I had the fun of shooting and then the nightmare of editing photos for my friends vow renewal. They came out fine and I’m happy with most of them, and perusing them on flickr probably would not show you anything too wrong. My photographer friends will probably hop all over these and could tell me everything that became a mistake in this collection, but alas, why wait for them when I’ll tell you myself. So the week before this shoot I rented a Canon 1.4 50mm and a 70-200mm L series. I have never shot with nice lenses before, I cut my teeth using whatever the cheapest crappiest thing I had was and thanked god I had the money for that. I’ve never charged for photography or anything because, well, I never thought I was really good enough. So onto the mistake, and it was really only one. The week of the shoot I had been taking the 50mm out and having a blast with it. I did no flash shots at Mellow Mushroom, and plenty of flash, but totally low light (almost no light) shots of my niece. I had a blast. What I forgot, is that since these shots were in almost no light, I had my ISO at 1600, I’m sure most of you know where this is going. For the non-photastic people out there, ISO is what used to be the light sensitivity rating of film. the lower the number the less sensitive, so ISO 100 film was crisp and sharp and had very little grain, where ISO 1600 would allow you to shoot in much, much lower light, but add grain and reduce the sharpness somewhat. Well on my camera, the 20D which is about 6 years old now, an ISO setting that high shows, especially when you have lots of light. Well as you can see in the set, we had PLENTY of light, tons of it, a glorious chance to take gorgeous pictures of cascading sunsets over people and get beautiful highlights and such. The other negative is that the 20D has a somewhat tiny LCD with low contrast, so often, your pictures can look ok, even zoomed in, but the moment you put them on a 22” screen, errors are screaming at you. So needless to say, I had about 700 pictures of my own, I edited them down to about 220, I edited those each by hand and did the best I could. I’m receiving compliments which is nice, but good lord, there was a solid week where I was ready to end it all over this. So if you need me, I’ll be obsessively checking my camera settings in the corner at the next shoot. The other set, marked Amy, is my friend Amy VanSchaik who graciously agreed to be the B shooter that day and of course hers are technically fantastic. So check them both out and vicariously enjoy the day with us.
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I had the fun of shooting and then the nightmare of editing photos for my friends vow renewal. They came out fine and I’m happy with most of them, and perusing them on flickr probably would not show you anything too wrong. My photographer friends will probably hop all over these and could tell me everything that became a mistake in this collection, but alas, why wait for them when I’ll tell you myself.

So the week before this shoot I rented a Canon 1.4 50mm and a 70-200mm L series. I have never shot with nice lenses before, I cut my teeth using whatever the cheapest crappiest thing I had was and thanked god I had the money for that. I’ve never charged for photography or anything because, well, I never thought I was really good enough. So onto the mistake, and it was really only one. The week of the shoot I had been taking the 50mm out and having a blast with it. I did no flash shots at Mellow Mushroom, and plenty of flash, but totally low light (almost no light) shots of my niece. I had a blast. What I forgot, is that since these shots were in almost no light, I had my ISO at 1600, I’m sure most of you know where this is going. For the non-photastic people out there, ISO is what used to be the light sensitivity rating of film. the lower the number the less sensitive, so ISO 100 film was crisp and sharp and had very little grain, where ISO 1600 would allow you to shoot in much, much lower light, but add grain and reduce the sharpness somewhat. Well on my camera, the 20D which is about 6 years old now, an ISO setting that high shows, especially when you have lots of light.

Well as you can see in the set, we had PLENTY of light, tons of it, a glorious chance to take gorgeous pictures of cascading sunsets over people and get beautiful highlights and such. The other negative is that the 20D has a somewhat tiny LCD with low contrast, so often, your pictures can look ok, even zoomed in, but the moment you put them on a 22” screen, errors are screaming at you.

So needless to say, I had about 700 pictures of my own, I edited them down to about 220, I edited those each by hand and did the best I could. I’m receiving compliments which is nice, but good lord, there was a solid week where I was ready to end it all over this. So if you need me, I’ll be obsessively checking my camera settings in the corner at the next shoot.

The other set, marked Amy, is my friend Amy VanSchaik who graciously agreed to be the B shooter that day and of course hers are technically fantastic. So check them both out and vicariously enjoy the day with us.