candids

I have a great love for candid photography. Here are a few of my own shots, and I love how even candids can have almost pre-meditated composition and portrait-type feels to them. I try to convey to people that I don't want every photograph of my wedding day to be serene and picture-perfect, like the photographer is holding their breath and waiting for that moment that conveys the bride's tranquility while she's in quiet thought. I want photos of me being stressed out. I want photos that convey tension, that accurately convey all the emotion that is going on throughout the day. But they just don't get it.

My parents look at the image below, of my aunt and uncle at a wedding, a photo which I love because it carries such emotion, in a way you might describe a painting or any piece of art, but they think it's just terribly unflattering. I think a photo like this would have likely been tossed out in the editing process from a wedding collection that a photographer presented to the bride. But I still love it, and hey - my wedding photos are for me, and I'm sure at the 500-1000 some odd images that photographers are able to pump out throughout the day there will be plenty of "normal" photos to satisfy the parents.



Photojournalism seems to be a big bridal craze, but how many brides out there really know what they're getting into? More than one book I've read has touched on the fact that many brides think that they want a photojournalistic approach to capture the day just as it unfolds and don't see the merit in posing against a fake backdrop with the studio lights set just so, but then they are let down when they realize they missed out on the "formals." Granted, I think most seasoned wedding photographers out there that tout a photojournalistic approach do allow time for formals, and do manage to pull them off wonderfully in more natural settings, it's something to keep in mind to make sure of and to allow time for even if just for 20 or 30 minutes.



And just to prove that not all my candid shots have the subject doing a stare down of sorts with the camera, here are a couple more, again with a bit of an emotional charge to them, but in a more light-hearted sense:

tim willoughby

tim willoughby is a handsome photographer hailing from south carolina. i used to say that i really didn't care for photoshop, and with the exception of a few inappropriate light flares and other random effects, i think tim's post-processing is the best i've seen, especially when applied to unexpected images like prep shots. i say a warm hello to "noise" and to the speckling of images to make them look like they're out of a 1970's self-adhesive/magnetic(?)/cellophane-paged photo albums. his use of wide angles and fish eyes is sometimes awkward in the people shots from entire galleries i've seen, but his blog is droolworthy, and he shoots some really great landscapes. i would actually recommend him as the best guy i've seen for a day after shoot. because he is so skilled at editing, he can deliver any sort of images you like - i've selected a handful of photos that show his versatility in the photoshop department, including several with a really vintage feel, as tiara had said of another photographer.

sean flanigan

here is another one of my favorite photographers, sean flanigan, based out of a nearby city to seattle, wa. he uses textures in a minimal kind of way, and his photos have a sort of stark, vintage kind of feel with a lot of the buzzword, photojournalism.

leigh miller

here's the work of leigh miller, based out of
southern california. this image in the car isn't particularly striking, but i like the concept. something about this wedding stood out to me; perhaps it was the fact that the bride wasn't blonde and a size 2, perhaps it was because things, perhaps the people themselves seemed different....it was set in england, perhaps it was just the shoes in the first image.

i realize that all but two of the images i have picked are black and white! oh color, how i miss thee. but the point here is composition i guess. photos that my parents might disapprove of because "their heads and feet have been chopped off."




but i love the energy in these candids. i couldn't put my finger on how to describe it until tonight. perhaps that's why i like candids so much.

my photos

i struggle with embracing the concept of photoshop. while i may have used pink filters in the darkroom to enhance contrast, and i certainly have always made use of that in photoshop (the sole effect on the first three photos), i have too much of an appreciation for the image straight out of the camera. hence my love for fuji's reds and greens, my longing for a lab that can fathom cross processing, and my love affair with the lomo l-ca and its naturally created vignette. so i spent some time in photoshop today with some of my hawaii photos taken on the credit card sized camera to warm up to the medium and to remind me that i don't need a $2000 camera to take good photos, and i can certainly tote around a concealable camera on my wedding day. keep in mind that i had this inexplicable obsession with surreal colored skies today, and i am editing on a laptop - i'm always slightly appaled at how my st*tchpixie photos look when viewed on my 19" lcd because the laptop screen lies!








a polarizing filter makes the skies bluer on film, and takes away any glare off shiny objects and windows. doing nothing but bumping up the contrast umpteen times on this photo below makes for some neat effects on the window glare at the bottom of the image.

jeremy lawson

i stumbled across don't box us in dot com today and came across some fantastically ethereal images from this photographer, Jeremy Lawson, from Ozark, Missouri.

photography

so here is the work of michele m waite, based out of bellingham, wa (?) i could be wrong but that's what her phone number looks like. i love her composition and attention to color. while you could certainly nitpick and say her whites are often washed out, and the horizon is sometimes 2 degrees off from being parallel with the edge of the frame, i do love her work!



as a side note, i added a statcounter to my blog, and i'm slightly terrified to say that i get almost as many hits on my blog as i do on st*tchpixie (and i pay for advertising for st*tchpixie!!!). i can see what people are googling to find me - and quite a few of the search strings are for that bridal shop in north van run by the terribly snooty woman. hah!

d300!

i've always believed everything happens for a reason. losing my photographer, no big deal, it's meant to be i'll find something better. missing out on my nikon d200 twice at costco.com, that's fine...maybe it will come back by christmas. or....maybe they'll make a D300!!!! okay i'm now stoked. liz and chaia have both asked me to take some photos of them and their families, so here's what i can do with the equipment i already own:

in addition to what's below, here's a few on flickr, and a few more that are fisheye shots via my trusty minolta maxuum 7000 and lomo fisheye2.











so on my wedding day, like i said in one of my very first posts, i guess i don't necessarily want to pack heat. andrew owns a camera just like this pink one, although it's not pink and it's probably a millipixel or two smaller, but it's the size of a stitchpixie coin purse, and toteably concealable.

i mentioned to a couple people already, but the folks from sex and the city found my cityscape purses at a local boutique and wanted 1000 manhattan cityscape pouches for the premier of the new movie this spring! but they wanted it in like 8 days' time, so there was no hope for me.

tilt shift photography

i don't think i've talked about the lensbaby yet, but let's talk about the tilt-shift! i first found out about tilt shift photography through andrew's make magazine - here's the article about how to make your own tiltshift. flickr has gads of photos, but it's hard to sift through the ones that were born from hours of photoshop and the ones straight off the negative. if you are at all familiar with my naked people earrings, you'll see why i would appreciate how this lens can turn everything into a model trainset. this photo below is via pinboke at flickr.

and while a lot of the best pictures seem to be taken from airplanes or by cubicle dwelling, metropolitan business people from their (skyscraper high) office windows, this room is made doll-sized, and this one below seems like it could translate into a great hycroft shot:
tilt shift:


and hycroft wedding, courtesy of jonetsu:

i bought a new toy to make myself feel better that costco.com no longer carries the Nikon D200. and for the fact that my lc-a fell apart in my purse last year and i can't seem to justify slamming $200 on another one. my favorite bee over at weddingbee made a post all about the potential in involving lomos in a wedding. this fisheye has a built in flash and a hotshoe for another! i'm so impressed.




andrew and i bought a 30 minute, $80 one of these pocket size camcorders at costco last weekend. i think these would be cool to hand out to each member of the bridal party as a gift with a purpose for the night (or at least for all the boys). we filmed about 20 seconds worth of footage, met up with friends from work for dinner in seattle and then when they asked to see my ring, i promptly extended my left hand and dropped the poor white gizmo on the ground. needless to say it doesn't seem to turn on when we want it to anymore. but it was fun while it lasted, and i may give it a second go with costco's great return policy.