I made my way to up Round Rock to this fairly new wedding venue and I was really excited. Arbor Pointe is a fairly new venue in Round Rock, and I have seen them from the very start. We first met at a bridal show over a year ago because we had adjoining booths. Pat and her daughter are such dolls to work with and they have a huge heart and go a long ways to make their client feel special and try to make their day the best. I hope the very best for their business.
Every year, I travel back to Louisiana to teach Vacation Bible School to some kids in a small town called Krotz Springs, Louisiana, in which I grew up. It’s really ironic how slow things move there and how FAST things move here. Also, the day-to-day issues they deal with is so different from mine. I really don’t realize how shielded I am from some things until I get out of my ‘territory’ and meet other folks from other backgrounds and upbringings.
This year was VERY challenging for me because we had 24 5th graders, and the boys REALLY tested my patience. Thanks goodness it was only 3 hours a day. Also, it’s ironic in that some of the kids in my class are sons/daughters of people that I grew up with (I’m not that old, am I?). I still don’t have my first kid yet! I guess I am running behind on that.
Anyway, it was fun to catch up with the relatives and eating some some great Cajun food. I can’t wait for football season because I hope it’s the year where LSU gets to go back to the National Championship. I graduated from LSU back in 1998, and my heart bleeds purple’n'gold. GEAUX TIGERS!
Here’s a couple of images and a waterfight that the kids had.
Well, we took a much deserved vacation last weekend for Easter and went back home to Louisiana. We’re pretty fortunate in that we get to go back every Easter and my extended family throws a crawfish boil for us.
It’s usually pretty warm, too, EXCEPT for this time! It was miserable! It was in the upper 40′s the entire time and we saw off-and-on sleet! The worst thing is that the crawfish got cold within 5 minutes of them hitting the newspaper (that what we use for tablecloths in Louisiana)!
So, I didn’t eat as much, so I’ll have to try again next year. Fortunately for us, there’s an awesome Cajun restaurant that’s right down the road called Cypress Grill, and their food makes me feel somewhat closer to my ‘home’.
Lastly, I always take a cool crawfish shot every year, and I’m really happy with this one.
I was asked to go and photograph a new and upcoming venue in Dripping Springs called Vista West Ranch. It’s a gorgeous venue that portrays an elegant and rustic hill-country experience. Brian and Cindy Pearson are the owners, and I definitely believe that they will be great to work along with for any bride.
I wanted to do a day-time portrait, but some of the construction isn’t completed, and it would have been a lot of work to get it looking right. Their advertisement images are due ASAP to the Austin Wedding Guide, so we had to get something done fast. So, instead I took a risk and created a night-time portrait of the venue instead. It definitely paid off.
They are having their first wedding in May.
All of our clients receive images from us that are very colorful, sharp and color-corrected. We also do some toning of images, and some skin-softening as well. We do skin-softening because we want images that are sharp, while I don’t want to see every pore in someone’s skin. While it may be ok for your HDTV show, it’s not ok for the prints that I want to place into an album OR prints that are purchased through us. We call this process ‘applying some tender love and care’, and it’s one of the things that sets us apart from other photographers in Austin in order to give a desireable, unique and higher quality print.
Color-correction is a method of where you take an image that was taken in a lighting condition that the camera could not properly compensate for. This is why people some times look somewhat either more red, green or blue in images than what they actually are. This is a problem for both film and digital cameras. In film, you could usually buy a filter of some type to help you out. In digital, you can do a number of things to color-correct an image before you take the image or after.
We usually use whi-bal white balance cards because they are small and can fit in our pockets. Another example of this is sometimes people look ‘orange’ in a church because of the strong tungsten lighting over-powering the flash on your camera. Ok – enough boring technical camera talk.
We as photographers almost never have the perfect scenario – maybe the lighting is bad and flat, maybe the background has something that is distracting, maybe the subject is uncooperative, or maybe I’m not in my groove!
In this scenario (as in every scenario), I had to be concerned about the following things and make split-second decisions. Concentrating for 3 hours straight can be hard, but I am learning to do it well.
1. I wanted to use natural light to capture the bridal portrait, but the lighting had to be timed just right because the sun was peeking in and out of the clouds. I was also concerned about the bride possibly wanting to squint because the sun was coming in and out the clouds and it was pretty bright.
2. I wanted to capture a ‘whiff’ of air to make her veil fly. Now, of course, we could have thrown her veil up in the air and moved out the picture super-fast, but I wanted to avoid that.
3. Since we were at the Quad at the University of Texas on a Saturday, we also had to deal with people walking in and out of the background. I wanted to avoid people being in the background as to isolate the bride.
4. I also wanted to capture some greenery in the background, which is somewhat hard at UT. So, all of these variables play into just 1 image!
So, the moment came (we did not have to wait too long), but I had to risk 1 of the 4 above elements. There was a tree and a pole in the background that some ‘could’ say would be distracting. Needless to say, it was a moment and I had to capture it because I finally found an opportunity where no one was in the background. the sun came out of the clouds, and the wind blew her veil up.
Now, I will be honest with you in that I didn’t know that the bride was going to pick this particular image for her bridal portrait because we take quite a few in a 3-hour session. However, I treat many of them as if they are going to be the one that she selects.
So, let me take you through my process.
We first look at the image that is straight out the camera. The image looks a little flat, and I think you agree that the pole and the tree are distracting. Also, since this a regular image, the crop ratio is going to be a 2:3 ratio (i.e. a 4×6 print). However, our bridal portraits are a 16×20 print, or 8:10 ratio, and I know that the pole on the left will be cropped out when we go to the large print. I also took this print in landscape because I wanted a cinematic effect. Of course, I could have taken this portrait in ‘portrait’ orientation, but the white wall behind her was getting a bit of sun and the wall would have distracted from the bride because it was brighter than the bride. We also had taken many portrait-orientation images that day, and I was just trying something different with the landscape-orientation.
So, the first thing I did was color-correct the image because the image was a bit ‘cool’ or had a bluish-tone to it. This is because the camera thought that it was a bit more daylight and over-compensated for it. Also, I added some contrast and color to bring out the bride and the shrubs. I wanted to take the ‘flatness’ out of the image and make it look a bit more 3-dimensional and add some depth. I even added a bit more ‘warmthness’ to the image or made her skin-tones a little red to indicate that this was taken in the late afternoon. Also, I had to deal with the fact that the sun was coming through the trees at certain points, so her dress was fully illuminated. I wanted to make her appear slimmer than what she already is, so I added some shadowing to her dress while preserving the pretty details in it.
I then went ahead and cropped the image to a 8:10 ratio for the final print. You can see how the pole that was bothering me before is now gone.
Now comes the hard part – what to do with this tree! I wanted to remove it, but yet I didn’t want the appearance of the image being edited. So, I spent some time and removed the tree by cloning some of the bushes. I also darkened the bushes a bit to hide some of the cloning, as well as blurring the entire background to hide some of the cloning. Also, by blurring the background, I was able to bring more focus on the bride.
Now, we’re almost there. You can not tell from this small image, but when it’s a 16×20, you do see A LOT. Fortunately, this bride had some really smooth skin, so very little skin smoothing was applied. She did have some freckles on her arms, and I never got around to asking her if she is sensitive about those or not. So, I took the liberty of assuming she was ‘slightly’ sensitive to them and I cloned some of them out, but there weren’t too many. I added some shadow to the bushes because I wanted the bride to stand out even more. I put a few highlights in her hair to bring out the brown, along with putting a little bit of light on her ring. Lastly, I thought this bride would appreciate a little glow effect to make the image look a bit dreamy since she was isolated. Now we have a finished product! We delivered the print to her reception on the wedding day, and everyone was truly amazed by it.
This amount of work goes into everyone of our prints in our albums and prints that are purchased from us. This is my art.
