A fellow photographer was kind enough to give me the opportunity to tag along with her on an engagement shoot with her sister Elizabeth and her fiancé Teddy. It was fun seeing the logistical parts of a photo shoot at play, ranging from prop gathering to pest control along with the creative and personal aspects.
Being the tag-along photographer gave me the chance to practice quickly adjusting manual settings without the pressure of holding up the people being photographed. One thing I focused on a lot during this shoot was lighting. I had a tendency to use aperture as my baseline adjustment, changing shutter speed and ISO only if needed. Since it was a sunny day, I didn’t really do much of anything with the ISO; I pretty much kept it at 100. Lower ISO means that you are letting less light in when snapping your photos. Since I got all the light I needed from nature, I could keep the ISO low. Shutter speed, however, is a setting I wish I had adjusted more during the photo shoot. Blurred feet and hands weren’t generally what I was trying to capture, and looking back at some of the photos, I wished I could have set my shutter speed higher to capture movements better without blurring.
Another issue I noticed when looking back at the photos was composition. Generally, my composition was thoughtful, but I found that I lost sight of details such as cutting off arms and knowing exactly where to start and end a frame. I also was surprisingly weak at taking full-body shots, oftentimes not giving enough space between bottoms of pictures and the feet and also taking in the entire scene and considering that when deciding how to capture the potential images at hand.
When it came time for post-processing, the photos I got right through manual settings of course took significantly less time to touch up. The best photos were the ones that took less than 5 minutes to edit! Just move the curves a bit, touch up the exposure, and voilà! I am hoping to eventually start working with Lightroom for post-processing in the future. I’m just in the beginning stages of getting to know that software.
In either case, I had fun seeing the process of going through an engagement photo shoot and capturing the love and joy of Elizabeth and Teddy. I look forward to more photo shoots like this in the future!
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