Week In Review

Phew, we’ve made it through another week. I was elated to see my not-so-corporate headshots of the beautiful and talented Victoria Smith, of SF Girl By Bay, on Refinery 29 & Rue. I actually had someone email me about her not so corporate headshot being on Pinterest before I even saw it online. I do love Pinterest and not sure if you noticed or not, but you can now directly Pin images from my blog – just hover your mouse over the image and voila – the Pin It button appears. Woohoo!

Here’s Victoria on Rue.

Victoria on Refinery 29.

I was also a participant on a panel at the Makeshift Society about being a small business owner. I was up there with Nicole Delger, Fiona Tang & Laura Gluhanich of Signal Camp and the panel was facilitated by Laura of Form & Future and Jennifer of Strategy TNT. All four of us own small businesses and it was great to talk about the differences in what we do with clients, pricing, time management, etc.. I kind of wish I had attended a panel like this one before I took the big leap into self-employment. I think we instilled just the right about of fear, but also communicated how incredibly exciting and rewarding it is. Owning your own business is NOT for the faint of heart, but there are so many of us out there doing it and we have a ton of advice for folks wanting to start out. One of the things that I really wanted to share with the audience is how important a support system is. I have my partner and a group of ladies that I was in the Success Squad with. We are truth tellers for one another because you can’t grow as a business if everyone around you thinks that everything you do is amazing. Check out some of my direct quotes on Twitter in the hashtag #strategytnt – thanks to Guinevere for live tweeting.

Here’s the flyer from our panel discussion.

Magic rings from the girls. Processed using the A Beautiful Mess app – my new fav!

Christina was up in the loft and snapped this great shot.

Creative Cropping On Photos

Are you following me on Pinterest? If not, here’s a link to my Pinterest page. I love Pinterest because I’m able to pin all of my latest work directly from blog posts. It has been interesting for me to see who pins my stuff where. Apparently, there’s quite a group of headshot photographers around the world that like what I’m doing. I always click to see who put my pins where and lately my photos have been pinned with another photographer in Texas that does creative crops. I am calling them creative because the top of the person’s head is usually chopped off a bit and the person is either far off to the left or to the right. So, I decided to take 3 of my not so corporate headshots and try different cropping on each one. I’m a fan of the equal amount of space around the person’s body and head because I like to give my clients a lot of options with landscape and vertical photos in their final galleries. I might position them to the far left or far right, you can easily use the tilt shift functionality in Lightroom to switch things up a bit. Here’s photographer’s secret – the best thing about a horizontal photo with a lot of space around your subject, is that it is easily turned into a vertical tight cropped shot.

So much about photography for me is about listening to my gut and trusting my intuition  There are certain rules about what makes a good photo, but those are fun to break and I say make your own rules. Tinker around with a photo until you feel in your gut that you’ve got it and then move on. There’s a bizillion and one things you can do to a photo when editing photos in Lightroom or Photoshop, so a key to being a successful photographer is knowing when to go on to the next. Sometimes if I want to do more than one thing to a photo for a client I will make a virtual copy and try different things on that photo. The client gets both because my favorite will probably not be theirs, interesting huh! I’m endlessly fascinated by how subjective photography is. Ok, here are the images:

Are you drawn to one photo more than another with these creative crops? If so, take a second and think about why.

Photography should be all about trying new things until you find your distinctive style. What will I try next? Stay tuned!

SD

Soul Sprout Coaching

I’m so excited to share with you the fancy new website of one of my clients, Stacy. She’s a life coach and just launched her business called Soul Sprout Coaching.  I’m a big fan of coaches and if you’ve never worked with one, but are feeling ‘stuck’ in any part of your life, simply ask yourself these three questions (I pulled these directly from Stacy’s site):

So ask yourself these quick questions:

1. Am I ready to expect more for my life?

2. Am I able to open my mind and heart to new methods and ideas?

3. Am I willing to invest in myself?

Interested? Then click on over to her website and get your free consultation now! We met in Golden Gate Park for this photoshoot and I was elated to see that Stacy had a bright orange blazer as an outfit choice. I think the bold color instills confidence in her clients and also shows off her fun side. I also like how her blonde hair looks with the jacket too. Ok here’s my favorite few photos from our session together. Congratulations, Stacy!

Las Vegas Wedding

Two weeks ago Nat and I took off to Las Vegas to photograph a lovely wedding at Mandalay Bay. Nat had never been to Las Vegas before, so I was excited to show her around. She was totally blown away that you could walk around outside with alcoholic beverages. It is truly and adult playground and we didn’t win big, but we didn’t lose much either. The day after the wedding we rented a cabana by the side of the pool and I had a drink in one hand and a fashion magazine in the other and I had one of those moments where I was like, “Oh yeah, this is what being an adult is all about!” The couple that got married were surrounded by so much love by friends and family that Nat and I were incredibly moved. Everything about their wedding was perfection from the clothing to the Elvis that married the to their first dance being surrounded by big sparklers to the toasts to the surprise armadillo cake delivered during the cake cutting. We had SO much fun and I will always have a special place in my heart for the couple – we adore you, S & K!

SD

Art Show on Thursday

Sip. Savor. Share! Food Photography art show curated by Femme Cartel is this Thursday night. In case you missed it, there’s a great article on the KQED blog and The Bold Italic even did a little shout out for the show. Super exciting, huh! What an incredible group of photographers. I can’t wait to meet these folks in person.

My photos are of El Rio, the bar in the Mission where Natalie and I got married. I’ve been to so many wonderful events at this bar and the owner, Dawn, is such a kind person. Here’s a fun photo collage from our wedding (photos by Tanja Nixx who is also my go-to tattoo artist in SF) along with the flyer again. Hope to see you there!

City Hall Wedding

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of photographing a beautiful City Hall wedding. Shooting weddings at City Hall is so much fun – the lighting up on the 4th floor is perfection, there are epic staircases and because there’s a significant amount of down time between getting of the license and the actual ceremony  I’m really able to get to know my couple. Di and Dondi traveled all the way out from New York for their sweet City Hall ceremony. I loved hanging out with Di and Dondi. Karrie, my dear friend and owner of Videokard, was with us because she was filming a short film for them – can’t wait to see it! Di’s dress was purchased on Ebay for only $15 and she saved a ton on her fancy new Dolce & Gabana white heels too. There were sentimental elements all throughout what she was wearing from a small blue flower in her hair, to her bracelet, and even her flowers were to honor her family. I am so lucky that they chose me to photograph their wedding and guess what? I got to be their witness too – that’s a first! Di and Dondi, I wish you all the best as you start your life together as husband and wife. Big love!

Here’s a small selection of my favorite images from the day.

Karrie of Videokard working it!

I love City Hall weddings. I can’t wait to find out what happens with the Supreme Court because I would be super happy photographing several LGBTQ weddings here each week! Want to see my wedding portfolio? Head over to Weddings To The People.

Hope you have a great week!

SD

San Francisco Photo Shoot Locations

Ok, so we’ve been working long and hard on these awesome collages to help our clients pick their photo shoot locations. San Francisco has SO many different spots to choose from, it can be hard, so we grouped photos from various locations around the city. I love shooting anywhere and so I can offer recommendations, but really I want my clients to look at a photo and get a feeling for the location and with a resounding YES – pick their spot. You love green, then we should head to the Palace of Fine Arts, although if you have long flowing hair this might not be the spot for you because it is windy down there 90% of the time. Do you like colorful graffiti cause your job is really creative and fun? Then choose Hayes Valley or the Mission. Do you love nature and want to make sure you’re photographed with greenery? Golden Gate Park is the spot for you!

Here’s all of the collages that I made with the corresponding location names at the bottom. I used some similar photos in the collages from Downtown because some locations are simply a block or two away from one another, but have a very different feeling, so I wanted to show you both. Hope you have a great weekend. I’m working non-stop the next 3 days!!!

iPhoneography 101 Class Tomorrow at Makeshift Society

Hey everyone, easing back into work after going to Las Vegas to photograph a beautiful and very fun wedding. I’m getting ready to teach my iPhoneography 101 class at Makeshift Society on Thursday, April 25th and I thought I’d share with you some of the things we’re going to cover. If you’re coming to the class, download these apps before you get there, so we can jump right in!

ProCamera App

First app that we’re going to download is ProCamera. I’ve been a huge fan of this app for a long time and it is a really easy way to step up your iPhoneography. The app allows you to shoot using a full screen trigger, there’s an excellent rapid fire mode and you can adjust the focal point and exposure for more artistic looking images. Here’s a screen shot of it and a link to the iTunes store.

AfterLight App

The second app that we will be messing around with is AfterLight. It used to be called AfterGlow, but they recently changed the name. I love this app because it has a TON of cool frames, the filters are really good and I love the instant film effects that you can add on like light leaks, scratches and big pops of color.

Over App

The third app that we will use is called Over. This is my go-to text adding app. They’re always making adjustments to the app like adding new fonts, enabling the ability to have multiple layers of text on one image, etc… I find it incredibly easy to use and it has been one of my favorites for a very long time.

We will also spend a good deal of time talking about Instagram and how to navigate it. Did you know that there are 100 million monthly active users? See, you shouldn’t feel bad at all when only 30 people like your photo! That’s actually a pretty good stat if you look at the big Instagram picture, ha. There are 40 million photos uploaded per day and and 8,500 likes per second. Wowzer! I think that Instagram is a great form of social media to use as a small business owner and we can talk about how to best use it for those purposes. Of course there will be a photo challenge (thinking about asking everyone to take a respectable selfie in the bathroom mirror) and we’ll be sharing our photos under the hashtag #iphoneography101 & #makeshiftsoc if you want to follow along with our classes photos.

Thanks and looking forward to meeting everyone on Thursday!

SD