Life of La Vida »

We were honored to be asked to lead at the San Diego Photog Shootout again this month. This is a great event that takes place monthly in San Diego, bringing photographers of all levels together to learn from each other and grow their photography skills. Awesome, right?

This time around our buddies, Stephen Knuth and Yvonne LeBrun arranged the day at the San Dieguito Heritage Museum filled with our lovely models all decked out in Rockabilly and Pin-Up Girl vintage outfits. SUPER FUN!!!

So…without further ado, let’s see some photos from the day!!!

We were stationed with Anna and Yan with a historic firetruck as our backdrop. These two pretty much gave us a 3-alarm fire all day long! It’s a lot for models to be “on” for so many hours in front of the lenses of 7-10 photographers at a time, but they totally brought it! They had great rapport with each other and the paparazzi. We’ve photographed Anna before and she’s just so down to earth and natural. Love working with her!

This time around leading at the Photog Shootout, we provided more instructional guidance than we did at the first one we did back in November. We talked a lot about our methods for working with natural light when shooting at the harshest hours of the day. Since we started at 1pm, it was a great opportunity to show how to get great results that are consistent and provide our clients with a lot of variety in a short period of time. Everyone did such a great job of working with each other and asking questions.

A big thank you to the absolutely delightful Pamela’s Parasols for providing some lovely props for our models (which also double as light modifiers . We know Pamela from her super fabulous Wedding Party Bridal Shows which are such high-class events! PS: We LOOOOOVE incorporating parasols into photos at weddings. If you’re thinking that they might fit in with your look, Pamela is the lady to see!!

Yan was able to rock the total bad-ass look and then turn on a dime and flash a GREAT smile. That’s skill! And he and Anna kept each other laughing all day!

As the sun went down, we even had the opportunity to bust out our trusty video light which we totally adore. Always fun to play with!

We covered metering for backlit situations in harsh sunlight using spot-metering to get the right exposure quickly and consistently. There are lots of different results you can get working with this type of shot, including sun flare, high-key fashion looks and warm, sun-kissed glow. It’s also a great method for blowing out the background to eliminate distractions… especially helpful when you have no control over where or when you’re photographing your clients.

On one side of the firetruck, we had an awesome natural reflector we used for natural fill light: a big abandoned white farm house. Thank you, dear old house for providing another layer of lovely light on our models!

A variety of amazing cars were provided by the good people at Hire Old Cars (by the way, you can actually RENT these cars for weddings and special events which is AWESOME!). Stephen even tried to arrange a Woodie wagon for us since it’s totally part of our branding, but to no avail. Oh well, there were some sweet cars there to drool over, none the less!

Hair and makeup was provided by Kelly Sluder and Robyn Mason who did a FANTASTIC job of executing the perfect period look for our shoot! And, we can’t forget to mention our awesome intern D’Vaughn who came out to help us for the day to help with the reflector, scrim, and video light! Everyone made her feel so welcome and she really enjoyed the event… it even inspired her to think about going down the path of fashion photography!

We ended the evening at our buddy Garrett’s studio in the Cedros Design District, for dinner, visiting, and a talk from Tofurious. Great end to a great day!

Thanks EVERYONE for such a great day of learning and growing for us all! Looking forward to the next event! And a big thank you to you photogs who sent us notes letting us know how helpful the metering walk-through was. We truly appreciate it!!