Results tagged “Engagement Photography” from MNP Blog

Several months ago I was hired to shoot what I thought was going to be a pretty typical engagement session in New York. Time passed and as the date came closer I got in touch with the couple to firm up the details. They told me they had some ideas about the shoot and then said they wanted it to have a 1950's theme. They wanted to shoot outside a diner, they were having a '56 T-bird there for the shoot, they were dressing up in 50's attire... in fact, it wasn't going to be typical at all.

One of the things they told me is that they wanted to shoot with the car outside the diner and have the sunset behind them. Well if you know anything about photography you know that in order for that to happen you're going to have to use lighting. I guess I could have done some HDR stuff but its not 2006 anymore. :)

So I rented a Profoto set up and drove out to New Jersey to the diner. The diner was awesome but it was also surrounded by cars, not from the 50's, which to me kind of kills the whole thing. So we positioned the car in the middle of the parking lot and I shot from pretty much the only angle that blocked out the rest of the cars and still showed the diner. I felt pretty good about the images as we were shooting but I never get too excited because you really never know what you're getting until you open them up. I even turned the strobes off at a couple of points and shot natural light just in case things weren't turning out as good as I thought they were.

When I opened the images up to begin working on them I just fell in love. Its so different from what I normally do but man they're so freaking cool.

While I typically work with natural light, when I was first getting started I never wanted to be in a situation where I felt unprepared so I learned as much as I could about off camera lighting. I'm by no means an expert but knowing this stuff has helped me get good images out of bad situations.

So here are a few of my favorites. I put in some of the natural light stuff as well. I think the difference is really interesting. Let me know what you think.

I was going through a shoot from a couple of weeks ago tonight and thought I'd put a few images up. I had such a great time with Chu and Antonio. They're such a great couple and this is actually not the first time I've taken Chu's photo. I shot her sister's wedding a couple of years ago and she was a bridesmaid.

One of my favorite images ever came out of their "pre-wedding" "day after" session:

Enough about them though, back to Chu and Antonio... :)

Here are a few images from my time with them.

I love these ones on their beach cruisers!

Side note to photographers... Every time I think about blogging I get this pit in my stomach. I mean, I love blogging but it always takes soooo loooooong getting the images ready to post. It's not the processing of the images, its the resizing, sharpening, putting my logo on, saving a version for web and a full size version that I dread. Well a couple of months ago that changed. I found out about a product called Blogstomp that does all of these things with literally just a few clicks. I still probably don't blog enough but there's definitely one less excuse. Haha. If you're a photographer, or just a blogger that posts lots of pictures go check them out and get yourself an early Christmas present. They are AWESOME.

I'd go through and tell you about my favorites but I love them all.