Music in the Park...in the Dark

Blah, blah, blah... I'm tired but wanted to go ahead and post these photos. I'll write more tomorrow.
: P

[ADDED]
It's well past "tomorrow," but something needs to be said about these pics. What follows are some photos I took when my wife and I attended "Music in the Park" in Tallassee, AL, on April 12, 2013. It was a fund-raising event to benefit the restoration of the Mt. Vernon Theater in historic downtown Tallassee.

The pictures were taken with my Nikon D70, which is a poor choice for night photography, but it's all I had. I can't for the life of me remember the guy's name who was playing while we were there, however he was really good and played a broad selection from old Blues Traveler to new indy-pop hits you would recognize from commercials.

Good times. I wish there were more things like this going on in Tallassee more often.

Not Professional Baby Pictures

I am a professional photographer. And yes, I took these pictures of my new daughter. However, I took them with a simple point-and-shoot using available natural light coming through the window.

Here are some tips for taking similarly excellent newborn pics before you leave the hospital with your next little one.

(1) Use your bed sheet to give you a plain white background. That gives you good contrast, isn't distracting, and lets you white-balance off it in your editing software (anything from Picassa to Photoshop).

(2) Set up your "studio" right next to the window. This will give you a huge, soft, directional, natural light source. It would be best if you can shoot at a time of day when the sun is angling into your window, but mid-day is good. The pics below were taken around noon.

(3) Turn on every light in the room. This will provide you with as much secondary light as possible. If you want a higher level of contrast between light and dark areas, then turn all the lights off instead. 

(4) If your camera will let you, set your aperture as wide as it will go. (My camera wouldn't let me.) Some point-and-shoot cameras have an aperture priority mode. Any DSLR will have one.

(5) Set your ISO as high as you can without making your pictures unbearably noisy. Many cameras will claim to have huge ISO ranges, but the top two settings are useless most of the time. Typically 800 is pretty safe; the pics below were shot at ISO 800. If you can't manually adjust your ISO, then you should put on you big girl panties and go buy a new camera.

(6) Turn your flash off.

(7) Be sure you are focusing on your baby's eyes. (This doesn't apply if his/her face isn't in the picture. :P)

(8) Get low and close and take some pictures. Don't get so close that your camera can't focus.

(9) Step back and zoom in on some pictures. You will get more separation of the subject (baby) and the background by backing off and zooming in.

(10) Don't wait for a smile. Babies make all sorts of cute and amazing faces. Get your newborn yawning, crying, looking at you, looking away from you, fighting with clothes, and whatever else. You can delete pictures later, but you can't recreate the moments you missed. That's a basic rule of thumb for digital photography; when in doubt, shoot it.

We had been cleared to be discharged when we were ready to leave, and this little D-I-Y session was a bit more hurried than I would have liked. Still, we got some pretty good pics without involving either my serious gear or the hospital photographer. Personally, I would have still let the hospital photographer take her pictures, but the two times she stopped by were bad times. As it is, I'm glad we took the time we did to get the pics we did.

I hope the info above helps you get better pics, too.

Looking for a Wedding Photographer?

Anybody out there looking for a wedding photographer? Because I'm still looking for somebody to be my first full-blown wedding! (I shot a surprise wedding at my church a couple years ago, but I don't count that one because it was REALLY informal. It's a great story, even so.)

I'm penciled in for a friend's wedding in late June, and I've got a lead on one in early June and one in August. The end of April is pretty open. May is going to be pretty wrapped up with graduations, but that schedule isn't set in stone yet either. Now is the time to book me before I get enough wedding experience to justify raising my rates.

Speaking of rates, here's how I'd break it down for my first couple weddings:

$50 + $50 per hour on site + $0.555 per mile round-trip from Tallassee, AL.

That gets you whatever coverage you want of the "getting ready," bridal portraits, groomal (I made that word up) portraits, wedding party photos, ceremony photos, reception photos, etc. I take the pictures, cull the bad ones, do appropriate tweaks and touch-ups on the keepers, and deliver them to you with full printing and usage rights on a DVD or CDs. I retain the right to use the best of the best as samples here on my blog and other social media outlets.

I can arrange printing through a 3rd party service (probably Mpix), but I'd charge an extra $20 for the time and effort to set it up (might be worth it, these are wedding photos, and I haven't been thrilled with some of my recent Sam's results).

An additional $25 would get you a very basic single-angle video. The cost of a somewhat more elaborate video would depend on what equipment I am able to purchase/rent/borrow/steal if the bride wants it.

Here's some of what I've done as just a guest at weddings:

This first one, it wasn't even my camera. It was the bride's, and so I had to figure out how to make it behave on the fly. These pics were pulled from Facebook, and have not been tweaked or adjusted.

This one it was my camera, but I was without a good external flash, and it was before I got quality editing software.

These are getting close to what you might expect, but were shot on a borrowed Nikon D90.

Here's my Pinterest board of the kind of wedding photos I'd like to emulate.

Call me at 334-452-3PEC or email me at pecaspers(at)gmail(dot)com to set something up.


Here are a few shots from that surprise wedding I mentioned, just for kicks and giggles.