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Thoughts on Shooting RAW+JPEG

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Welcome to another Reader FAQ! Thanks for submitting your questions to us - we get such a thrill out of answering our readers most pressing questions about their businesses. This is an ongoing series, so make sure to read the rest of our Reader FAQ posts.

If you have a question that hasn’t been answered already, check out the info at the bottom of this post for how to submit. You never know, it just may be featured here on the bloggy-blog!

On with today’s question…

I’m shooting RAW+JPEG and find that I never end up using the JPEG for anything except maybe previewing in the Finder. I’m thinking that I should shoot in RAW only to save space on the CF card, but can’t convince myself to drop the JPEG. What do you guys do – RAW+JPEG or RAW only?

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Where Should I Host Client Meetings?

View More: Client Communication
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Welcome to another Reader FAQ! Thanks for submitting your questions to us - we get such a thrill out of answering our readers most pressing questions about their businesses. This is an ongoing series, so make sure to read the rest of our Reader FAQ posts.

If you have a question that hasn’t been answered already, check out the info at the bottom of this post for how to submit. You never know, it just may be featured here on the bloggy-blog!

On with today’s question…

Where do you meet up with clients or where would you recommend for photographers who don’t have their own studio?

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The Dish on Editing: What (and Who) We Use to Edit

View More: Workflow
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Welcome to another Reader FAQ! Thanks for submitting your questions to us - we get such a thrill out of answering our readers most pressing questions about their businesses. This is an ongoing series, so make sure to read the rest of our Reader FAQ posts.

If you have a question that hasn’t been answered already, check out the info at the bottom of this post for how to submit. You never know, it just may be featured here on the bloggy-blog!

On with today’s question…

What program do you guys edit in?

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What Gear Do We Use?

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One of the questions we get asked most often is about the gear we have in our bag – what lenses we love and why.

Before we get started, I want to mention that the lenses we have are the best lenses for us - your needs may vary. It’s important to have purpose behind each and every lens you own, and it’s definitely not to your advantage to just go out and buy every lens you can get your hands on. We built our kit over time, and when we were unsure about a lens, we rented it first.

Many local camera stores will rent lenses to you at a great price, and there’s also a few awesome online lens rental places (BorrowLenses.com is a favorite around here.) Continue Reading

Dying to Shoot More First Looks?

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What I love the most about writing this blog for photographers is that Jeff and I get to say we’ve been there. Any frustration, roadblock, disappointment you could throw at us, we probably have a story of our own to tell. If you’ve walked around all day at a wedding with spinach in your teeth, I’ll tell you about the time I had a huge black mascara swipe straight across my face for most of the day and then fell backwards over a chair in front of the entire bridal party – in a dress. Or what about the time I stepped into a pile of manure that went up to my knee? Again, in front of the entire bridal party. Yeah, that’s a fun story to tell.

Which makes me ask myself – why doesn’t anyone in the bridal party actually WARN ME when I’m about to completely embarrass myself??

Anyhoo, the same goes with the First Look. One look at our wedding blog and it’s clear that Jeff and I shoot a LOT of First Looks with our couples, but that wasn’t always the case. During our first few years of business, only a small handful of our couples would opt for First Looks, so we had to become pretty adept at educating couples about them until the tides began to turn in our favor.

So how can you begin shooting more weddings where the bride and groom see each other before the ceremony? I’ll walk you through how we educate our couples (notice how I say ‘educating’ and not ‘convincing.’ BIG difference.), and how you can begin turning the tides in YOUR favor. It’s easier than you may think.

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The Perfect Wedding Photography Schedule

View More: Technique
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There’s nothing better than a stress-free wedding day when everything runs on time, people are ready to take pictures when you need them, and you have creative freedom to do your job well. Can I get a ‘fo-sho’ from my wedding peeps out there?

And you know what the best part is? There’s a lot that you can do as a photographer to make sure that these kinds of wedding days happen more often than not, which is a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. In fact, the photographer and the wedding coordinator have the most control over how a wedding day is run, which means two things:

  1. You get to create the best photography schedule to help make YOU successful
  2. You need to create the best photography schedule to help make the WEDDING successful.

In other words, we need to set ourselves up for success with every wedding we shoot, because it is our job to create the best wedding day experience we possibly can for our couples and their families.

After years of shooting weddings of all shapes and sizes, we’ve fine-tuned a schedule that has become our foundation for every wedding we shoot. This schedule changes, of course, based on the unique logistics of a particular wedding day, but the real value of this schedule isn’t so much the exact timing as it is the principles behind the timing – giving ourselves time and space to photograph what we need to and when.

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