Studio News

Ever since Jake and I reorganized our office it has been bothering us that the walls are a little bare. I mean, we’re photographers - we have so many photos, especially since we’ve been making a point of taking more photos of ourselves. I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly creative person, and when I have a camera in my hand or when I’m in front of my computer, I am. Jake is too. But when the time comes to envision decor solutions for my walls, I just draw a bit of a blank. I see so many beautiful home makeovers on Pinterest, then I look at my own home and wonder why it doesn’t come as naturally to me…

When Jake and I first got married, one of the first questions people often asked us was where we went for our honeymoon. We always told them we hadn’t gotten around to it yet. That’s still what we say, and I suspect that will never change. We talked about a honeymoon, and something about it made me feel uneasy. A honeymoon is supposed to be the best, most romantic trip that you ever go on together, the most passionate adventure of your marriage. I didn’t like the idea that we might go on a trip together, a great vacation, then get home and think to ourselves that the best was behind us. We’ve gone on several wonderful trips together, but…

Jake and I have worked hard to build our business together, but no one gets anywhere in this world without people helping them along the way. We have a long way to go before Jake and Dannie Studio is everything we hope it will be, but we wouldn’t have made it as far as we have if it weren’t for he help of my Mother, Karen. She has been by our side almost from the beginning of this adventure, helping us around the house and making sure that dinner is always ready for us when we get home. We get to spend more time on our photography, on our blog, and on our clients because my mother invests her time…

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…

A month ago we took engagement photos for Amy and Luigi and we are honored that they chose us to photograph their wedding next May. Amy and Luigi are such a fun couple, and when we met with them to talk about their plans for the wedding we couldn’t help but get excited. Their location is beautiful (as are the bride and groom), and they are both very involved in the planning and DIY projects … love that! Above is a photo of the care package we are sending them along with their contract. Included are: A Japonesque Precision Eyelash Curler which comes with a free refill program. A Vintage Blossoms Notebook by Rifle Paper Co. (Printed in the USA,…

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…

Since August gets pretty hot down here in Florida we thought it might be nice to take some photos indoors this week. We decided to construct a DIY backdrop for an indoor photo booth. We bought some colorful tissue paper at the local Target. If we’d had more time we would have bought a pack with better price and variety from Amazon. For our first photo booth DIY I decided to keep things simple. I know a craft project is simple when I show the idea to Jake and he doesn’t walk away muttering. I went with a fringed tissue paper backdrop with tissue paper flowers. The first step is to pick your colors. I decided on a bright color…

July was a busy month! Here’s a round up of what we blogged about: The neighborhood cranes had babies. We celebrated the 4th of July. We announced that we were going to start trying to monetize our blog. We also published a resource page for our readers and reorganized our portfolio. We published our couples sessions with Allegra and Shawn, Mary and Simon,Ellen and Jim, and Susie and Trevor. We also published the engagement session we did for Amy and Luigi. I hurt my leg, prompting us to get this first aid kit to bring along on our future photo shoots. We wrote gear reviews for our Nikon D800 camera, Nikon D700 camera, and Nikkor 85mm lens. We traveled to…