should have been included as i mentioned in the intro there is a lot within this tutorial but the business side of things is all over on the members website so if you're interested in i guess getting the presets and as well as if you're in the video there's lots on there when you sign up you get instant access to everything that's already up there which is i think three thousand dollars in content at this point and it is all wedding photography i guess it kind of all goes into three silos the main silo is wedding photography business giving you the tools to book your own weddings the other section is uh more hands-on tools like the introvert's guide to wedding photography posing and the off-camera flash guide and then the third section is a bit of one that is kind of my personal interest which is figuring out how to travel for free or at least to break even on trips um so that's just kind of some content there that at least for my dream life i kind of sat back and figured out that like hey i want to be able to travel as much as i possibly can and uh how what do like what pieces do i have to put in place to be able to do that and with photography and potentially some video skills that all of a sudden you can create amazing things for other brands so you will find a lot of opportunities you're not just a quote unquote influencer because you actually get to be a content creator for them so you're a heck of a lot more valuable and you'll find a lot more opportunities so that third section is kind of all about that so come on over to the member site if you're interested there is so much content on there for you to continue to explore this whole wedding photography journey hope you found this helpful don't forget to add a like or subscribe if you if you're not yet and uh yeah that's all thanks for staying to the end have a good day enjoy your future wedding photography career and maybe we'll meet again on the internet or potentially in real life who knows

Channel: Taylor Jackson

Views: 255,495

Keywords: photography, wedding photography, wedding photographer, photography tutorial, photographer, taylor jackson, photography tips, photography tricks, learn photography, become professional photographer, learn wedding photography, become a wedding photographer, wedding photography tips, behind the scenes, wedding photography tutorial, wedding photography behind the scenes, how to photograph a wedding, full wedding day, wedding photography education, photography tips for beginners

Id: AzV_cJD8dLY

Length: 157min 2sec (9422 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021