xoxo,

Khara & Emir

At one point during the day, while I was outside photographing the adorable ring bearer, Emir was inside shooting the rings and caught this gem. A reflective surface and some Christmas lights makes for one heck of a yummy ring shot!

I love so many things about this image; the light, the line of Abby’s hand/arm/dress, Jason dancing with his mom in the foreground—but especially, the look on the flower girl’s face. :) You’re a hoot Sam!

A little mother/son moment, taken right to the heart…

Happy New Year!

The third of her sisters to get married in the past 9 months, I hope the Chelohas can finally relax and enjoy their newly expanded family in 2012—congratulations to you all!

And if you’re still looking for a great gift idea, you should know that you (or the shutterbugs in your life) can learn to love your camera back for less than $20! Available at both Barnes & Noble and Amazon, it’s easy to ring in the holidays with better photos!

Here’s an excerpt from the most recent review: “It’s funny how many photo guides and books are out there, but when it comes right down to it, only you will know when the book in question is “the” book for you. Like that crush you had in grade school…. you didn’t know what was happening, but it just felt right. Well, Your Camera Loves You should be your crush of the season.” You can read the rest of the review here.

PS: If you already have the book, let others know how much you’ve enjoyed it and write your own review here!

Every year, the Thirst Relief Mentor Auction taps into the talent and generosity of the photography industry to create better and more successful photographers, while using the proceeds to provide safe drinking water around the world. What a cool thing!

Last year, the sponsors and 90 mentors/mentees who participated raised more than $40,700 which directly provided 8,147 people with clean water. Wow!

With 100% of the proceeds directly benefiting Thirst Relief International, at least 25 years of clean drinking water is being provided to more than 1 billion people who don’t have it.

Here’s where YOU come in! Up for grabs is a 90 minute mentoring session with yours truly, PLUS a copy of my Wickedly Fast Wedding Workflow Guide.

We can conduct the session in person, via Skype, over the phone, or at WPPI if you’ll be there too. So start the bidding and let’s change the world!

Bidding ends Nov. 17 at 11pm EST. so don’t wait!

Where could a mentoring session take YOU?

Not only do I use InDesign to build all of my contracts, pricing guides, and wedding albums, but I use it to build my presentations too.

Say what?

That’s right. I use it to build my presentations. Whether for a webinar or a platform class at WPPI (coming this February!), I build all my slide decks in InDesign.

Why not Power Point or Keynote? If you’re familiar with InDesign, you know nothing compares to the speed and efficiency you get for quickly building and editing layouts. And since slide decks are nothing more than a collection of horizontal layouts, I use InDesign just as I would for laying out a wedding album.

Most of the time, I export the finished presentation to PDF and then present from the PDF itself (if you press cmd+L on a mac it makes the PDF full screen), using the same arrow keys, mouse clicks, or remote to advance the slides. But if I want to take advantage of Keynote’s “presenter mode” where I can see a preview of the next slide before it appears, then… well… I have to use Keynote.

Messing around in Keynote for the first time, I found it frustrating, so I swore I’d figure out a better way, and I’m happy to say—I did. And here’s how: I build my presentation in InDesign as usual, but instead of exporting to pdf, I export each page (slide) to jpg, and batch import them into Keynote. That’s it.

Here’s a quick video to demonstrate. :)

PS: Obviously, if you want to embed videos and other special effects, your keynote presentation will require additional tweaking. But for the simple and clean presentations I do most the time, this works like a charm!

PSS: Curious about learning to use InDesign for your own photographer related purposes? Check out my InDesign tutorial video and save 10% with the code CRAZYFAST

(gasp!)

Make no mistake about it, I’ve experimented with RAW and occasionally shoot it for corporate clients who have specific needs—but other than that, I mostly just curse at it on the rare occasion when I find myself shooting RAW by accident.

It seems I’m never quite able to get the color I want form RAW files. They’re big, bulky, and since they end up as JPGs anyway, I prefer to cut through the middle and get straight to the point.

Because I shoot in manual mode 100% of the time and keep an obsessive eye on exposure and white balance (carrying a highly used pack of color correction gels for all my flashes), I’m able to consistently nail exposure and white balance in-camera and don’t need the extra weight or cushion of a RAW file to correct things later. It’s part of what makes my workflow so awesomely lean and efficient.

I shoot JPG because it works for me. Others love RAW because it works for them. As long as you’re shooting in a format that works for you, you’re in good shape! :)

(If you’re looking for Part 1 of this post, you can find it here.)