Engagement Photos

I took some Engagement Photos for a coworker this morning. The sun was pretty bright, which caused harsh shadows, but I had borrowed several canon speedlights, which did the trick with the High Speed Sync. I was surprised by how well they worked, even with shutter speeds of 1/6400! It was my first time having three separate speedlights and using high speed sync. In hindsight, I should have used a quarter cut of CTO to warm the lights just slightly, as the flash appeared a little cool against the mid morning light.

This was the image we decided to go with for the announcements, below are a few other picks.

The expressions were good on this one, but Susan's arm is a little awkward and distracting. The light colored shirts also were blowing out quickly in the bright light.

And of course, a little bit of fun doing album cover poses...

Revisited

After speaking with my Father on Father's Day, I am going back and revisiting a few of my older posts based on his critiques.  At the same time, I just heard back from iStock, I didn't realize they worked on the weekend, too much noise in the images, I can try again in 3 days.  Shutterstock also has slowed down since Friday, last week it stayed steady through the weekend, but this weekend nothing...

This first image is fairly recent, but as my Father pointed out, there was too much empty space above his head, so I re-cropped it, placing his right eye two-thirds up, which feels a bit better.

The original post was on April 13th, 2009 titled "Qutub Shahi Tombs in Hyderabad"

The following two images were from an old post, "Dirty Laundry" July 30th, 2008.  My father critiqued these a while ago, I just hadn't gone back to revisit them yet.  The critique was regarding the harsh white door frame on the right edge of the image.  Originally I left it in, trying to find some sort of balance, and contrast to the soft reflected light, but was never quite happy with it.  After cropping it out, the door frame seems to add enough balance and it helps the sliver of light on the laundry basket with not having it have to compete with the edge of the frame, but I'll let you judge for yourselves!

Cruisin' on the Bajaj Avenger!!!