Cmackphoto

Simple Poll to see what people do with Photoshop

Clinton MacKinnon — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:50:15 +0000

Adding Clouds to a blue sky

Clinton MacKinnon — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:18:53 +0000

One of the most beautiful aspects of Southern California
is its blue skies, they can be so blue and clear you can see for miles, but how many photographs can you take before you start to get bored with the same blue sky over and over, and what do you do when the situation your photographing in makes you choose between dark underexposed subjects or a blown out sky. There is a way to fix this, and that is with photoshop. Is it cheating?… well a little bit but if it can make your photograph a little more engaging, and more importantly, make your client happy, then it is worth doing. So how do I put clouds into my clear blue skies?

First you have to photograph clouds. Yeah, that’s where you need to start. As easy as it should seem to be it’s not. The hardest part is finding good clouds to photograph. In the 5 years I have lived in Southern California there have not been that many cloudy days, and if it’s to cloudy, or hazy, that isn’t all that much fun either. Finding good clouds can be hard, you want puffy clouds, clouds with gray, basically clouds with an interesting personality. I find the best clouds are usually hovering over the hills and mountains to the north east of where I live. The have great shape, and tend to stretch off to the horizon. When you see good clouds, grab your camera, get a good exposure, and snap away. You will find that there is a tendency to try and zoom in on the clouds, but don’t do this, shoot kind of wide angled and get lots of sky, don’t worry if there are hills or trees in the bottom of your photograph, they can be taken out when you mask them in to another photograph. Try to frame your shot similar to the same way you would frame a landscape or a portrait, that way when you do put your clouds in another photograph they look like they belong. If you zoom in to close, or shoot at to high an angle the clouds will look out of place when you put them in a new photograph. Something else to keep in mind is the angle of light in your cloud photographs. If you are using them to replace a blue or blown out sky in another photograph and the light is oriented to the left of your subject, but the light in your cloud photograph is coming from somewhere else it will look wrong, so photograph a lot of clouds from all kinds of directions, and don’t be afraid to flip the cloud if it will look better that way. One of the coolest situations where you might want to replace the sky with clouds is if you have photographed someone at the beach during sunset. Pink or orange clouds can really spice up a photograph but they are not always there when you need them, so build a nice collection of clouds at sunset. You don’t always need to replace a clear blue sky with clouds but when you want to its good to have some around.

Second, how do I replace my clear blue sky or blown out sky with clouds? Open the photograph that needs to have the sky replaced, we will call this the original photo, then open a photograph that has the clouds you want to use. Copy the cloud photograph to a layer in your original photo, and put it at the bottom of the layer stack. Now there are quite a few ways to get the clouds to show up in your original photo. One is to blend the layers. With the original photo layer selected choose “Blending Options” from the layer styles menu. Use the Blend if sliders to bring the clouds forward and send the blue or blown out sky backward. Under a lot of circumstances this will work wonders. Play with the sliders until you get a good blend. Another solution that works well is to use the pen tool, magic wand, or your selection tool of choice to select the sky and apply a layer mask that allows the sky to show through. I will be putting together a tutorial in the future that will show how to do these two techniques in detail, but for now experiment and see if you can’t figure out the correct way that works best for you. Trying different techniques is the best way to learn what works best for you.

What is your favorite way of replacing a sky in your photographs? I am always interested in new and interesting ways of doing things.

Posted my first video to YouTube

Clinton MacKinnon — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:08:08 +0000

Finally learned how to post a video to YouTube. This video goes over how resolution plays a factor when posting a photo on the internet, emailing, or just printing.

I will be doing more tutorials in the future, this one is not as polished as I would like it to be, but I think it is a good first try. If you love taking photos and want to learn some interesting things in Photoshop or Lightroom let me know and I will do my best to post a tutorial on how to do it. Remember to leave comments so I will know what you want.

Screencast

Clinton MacKinnon — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 05:19:26 +0000

I have been desperately trying to put together a screen cast on resolution. I never thought it would be this hard, you get started and then mess up, and not a little mess up but a big one and have to start over. Its killing me. I am trying to do a screen cast on resolution, I know its not much of a topic but I thought it might be a good one to start with. I think my next one is going to be on retouching, actually a series of them on how to remove blemishes, going to try and make is a short one, but I don’t know, I tend to digress quite a bit. Maybe one on how to remove objects from the back ground effectively, and maybe some on using nik filters. If you have something you would like to see as far as retouching is concerned let me know. I have a realyly cool way of removing stubble from a guys neck that when your done you can never tell it was even there. Thats it for today, I think I will wright more tomorrow though.

J Squared Photography

Clinton MacKinnon — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:16:42 +0000

Today I would like to talk about two photographers that I get inspiration from and enjoy working with on a professional and friendship level. J Squared Photography is Jared Schlachet and Joe Magnani. Jared and Joe have a studio in Los Angeles where they do quite a bit of their work but I personally think they are at their best when they are shooting on location. I met Jared on the first day of my first session at Brooks Institute of Photography and we have been friends ever since. He was three sessions ahead of me and on the rise to being one of the best photographers Brooks has ever graduated, he is truly exciting to watch work. Over our three years at school he and I would bump into each other in the halls or at the studio, exchange a few pleasantries, inquire how things were going and quickly move on to accomplish the stuff we were there to get done. After we graduated we kept in touch, periodically he would assist me on a job, or I would assist him, it was fun, he knew he could count on me to be where I needed to be and I could do the same with him. I met Joe at a shoot they were doing at a bar in Santa Monica about a year ago. They were doing a cover and editorial shoot of Chelsea Handler for LA Direct Magazine, they needed some people to act like paparazzi for one of their concept photos. After we got done with that look, I stayed around to assist on the other setups they were doing. I was impressed with the way the two of them were able to work so seamlessly together, one would shoot and the other would supervise the talent, then they would switch. It was really exciting to watch them collaborate on the fly.

So how did they start working together? About a year or so ago a mutual colleague of Jared and Joe introduced the two of them thinking that they would be able to work well with each other. I think Jared and Joe saw a kindred spirit in each other. Both of them are hard working, demanding of excellence, and will go the extra two miles to create a photograph that is not just great but amazing. Their forte is celebrity photography, they are able to create a setting that really brings out the best in their subject. They also do catalog work, headshots, and the occasional teen magazine, but their passion is creating a look that is full of detail, crisp lighting, and attention grabbing drama. Recently they have started building sets to put their subjects in, that is what I mean by going the extra 2 miles to create amazing photographs. Go to their website and take a look at the gallery entitled New Work, most of the photographs you see that are interior shots are sets that they built at their studio. It’s great.

They are quickly building a reputation for themselves of being dependable, creative, and great to work with. If you are a celebrity who wants to have photographs done that are creative and don’t look like everything else you have had done, give them a try, I think you will be extremely happy. Actors who need headshots will be very pleased with the results, the two of them treat every client with respect and the attention they deserve. Aspiring photographers study their photography, figure out how they light their subjects, there is a lot to be learned from these two inspiring photographers. I plan to watch their careers with great interest, yes they are my friends, but they are also creative photographers that have much to teach.

Ojai Wedding in October

Clinton MacKinnon — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:41:17 +0000

This afternoon I had the opportunity to visit the wedding site of a couple I am photographing in October. It’s up Hwy 33 towards Ojai, and off the beaten path, it is going to be an amazing place to photograph. The couple that owns the property are totally open to us using just about every square foot of their property for photography, including the interior of their amazing house. For one, the property is very large, with lots of big trees, horses, a huge stable, and a wonderful view of the hills leading up to Ojai. The ceremony is taking place in the couples back yard against a stand of trees and bushes, they have a pool, lots of grass, stone walls, stone decking, and best of all, the sun should be just setting behind the hills when the ceremony begins, giving me some amazing light to work with. I will be photographing the couple before the ceremony, I will be able to use the huge horse stable, a couple of corrals, and the shape and shade of lots of pretty big trees. There are so many wonderful places to photograph I think it will be hard to get them all in before we run out of time. This wedding is going to be a blast. I can not wait!

What is resolution?

Clinton MacKinnon — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:03:47 +0000

Hi there, today I am going to talk about resolution. When I photograph business people they usually are not hiring me to make prints for them, they want digital files that they can use in brochures, on business cards, their website, and social networking sites. Each of the fore mentioned media require files that are of different resolutions. Wikipedia defines Image resolution, as the physical area that a single pixel covers. Well that is all fine and dandy, but what does that mean when I am trying to email a photograph of my little one to their grandparents or put something up on Flickr? Lets get into it.

Resolution can be very confusing if you don’t understand what it really means. Many people do not really understand what resolution means, including some professional photographers I know. Open a photograph on your computer and find the command for image size, in Photoshop “Image Size” is under the Image menu at the top of the screen, I believe Photoshop elements is the same. In IPhoto you go to “Photos” then “Get Info”. If you can’t find it in the software you are using open help and enter “Image Size”, it should tell you how to find it. Once you have the window open that displays the image dimensions, find the height and width of your photograph; it is usually displayed in pixels. Here is what it looks like when you use IPhoto:

and from Photoshop:

So what is this telling me? Look at the dialog box from IPhoto: Width: 878 pixels Height: 500 pixels. Aside from it showing the dimensions of the photograph, it is also telling us what size it will be if we try to print it. Here is how you would determine this; take 878 and divide it by 240 and 500 and divide that by 240, (240 is an acceptable print resolution) this tells us that if we wanted to print this photograph and have it look good, the image would be W 3.65inches x H 2.08 inches, pretty small but on the screen it looks enormous. Does that make sense? Lets decipher the dialog box from Photoshop, as an aside these are dimensions from two different photographs. The Image size dialog box has a bit more information in it, Width: 200 pixels Height: 300 pixels, it also shows you the documents size in inches displayed at 72 pixels/inch. If we changed the Resolution of this photograph to 300 pixels/inch its new document size would be W 0.667 x H 1.00. So, in these instances, resolution is used to determine the size of the photograph if it were printed at respectable print resolution size. It should really be referred to as Dots Per Inch, since that is how most personal printers put down ink.

When you only want to display photographs on your computer, online, or email them to someone so they can have them on their computer, the numbers you need to pay attention to is the pixel dimensions. If your computer screen is 1024 pixles x 768 pixels a photograph with the dimension of 1000 pixels x 500 pixels will display nicely on your screen, if your screen is 800p x 600p, the width of your photograph will go off the screen. Knowing this can help you when emailing photographs to friends and family. Flickr’s normal accounts will only let you display photographs at a maximum pixel size of 1024 pixels on its long side. If you upload a photograph that is larger it will automatically re-size the photo to 1024 pixels on its longest length. Their program does a very good job of resizing the photos but why send something that is bigger if you don’t need to. It can make uploading files take much longer. I re-sized one of my .jpg photos as an example to show file size. With the dimension set to 1024 pixels on its long edge the file is 450KB in size, at its original size it is 4.4MB. That is a tremendous difference. If you were uploading 20 photographs and each of them was around 4.5MB in size it could take a long time to upload them, and it might just exhaust your monthly limit of up loads to Flickr. Think of emails as kind of the same. If you’re only emailing a friend or family member something to show them something, keep the file dimensions below 1000 pixels on its longest side unless there is some small detail in the photograph you want them to see. Anything else is just to much, plus, some email clients limit the file size on individual files to less than 5MB. Personally I get annoyed when someone emails me a bunch of photographs to look at and they practically crash my email account. Make them so they fit on the screen without having to scroll around.

Image resolution, file resolution, print resolution, they can all be very confusing, but hopefully this post will help. As a recap: When you’re printing something divide 240 into what ever your pixel dimension is, this will give you a good idea of what size your photograph will be when printed, if you’re emailing a photograph or posting to Flickr or other image hosting websites keep the file size at or below 1024 pixels on its long edge. This is about the largest that can be displayed on a screen without scrolling at this point in history, this may not be the case in the future, but at least now you are better informed and able to adapt with changing technologies. Some time in the next week or so I will be making a screen cast that will go over what we talked about here, but with a better visual demonstration. Have a wonderful photography day.

Backing up photo’s and important memories

Clinton MacKinnon — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:46:59 +0000

Yesterday I talked about how important it is to add metadata to your photographs, today I will talk about something even more important. Your siting at your computer working and minding your own business and suddenly you get the “blue screen of death”. You accidentally downloaded a virus, something in the computer got fried, or that power surger you bought at the discount store really wasn’t as good as the salesperson said it was and lightning has just fried everything on your computer. What is your alternative, take the hard drive to a computer doctor and have them try to recover your hard drive for hundreds of dollars possibly more, or getting a new computer and using your backup volumes to re populate your hard drive with all of your important information. But wait Clinton, I didn’t back up my important stuff on a disk or external hard drive, what do I do? Unfortunately, if you didn’t back up your important information you will be saying goodbye to all of your documents and more importantly every photograph you have been saving for the last three or four years. Back up your photographs, its one of the most important things you can do. Lets list some of the ways that you can backup and protect your photographs from being lost forever.

Burn all of your photographs to a disk, CD/DVD
Burn your photographs to an external hard drive
Upload them to an online storage facility
Leave them on your computer and hope for the best
Print them and store them in a safe place

There are other ways of protecting your photographs but we are going to focus on these 5 for today.

1. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to back up your photographs, is to burn them to a CD or DVD. DVD’s are more expensive than CD’s but they hold almost 5 times the amount of information, and they are quickly coming down in price. A typical CD can hold about 700 megabytes of information, for people who don’t have a lot of data to back up, a CD could be the best way for them to go. DVD’s on the other hand can hold about 4.7 gigabytes and double sided can hold twice that much, a DVD is very good for high volume photographers, if you shoot all the time and have lots of photographs, a DVD is the way to go. A drawback to using DVD’s or CD’s to back up your photographs is not having enough information to fill a disk, so you hold off burning the disk, and run the risk of loosing information. There is software that can be gotten that will allow you to burn your information in sessions, some can be purchased but there are open source alternatives, you just have to look for them. CDBurner XP is a possible solution to turn to. Burning CD’s and DVD’s take time and commitment but the idea of loosing all of your photographs to just a bit of stray electrical discharge in your computer could be a motivator. I personally feel a major drawback to using CD’s or DVD’s to back up your photographs is the fact that in a few years you will have to transfer them to another format so they will be readable in the future. I don’t think disk’s will always be supported, if you have any doubts put a floppy disk into your computer and read that information, oh wait, my computer doesn’t take floppy disks. Vinyl, 8 tracks, cassette tapes, floppy disks, when will CD’s and DVD’s be fully replaced.

2. Burn your photographs to an external hard drive. External hard drives are one of the best and quickest ways of backing up your photographs, it can be scheduled to happen automatically while you sleep, and transfer rates between a computer and an external hard drive is much faster than burning a disk. Hard drives used to be so expensive that only professionals owned them but over the last couple of years they have been coming down in price making it very easy for anyone to buy one that holds a terabyte of information for less than $200.00 dollars. Important thought, just because you can buy a hard drive that holds a terabyte of information for $89.00 should you? Perhaps not, remember your storing your most precious memories, research the manufacturer, look at other peoples thoughts on blogs before making a decision on which hard drive to buy. The wide variety of options can be confusing, what is a terabyte, what is a raid system, how much is to much and which one should I try. The best way to make the decision is to go to an independent computer store, perhaps more than one. Shop around, get opinions from friends, family and local experts, and really research online the opinions of people who have purchased the product you have in mind, see what they have to say. Remember though, just like the hard drive in your computer, external hard drives can fail, so be careful of putting all of your eggs in one basket. Not very helpful huh?

3. Another option is putting all of your photographs at a trusted online storage facility. This is one of the most secure ways of preserving your photographs. With a lot of them you can set it up to periodically upload your important documents late at night when your not using your computer. It does require that you have a reliable internet connection but if your reading this you probably have that already. A fast connection doesn’t hurt either. Some companies that allow you store full resolution files are also printing companies, shutterfly says that you can store as many high resolution photos as you want, they also give you the option of having them printed in places other than where you live, this could be good for getting photo’s to grandparents and in laws with very little work on your part. Flickr will allow you to upload and share your photographs with the world or just your family up to 100 megabytes per month but you cant store high resolution photographs, if you pay for a pro account its unlimited and you can store high resolution photographs. There are quite a few other sites that you can use, some have limits and fees but is that so bad to save your photographs from being lost. Cost can be an issue with online storage, but there is also to concern, not a big one right now, but a concern none the less; will they be around forever. Your guess is as good as mine.

4. This one is the worst thing you can do. Your personal computer is not the place to store your photographs. A big draw to keeping them on your computer is ease of doing nothing, if you do nothing then you don’t have to worry about it. That does work for a while, but it does stop being a viable option when your computer crashes, the dog takes a wee on it, or even worse you spill something on it. We have all heard horror stories of friends or family who had their computer crash and they have lost everything they have done for the last three years. I know a woman from a business group I once belonged to that lost every photograph she had ever taken of her grandson. She had successfully transferred what she had on an old computer to a new computer, but the new computer was one of those $800 jobies, made from cheap hardware, so the inevitable happened, it crashed. The old computer had long been donated to charity so she wasn’t able to at least get back photographs from her grandsons first 3 years, she was devastated. She now has a backup system in place but its to late to get back the first four years of her grandsons life. Never rely on your computer as a back up system for your photographs or anything that you think is important.

5. The final way of protecting your photographs were going to talk about is printing them. That’s right, print them at a lab and put them in an album. Printing them on your home printer is a way to go but its not the best way. Printers today can print some amazing photographs, and some of the high end printers $700.00 or more can reproduce amazingly. Unless your willing to coat them with a protective layer, and some printers do that for you, don’t even go there. A professional lab is going to do a better job than you ever will, and if they make a bad print they replace it, usually free of charge, if your printing it and make a mistake, it can be as much as $2.00 wasted for a 5×7. Go through what you have, find the photographs that mean the most to you, and that your really like and take them to your local lab, or better yet, use an online company, and have professional prints made. There are lots of companies nation wide that will allow you to upload photographs to their servers and have them printed and delivered to your home. It is an amazing way of doing it, but if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, or don’t have the time, put them on a thumb drive and take them to a trusted lab in your neighborhood. Printing your photographs is one of the best ways of protecting your precious photo’s. Analog photo albums don’t crash, they don’t require a learning curve, and they are easily accessible even without electricity. You may be thinking that this is still not the safest way of storing them, and you would be right. You could have a fire, flood or what ever and that is true, but look at how often computers crash, and how often you have had a flood or fire. Print your photo’s, if nothing else the tactile experience is worth it.

So we have come to the end, this is not an exhaustive list of ways to preserve your photographs but it is the typical ways most people use to preserve their photographs. Burn them to a DVD or CD, store them on an external hard drive, use an online storage facility, leave them on your hard drive and hope for the best, or print them all good ways of preserving your photographs. If you have the ability to use an online facility that is one of the best ways to go, but supplement this solution with printing. In the “old days” you had your negatives and prints, think of your digital files as your negatives, backups to your prints. As long as you have the original files, you can always make more prints.
If you have any questions or ideas that I have not covered comment below, I would love to hear what you have to say.

Family photographs, memories, and Metadata

Clinton MacKinnon — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:31:53 +0000

My mom sent me a photograph in the mail the other day of my Aunt Jo, cousin Simon, and me from 1987 taken at my grandmothers during a holiday. I have been trying to determine what time of year the photo was taken, but its been difficult. Three times a year the whole family would gather at my grandmothers, Easter, Christmas, and New Years, so I have it narrowed it down but dang. It’s kind of funny, we live in Florida so just looking at the photo its really difficult to determine what time of year the photograph was taken. I have experienced Christmas in shorts and other times wrapped in a warm coat so figuring out when it was taken is almost impossible. I have an idea that it was taken during Christmas because I was in college at the time and missed Easter that year, I think, but it could just as well be New Years day. Now seven days doesn’t matter all that much but knowing exactly when it was taken can help you to put yourself back in that moment, I really wish it had been documented better.

If that photograph had been taken with a digital camera I could go to the original and see what time, day and year it was shot. Metadata (data about other data) can be very important to the person taking the photograph and really important to someone who is trying to make sense of it in the future. Most camera’s
add the metadata to the photograph as soon as its recorded, time, date, aperture, shutter-speed, was the flash used, focal length, etc, for a budding amateur photographer this can be helpful in learning how to take better photographs. If your photograph didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to the answer may be in the metadata, but for those who are just trying to keep up with the passage of time it can be a boon. Imagine, your a parent taking photographs of your newborn child, you not only get a photograph you can use seconds after taking the photograph but the time you took it is there as well. You will never have to look at the photo and wonder, “was Aaron 4 months old in this photo or 4 and a half.” Parents in the past, and the past being less than 10 years ago, had to look at their photographs and try to figure out when it was taken and try somehow to keep them in chronological order. Today all you need to do is go into your album in your computer and sort by capture time, ta-da, each and every photograph is in the order you took them. Some camera’s today even allow you to go in and add information like creating a folder on the card labeled the way you want them. Museum, school play, day at the beach, so even more info to help you remember when the photo was taken and what you were doing. The ability to add GPS data to your photos is included on some of the higher end camera’s, can you imagine? Not only are you able to record when you took the photo, why you took the photo, but where, down to a few meters, you took the photo.

What do you do if your camera is not the most sophisticated but you would like to have more information about your photographs? Well odds are your computer comes with some kind of photo editing software, most do. Mac has iPhoto and Windows has Windows Photo Gallery, both have basic editing features and your able to add to the metadata. So if your serious about recording the important information for your photos the ability is right at your fingertips. If you’re not happy with either of those products there are many that can be found on the web that do just as good or a better job and many are free. The most important thing is be diligent about keeping your metadata accurate, even if you don’t do it for yourself, do it for your little ones. Give them their history, and preserve your memories. If your over 35 years old odds are you have looked at a family album and thought to yourself, was I in the 9th grade or the 10th grade when this was taken, who knows for sure, unless someone in your family was diligent about writing information on the back of the photograph or in putting together their album, but who does that consistently. Save your past by planning for the future, we take more photographs now than we ever did, so set up the things that happen automatically, and be diligent about documenting what isn’t.

Tomorrow I will talk about how to make sure those photographs are still around for someone to see in 10, 20, 100 years.

Making practical wedding decisions when working on a budget

Clinton MacKinnon — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 02:02:35 +0000

With the times being what they are it is difficult for a couple to decide which aspects of their wedding to scale back or leave out all together and what should not be. The first thing that you should decide is what is most important to you. Is it important that everyone you know is able to come and celebrate with you, or is it most important that those closest to you attend. Just a year ago having 100 guests was considered to be a small wedding, but recently 100 guests in attendance is large. Consider, for your guests you need a chair for the ceremony, chair and table for the reception, appetizers, food, drink, and if your serving it, alcohol.

Flowers are important, the overall ambiance of your wedding can make or break the party, but think about how many flowers you have and what kind. Not all flowers are priced the same, going with fewer flowers but choosing a great florist can go a long way to creating a lovely event. A creative florist can create small interesting flower arrangements that look just as amazing as a large arrangement. Understatement can be a good thing, but the key is choosing the right florist. If it is at all possible, try not to do the flowers yourself, the amount of time it takes can be overwhelming, and it is one of those things that has to be done at the last minute so they look good for your important day.

Food is another area that trips up couples when planning their wedding. Three course meal, four course meal, or do you do a buffet. The more creative the meal the more expensive it can be, but think about the weddings you have attended, do you remember what you ate, did it make a big impression on you? Good food is good food whether it is brought to you by a server or you had to stand in line for a bit to get it. If you have a good DJ they can make the whole experience of going through a buffet fun and entertaining, so consider an excellent buffet over an expensive four course meal.

Photography is another area you can save on but be very careful about how you do it. When the day is done and everyone has gone home all you have left is a dress, a spouse, maybe a piece of your wedding cake, and the photographs of the day. Weddings go by so fast most couples can barely remember who was there and what happened, having a great photographer who knows how to photograph a wedding is very important. A great photographer puts themselves where the action is, they know how to compose an emotionally impacting photograph, and they don’t have to take hundreds of photographs of one moment to get a great shot.

So how do you cut back your budget? Do you need to have the photographer there the whole time, does he need to stay all the way to the end? Think about what is important to you; moments with your parents, photographs of you and your spouse, the ceremony, your first dance, cutting the cake. Do you want 1,000’s of ok photographs, or 100’s of great photographs. Remember, when its all over, your photographs are all you really have from your day, choose wisely with a thought to the future.

Another important player for your wedding is the DJ. I know that might sound weird, but at your reception the DJ is the one who can make or break the event. A great DJ knows how to handle large groups of people, they motivate people to dance, they interact with your guests, and they keep the flow of the night moving forward. Once your reception starts going your dance floor should always be full, a great DJ makes that happen. How do you scale back a great DJ? Your first step is to contact a great DJ, tell them your budget for music and entertainment and let them help you to put together something that fits with your personality and budget. They will be willing to help if they are not willing, perhaps they are not for you.

Everyone rich or poor is working on a budget, its just that some budgets are bigger than others. Don’t be afraid to tell your vendor what you have budgeted for their particular service, and ask them to help you keep to it. Some will not be able to provide a service that stays within your budget and that is ok, keep looking and don’t settle just because it fits in your budget, choose what makes you feel the most secure and the most happy.

Feel free to comment