Jake

Have you ever seen a picture of yourself where everything seems to be fine - you look good, the scenery is beautiful, and it’s not out of focus or underexposed - but for some reason you don’t feel like the the photo is of anything. In other words, you can’t tell if it’s a picture of a person in a park or a park with a person in it. In this post I want to go over some techniques that can be used to draw the viewers eye to the subject of a photo, and make it clear what the photographer was trying to capture. Here are five ways to make the subject of a photograph stand out from the…

No matter what brand you use, the Nikon 70-200mm is a classic for photographing weddings. We picked ours up this Summer as a way to celebrate the booking of our first wedding clients since moving to Florida. Even though we bought it to photograph people, I couldn’t wait to break it in so I gave in to my inner nature photographer and took it for a walk in the park. Since then I’ve been using it during our couples and engagement sessions, capturing the more remote angles while Dannie gets up close and personal. The main reason I wind up carrying this lens instead of Dannie is that it is heavy. It weighs 3.4 pounds without the camera attached, and…

Hi there, this is Jake, bringing you our first monthly report of the earnings we generated directly from our blog. You’ll recall I mentioned last month that we had decided to monetize our blog, hopefully generating a little extra income. To help incentivize people to root for us we are donating 10% of the profits from our blog to Operation Smile, just like we do with our prints and photo sessions. Our first month of this experiment yielded modest but more or less expected results. Here’s how our blog earned money: Google Adsense: $1.98 Google Adsense lets us put some ads in our sidebar. The nice thing about Adsense is that it is easy to use and there is no…

Hi! Jake here, Ever since we moved to Florida our business has been growing slowly but surely. We’ve been delighted by the reception we’ve gotten from the locals, and we love the work we’ve been doing. We want to continue doing what we’re doing with our photography, but we’ve decided to make a few changes to our blog. So we’ll keep booking clients and taking photographs, but when you visit our blog it will look a little different. For one thing, we’re going to try to turn the blog into a resource page. We love writing blog posts about the shoots we do with our clients, but we also want to create a database of posts that can help our…

Dannie and I recently invested in a new lens, and it arrived a couple days ago. The first thing we did was take it out for a spin on a walk around the neighborhood. The lens is a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 telephoto lens, and though we bought it to photograph people, I couldn’t help but try it out on some of the local wildlife that was out of reach using the fixed focal length lenses. Our old zoom lens had a little more reach (28-300) and I was always very satisfied with it. But wow, there was no comparison on the sharpness and the speed of this lens. The images of an alligator floating in a pond came out tack sharp…