Are you equipped for this season?

I found this image of me that was taken by my friend back in 2004 and I had a good laugh.
I promised that I will try to post something for many aspiring photographers out there so here is my very first attempt. I still consider myself as an aspiring photographer so it will be mostly about the lessons that I learned as I was starting out and something I picked up from watching other great photographers for past 5 years. There are many useful forums online nowadays, so I am not going get too technical with my entries. I hope you find it useful somehow.

So my very first post title is
#1 Shoot light
Shooting with minimum gear on yourself gives you mobility. This also allows you to focus on one thing and one thing only while you are on the job. That is to capture true moments. A good photographer captures the moments as the day unfolds.

Can you see the amount of gear that I have on me here? I was second shooting for my friend that day so I believe I had less on me. LOL !!! This Wedding was held in mid summer afternoon at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Greystone Mansion and Park offers many beautiful location to shoot, but the ceremony was at noon so we chose to use fill flash. But I probably did not need mighty Quantum Turbo power pack. (I will elaborate on fill-flash on another posting) When you are new in this industry it is nice to be over prepared then not prepared. And please bring your back up gears and leave them in the car safely. At the time we were new and we weren't able to instantly check what we were shooting with film cameras, so we equipped ourselves with everything we had then. Even now, I always bring my light meter with me even if I don't use it.

Here Tammie is wearing;

Nikon F100 with Nikkor ED 24-120mm f/3.5

Nikon N80 with Nikkor 85mm f1.8

Quantum Turbo battery pack with SB-80 Speedlite

and think I am wearing another not so fancy belt purse for films.

I think having two camera bodies on yourself as you shoot wedding is generally a good idea. Especially, if you are shooting alone. We can now just switch ISOs on digital cameras but I still do at times because I can quickly switch my lenses this way. I now have a cool Shootsac, so I try to go to my job in style now.

I am not a big fan of long lenses. Don't get me wrong, I own one and I love milky blurred look ,but I find that I don't get it out much unless I am shooting at outdoors where I have a lot of room to move around. I am strong and I can lift heavy things pretty well.( I move house furniture all by myself) But I am only 5'4" and having heavy gears on me for 10 hours is really hard on my body so I came up with a solution . That is to shoot with a fast prime lens. I can still get "bokeh" ( means blurred in Japanese also means demantia and senile- can you see the relations here?) and gain my mobility back. Prime lenses are now very popular among wedding photographers. Using a prime lens means that you need to zoom yourself in and out instead of a lense. This also challenges you to be more creative with your composition. Hey, I can always use more cardio! so this works for me.

Here are list of some good prime lenses to have: I will just list Canon lenses here. If you are on budget or own a different system you can just take notes of the length of lenses (mm) and the brightness of the lens (f-stops) then get similar items that fits your budget. I own few Tamron lense for traveling and I highly recommend them.

Canon EF 24mm f 1.4L

Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 or on big budget 50mm f/1.2 L

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 or on big budget 85mm f/1.2 L II

Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro (my favorite lens along with 50mm f/1.4)

Canon EF 135 f/2L

Please feel free to leave comments or e-mail me with questions!

Little office update: with extra Ram added to my PC. It's not flying but it's working fine. I've decide to maintain current condition until I finish editing all the images for my website. Andy is dying to build new PC for me, but I can't afford to not have computer for few days!