On a short notice I got together with my brother’s family and had a great time shooting them down by the Sacramento River in Red Bluff. The kids brought bikes and played on the trails in between poses and that helped keep it fun. With Dog Island Park so green and lush, we had plenty of opportunities. May I present to you some of the highlights.

Your Family Photos

I’m available to shoot your family’s portraits too. Give me a call/text at 530-727-8020 or email me so we can talk about it. You can find me information about what I do here.

So this is all a very interesting turn in the life of this landscape photographer. I’ve been shooting landscapes for the last two years completely smitten and completely monogamous. Yeah, I would shoot pictures of my kids and family, but I always had it in my head that I hated shooting people. Most of that probably stemmed from the countless shoots of grumpy kids not having enough patience to get the shots we needed. They had always been stressful and unpleasant experiences.

©Crystal Leslie

In comes my brother in law who was getting married and he asked Crystal and me to shoot his wedding. We agreed with the stipulation that we couldn’t guarantee anything and they graciously accepted. The panic then set in. Yeah, we know how to setup a composition and understand exposure, but posing and lighting not so much. I started experimenting with my lighting and quickly learned we needed to work with light to get really exciting images. We invested in some wireless triggers and umbrellas to shoot our Speedlights through and practiced the whole month leading into the wedding.

Crystal planned out everything to a T. We made a list of all the poses we wanted and organized them into a schedule to coincide with the wedding plans. One of the biggest challenges we had to face was the ceremony itself. It was at night and candle lit. There was some auxiliary stage lights, but it was dark. We needed some pro glass, so we rented a pair of 24-70 f/2.8 lenses. This decision ultimately made all of this possible.

It was a long and exhausting day, but the amazing thing was how much Crystal and I enjoyed it. My good friend Aaron Patterson who is a seasoned wedding photographer warned me that my first wedding would be the worst and that it would get better. He was trying to encourage me and to expect mistakes. We made a few but overall, we rocked it. Everything went so smooth and we had so much fun doing it.

In the end it came down to a month’s worth of preparation and practice, having the right gear and most of all an open mind with a good attitude. Shooting with my wife was kind of scary in and of itself because we have slightly different tastes and opinions on how things need to get done. Yet somehow we gelled and it all came together in the end.

So guess what? I want do it again.

I’m not going to give up on my landscapes and licensing that kind of work. I’m just going to seek out wedding and portrait clients now that I know that I don’t actually hate shooting people. I’ve been approached in the past and I turned that work down. In my initial Going Pro post, I suggested I’d teach work shops. That’s looking less likely now and more likely weddings and portraiture.

Weddings are a very crowded market and I’m going to work very hard to differentiate myself from the rest. Using light is going to be central for my work. In my area, it isn’t very common. I also want to mix in some of my landscape experience bring it in together giving clients some truly unique work. The challenging will be to carefully craft my new branding. I don’t want to throw away everything I’ve already worked for yet I am going to selling something that you don’t see mixed together often.

I am completely biased but I think the photos came out fantastically! Here’s a link to the whole album if you want to see more. How many of you guys love shooting landscapes and think the idea of shooting a wedding is too scary? Perhaps you’ll rethink it.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. It feels like I’ve been shooting non-stop for the last 14 days. I shot my first wedding, I hosted a three day photowalk around Mount Shasta and I spent last weekend in Yosemite. I have a lot to tell, but I want to start with Yosemite. I’ve been visiting the park since I was a boy, but I haven’t been since I got into photography two years ago. So this was my first trip with my new photographer eyes. It’s inspirational for everyone that visits, but it was a totally new experience behind my lens.

I tried to shoot Horsetail Falls during that window where the setting sun hits just the falls creating this molten lava look. This winter has been so dry, Horsetail wasn’t more than a seep, but it still looks cool with the light hitting El Capitan. I got the pleasure of meeting up with Lori Hibbert and Jeffrey Sullivan who are very familiar with the park and showed me some great spots I would not have found alone. So thanks you two!

Tonight, I’m sharing my sunset shot from the classic Tunnel View overlooking the valley. To the left you have the mighty El Capitan and on the right is Bridalveil Falls with Cathedral Rock. Further back is Half Dome. Coming into Yosemite, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about shooting in the crowds of people. Having to setup close to other photographers competing for a view of the landscapes. While it was busy like I feared, people were cordial and real pleasure to meet. People who all share the same passion I do, so there was an instant connection with these total strangers. So the competition quickly turned into comradery.

There’s no denying the fact that the internet revolves around social. It is only going to get more tightly integrated when things like Facebook’s “Frictionless Sharing” becomes more widespread. So as a website owner, how do I utilize all of this social power for my own evil deeds? Sure, I’ve got social buttons so it’s super easy to +1 and “Like” all of my content, but that so 2010. The latest craze has been to bring the social networks to your website by generating conversations around your content instead of people simply leaving comments.

This is where LiveFyre come into play. At the core, they are a hosted comment service. The magic lies in how it’s tightly integrated with Facebook and Twitter (hopefully Google+ in the future). You can @ mention all of your Twitter and Facebook contacts to bring them into the conversation here on my website. You can share good comments on Facebook and Twitter. To top it all off, it will bring posts from Facebook and Twitter into your page where it belongs using what they call SocialSync.

It isn’t perfect yet. For example, I have a site that is half custom built and half WordPress. So on their end, they consider this two separate websites and is treated like two separate installs. So I have two places to maintain settings and moderate comments. They say this is getting worked on. The other problem I have is with SocialSync. While it’s great that it’s snatching all the posts from Facebook and Twitter and bringing them into my website, it’s just there for reference. You cannot interact with those posts and tweets at all. You can’t “Like”, or reply to those conversations. You can’t even follow a link back to Facebook to enter into the conversation there. This is a new feature and they are iterating their product quickly so I suspect I won’t have to wait long.