Can you believe it's already almost October? What that means here at the studio is...HOLIDAY CARDS! The fall is our busiest time of the year. Right after we book a session with a client one of the very first things they ask is, "Okay, now, what do I wear?". Although you and your family may not be having your holiday images taken with me, here's my little guide to dressing for your professional portraits. We give this advice out all year so it's not specific to holiday pictures.

Rule #1: Keep it comfortable. People that are hot, itchy and hate their outfit will not look happy and comfortable in a picture. Fall sweaters look super cute but if you are shooting outdoors and it is still 90 degrees outside, leave them in the closet.

Rule #2: Make sure it fits. This sounds obvious but I can't tell you how many times people will show up for their portrait session with clothing that has never been tried on. Newborns can be especially tricky because they are so small that not a lot of their clothes fit well. If a little baby's clothing is loose it makes them look thin. Because babies are already so small making them look think just doesn't look good.

Rule #3: Not everyone has to match. In fact, I think when everyone matches it can be distracting - like you are all in a uniform. Kids look cute matching but a group of matching adults can look kind of strange.

Rule #4: Everyone should coordinate. Don't worry about matching and think about coordinating instead. If you imagine everyone's clothing is all part of a single outfit and just keep it coordinated that will look great!

Rule #5: Be YOU. I want your images to reflect you and who you are as a person and as a family. If you aren't formal then ditch the ties and suits and be comfortable (and vice versa). You want to be able to look back at your images and say, "That's so us!".

Rule #6: Be careful with patterns, stripes, polka dots and bold patterns. It can look great or it can kill an image. If you aren't a natural at fashion and picking out great coordinating clothing, just keep it simple.

Rule #7: Be careful selecting hair bows and clips. A huge bow on a little girl's head can be very distracting.

Would you like to see some of this played out in real images? I thought so. Here are some examples of well coordinated clothing:

This is a 4 generation portrait. They picked a color that looks great on everyone but they don't match. They all look comfy and they coordinate.

These super sweet brothers look perfect in their coordinated grey, yellow and black.

When in doubt, just keep it simple...

Hope that helps! Have fun this season with your families images!

One of our very favorite places to decorate in our client's homes is the playroom and the children's rooms. It is the perfect place for fun, bold and whimsical imagery. We also love using our line of hand painted frames for these rooms. These frames come in almost any color that you can imagine so it's easy to match an existing decor.

When you are planning out a wall display in your home, the first thing to do is determine where it is going to go and how big that wall is. From there, you can look at the images that you have and decide if they need to be smaller or larger and, with that in mind, decide how many can go into that space and look good. Generally speaking, I think less images and larger images work best. They have more impact for one and really make a good focal point.

This image is of one of the main walls in my boy's bedroom. Their room is actually two rooms that are adjoined. The images on the wall are 16x20 and printed onto metallic black and white paper and framed in our hand painted wooden frames.

One of the big concerns that I hear from people here at the studio is the worry about "filling up the walls". This display does fill up the wall and that is what makes it work. So, what will I do in a few years when they are older and I want to make a change? The easiest option is to simply replace the images in the frames with new ones. I could also move these frames to a separate room (a playroom maybe?).  Your rooms will change, you may move, your kids will get older and their bedrooms will change, etc. Our displays will change too and that is perfectly ok. My attitude is that I want to enjoy my art work now and be open to changing it as my needs change. I am planning to change their rug and bedspreads later this year to a Star Wars theme (black and gray) so, with that in mind, I picked the black and white frame so that it could be a little more neutral and go with what I have now and what I am going to do later this year.

So, the next time you have some fun images and hear yourself say, "My hallway is already so full" or "I have no dea where these could go", consider your children's playroom, room or even their bathroom (cute bathtub shots would be great in a bathroom!).

Oh, one last thing, see the glare on the glass? If your pictures are anywhere near a window, consider using non-glare glass in your frames. If you already have a frame, just ask your local framer to cut you a piece of non-glare glass. All of these will be having their glass replaced!

Happy decorating!

Hello Monday Lesson friends!

This week I am giving you guys an assignment! Ah, but I am jumping ahead...first we need to talk about what our topic is for the day.

I personally think one of the main problems when shooting casual photos of your kids is the sheer amount of visual clutter in the frame. It takes away the focus from our subject. If you are at a soccer game you have people, coolers, folding chairs, etc. At home you have scattered toys and laundry piles. The lists go on. When you are trying to catch the moment you don't have time to remove all of the distractors and that's ok. However, when you do have the time and things are moving slower, it always helps to take the time to craft a better shot by cleaning it up.

One way to de-clutter your shot is to minimize the color clutter. What color clutter? Yes. When you go to a professional photographer for a portrait they will likely coach you on what to wear. We do this because when everyone in the shot is wearing a different color it makes it so much harder to look at. A simple way to clean up your compositions and make your images more striking is to limit your color palette. Here is an example:

This trick won't work for your everyday shots that you have .2 seconds to catch, this concept is for the times when you can take a few extra minutes and prepare. For example, If you are taking the kids to the park to shoot a holiday card photo, you can take a little bit of time and coordinate their outfits. In group shots, everyone doesn't need to match. How many times do you all leave the house wearing the same outfit? Never! I like to tell people to coordinate instead. Imagine that everyone's outfits are one outfit. Pick one color palette and stay there. I believe, in a portrait, your clothes should either say something about who you are (funky, trendy, crazy, conservative, dressy, etc.) OR take a backseat (simple, classic, not distracting). It's the middle ground, where it looks without purpose, that can make an image suffer.

When you look at the shot above, it has a very limited color palette. If her scarf was red and her pants were another color, it would distract you from her belly. In this example, her clothing is not the subject but merely a frame. For an image like this, you want the picture to have a feeling of color harmony. The skin, the background, the wrap and her pants all go together.

This brings me to your assignment. Take a photograph (of anything or anyone) that has a limited color palette or shows color harmony. That's it! Post your Flickr links in the comments section here or post images to The Monday Lesson Flickr group. Don't be shy!

Objective: Learn some guiding principles that will help you to arrange multiple images into collage type frames in a way that flows and is easy on the eye.

At the studio we create a lot of framed pieces using multiple images. We call them storyboard frames because they do just that, they tell a story. Many of the retail frame shops and home decor places sell ready made frames with mats that have multiple openings. This can be a great way to show off some of your shots of your family. The keys to pulling off a great looking storyboard frame are using coordinating images and arranging them so that they flow and keep the viewers eye inside the frame.

To illustrate this, I grabbed my four favorite images from a session last week with Mia. In selecting my 4, I knew that I needed all 4 to coordinate so I chose them all with the same dress and I chose 2 standing and 2 leaning in on a little pink ottoman. This would not have worked as well with 3 standing and 1 ottoman or vice versa. They needed to all be one thing or 2 and 2. Here is the layout arranged in a way that I think works best.

* When laying out an arrangement like the one in this post (2 pink ottomans and 2 without), I like the matching images to be diagonal from each other if at all possible. If you do them side by side it splits the composition in half visually. This can be seen in the next grouping below.

* I also like all of the eyes to be looking IN to the center of the arrangement and not out to the sides. In the group below, she is looking OUT of the frame in the lower left.

In this next group, we have repositioned the similar images diagonal from each other, which helps a lot, BUT we we still have her looking out to the upper left. The way my eye travels here is that I start at the top left and have to really push my eye to move to the top right and then easily down to the bottom right and then to the bottom left and back up to the top left where my eye wants to follow her glance off to the left and out instead of back around, which would be preferable. I like to keep the viewers eye moving in an easy circle through a 4-up like this. In triptychs (a 3 image layout), I like the center to feel nestled in between two images that keep the viewer's eye inside. I always imagine the 1st and 3rd image in a triptych to be like a pair of parenthesis.

Another thing to consider is the size of the faces in relation to each other. As I was cropping the images for this arrangement, I tried to get her head to be the approximately the same size in all of them. It can work if the heads are not all the same size but it goes along with what I said in the beginning, if only one is bigger it will look out of place or kind of like "one of these things is not like the other" (you have to sing that when you read it). If two heads were slightly bigger or smaller but matched that could work (like the pink ottomans). Here is the same grouping as above but with one head bigger.

Okay, now it's your turn...gather up three or four like images and see how they work together. I'd love to see some of your experiments. Please post links to them here in the comments section.

Yes, I know...it's tuesday. I had trouble with the video in this post but I finally got it uploaded today, yippeeee!

Objective: the experiment with selective focus, your auto focus point selector and depth of field.

Over the last year or so we have talked about composition and how to control your depth of field using your f-stop or aperture. If you have not been reading these all along, it may be a good idea to review the lesson on depth of field, composition and rule of thirds before you go on. The links that I just gave go to my old blog (I am still working on moving all of the older content over to this newer blog). Today I am showing you an example of choosing a selective focus point and combining that with shallow depth of field.

Here is our example shot for today:

(tech info for the above shot: shot in manual using studio lights, F 3.5, shutter speed 1/160, lens: 50 mm, ISO: 125)

The shot above would not be possible if your camera only focuses on the center point in an image because the area of sharp focus is in the lower right corner. The other thing that adds emphasis in this shot is the very shallow depth of field. You can see in the tech specs that I used f 3.5. The fact that I am close to my subject helps make the background even softer. Remember, the closer you are to your subject, the more dramatic the depth of field will be. The lens that I was using is the Canon 50 mm compact macro, which allows you to be very close to an object and get nice sharp focus.

Setting your selective focus: Many of the digital cameras out today have the option to set a specific focus point. The default setting of most cameras usually takes information from multiple places in your frame and tries to track or determine what you are photographing and how far away it is.  Often, the default works fine. Every once in a while though, when you are trying to frame something up off center or something else that is tricky, it gets confused and won't focus where you want it to. There are two ways to try and solve this problem and I made a little video talking about it.

This week Julie (my studio manager) and I also tried out my Canon 5D mark II video feature for the first time. Go easy on us...we have a lot to figure out in that department. If we spent any more time on it trying to make it perfect it would never have gotten posted. I'm excited about the prospect of doing more video stuff for you guys though and I promise to do some homework between now and then to make it a little easier on the eyes.