Juan and Sandy

I had the great opportunity to shoot some pre-wedding pictures for my wife's cousin, Juan, and his fiance, Sandy. This was probably my second "official" assignment. What I mean by official is that someone asked me to be a photographer and produce material that they will use. The first assignment I had was to photograph an open house event for my company. (Perhaps I'll post some examples of that assigment in another blog entry.)

Juan and Sandy's assignment was pretty fun. It helped that I knew them well, and they trusted my ability to get decent shots. Right at the start of the shoot, realized that I had no clue on how to pose people or couples. Luckily, they had some ideas of poses they wanted. Throughout the shoot, we tried different things, some that worked and others that didn't.

Since we started mid-afternoon with the sun peeking out of the clouds in the western sky, I used flash throughout the shoot and shot into the sun. I originally wanted to shoot everything with my 50mm lens, but quickly decided to switch to my 18-200mm zoom for maximum flexibility. I also intended to shoot using manual exposure, but the light kept changing with the sun peeking in and out of the clouds. What I found quite effective was to underexpose using exposure compensation of -1 to -1.7 to darken the sky and ocean in the background and illuminate the main subject with off-camera flash triggered by Nikon CLS. I tried practicing this technique with my son at the same beach at sunset with some good results. However, I think I need to understand it and work at it some more.

I hope they like the pictures.