High Tea and sorts...

MOMS & DAUGHTERS OF ALL AGES:

We are planning a very fun High Tea group photoshoot! This is something very different and new to us, so we are soooo excited to get to work.

Here's how it works:

There is a limit of 5 pairs (10 people in total)

Each pair contributes R150-00

We set up and provide eats, props and the location

We will have 2 wonderful and excited photographers there ready to take pictures.

There will be lots of group shots and plenty individual shots of each pair.

After the shoot we will go and edit all the beautiful photographs and upload them to Facebook and a personalised dropbox folder for you to have UNLIMITED access to!

You can take, keep and print as many of the photo's as you want! They are all yours! 

Make sure you book your spot now, as like i said earlier, spots are limited!

And don't worry if you haven't had a photo shoot before, we will be there to guide you all the way! And don't for get to enjoy yourself! 

Here are some of the pics you can expect to see: 

5 Crafts to try this weekend

Okay so this is a little off topic for us, but we love DIY, hand made and all things rustic so we came across these 5 quick little DIY projects to keep us busy this weekend...

And with Spring - literally just around the corner - we thought it would be fun to give some of our stuff a "facelift"

How very excited did we get when we saw these gorgeous DIY projects that are perfect for Summer Dining. You may be thinking.. What do robe baskets have to do with summer dining? Well, we thought you could fit some blankets or outdoor pillows in there for carting about the place! We do like the rope baskets. We may infact be a little bit obsessed. Every basket or box that comes into our home always always always ends up holding washing that needs to be ironed!

1. DIY Blocked Paint Charger Plates Make sure that you use non toxic paint if you plan to eat off these plates. They're great for wall art too in your kitchen or dining room!

2. DIY Mason Jar Straw Lids from Thats what Che said! A genius move and so easy as long as you have a drill and drill bit.

3. Outdoor Pillows from Martha Stewart. The link doesn't hold a tutorial so I have found a tutorial that will help. I have found that when you sew oilcloth you should attach a piece of washi tape under your foot because it will catch! A page from Sew Mama Sew to help you with sewing oilcloth

4. Using the Easy Rope Baskets Tutorial you could also make a Sissal chair for the kids as long as the bucket was left on and sturdy enough for their tiny bottoms. Original Project from Martha Stewart

5. Painted Berry Baskets from While Wearing Heels blog. Super Easy and could be beautiful little boxes for nibbles at a dinner party outside

Our 5 best tips for AWESOME indoor photo's...

5 Tips for AWESOME indoor Photo's

1. Adjust your white balance

If we could tell everyone just one thing about indoor photography, this would be it. White balance. It will change your life (it totally changed ours). We lived through months of orange basement photos and random blue photos thanks to "auto white balance," and we're here to tell you there's a cure! Little did we know it would be so easy. To simplify WB, just know that it is the coloring of the light. Different light sources come with different colors or temperatures. Our eyes are awesome and can adjust to the different hue of light each light source provides, but digital cameras can't do that on their own. You want to adjust white balance to get the colors in your images as accurate as possible. For example, the coloring of shade is much cooler than sunlight, but light bulbs inside the house are much warmer than sunlight. Because of the change of coloring, you need to adjust your WB to compensate. Auto white balance (AWB) does an okay job, especially outside with the sun, where your camera can guess coloring pretty well. But low light and mixed indoor lighting throws it off, and you may have found you'd like a little more (or a LOT more) control to avoid those bluish or orangey-reddish pics you're getting (like what we got for months!!).  Adjusting your own WB will make the most obvious difference indoors at night, but it's always better than auto. There are almost always presets on a DSLR, which are displayed as icons you can choose from to match your lighting:

For clarification, Tungsten is your basic yellowish household light bulb. Fluorescent lights make you feel like you're walking through Target (think bright neon-like white). Everything else is pretty self explanatory. So for cooler light (cloudy day, shade, indoors in the day without lights on) you’ll tell the camera to warm things up, and in warm light (indoor lights/tungsten) you’ll tell it to cool down. Or just pick the WB icon that matches your light :)

2. Lose the flash

We have to confess..., we LOVE our flash... perhaps a little too much. Even with our point and shoot. Granted we've probably ruined a lot of shots that way, and when we finally had to suck it up and learn how to use our external flashes for receptions, we hit a learning curve the size of China. And we'll admit, there is a time and a place for flash. Large events in the dark being a good example. But (we could totally be going out on a social limb here) we are believers that inside our house we can all take great photos without it. We can also take a lot of not-so-great photos without it, but that's what the delete button is for :) And our guess is that even then, you will not regret having ditched your flash. Our goal with photos is to make them authentic, and flash will sadly take your moment and flatten all the depth right out of it. It removes soft shadows that show definition and replaces it with harsh shadows that are super distracting. Work with the real light you have and learn everything you can about your camera so you can adjust it to make your shot light enough without flash.

3. Use your biggest aperture

Another confession (all the sudden it feels like we have a lot of things to confess)... We are addicted to large apertures. Huge, open, suck-in-every-speck-of-light apertures. A depth of field that turns everything into a watery blur (except the tiny point I focused on) makes us melt. This is to a fault, and we stick to it even in family sessions or group shots. We seriously can't help ourselves. Aperture. This is hard for us to even mention without going into more detail, but for now, know that your aperture is the size of the opening on your lens. The bigger the opening of your lens, the more light you will let in, and the more background you will blur out. Both of these things are the best news ever for indoor shots. You need light, and you want the busy background to melt away. Try switching to Aperture Priority setting ("Av" for Canon and "A" for Nikon) and get your aperture to the smallest number possible (they're fractions, the smaller the number, the larger the opening). That's a good start.

4. Clean up the clutter

As a family, we've always got some form of a tornado running through our house, so a constant mess is inevitable. But we have a little secret. We like to practice the idea of quickly cleaning up the background of any shot before we take it. This doesn't mean sweeping and vacuuming or putting everything away on their proper shelf. We would miss the moment we wanted to capture if we did that. Let's call it the 10 Second Sweep. We do a quick scan of the scene, and if anything is distracting from what we want our focus to be on, we just move it away so that it's out of the shot. Literally, like to the side of the couch. Or to the opposite wall. It's fake cleaning. And it works like a charm. We do it all the time :) We're all about being real, but if we're taking a photo that we may potentially frame on my wall, or send off to grandparents, or if we just want to make ourselves feel better, it's worth a fake cleaning. 10 seconds. No big deal.

5. Look for catchlights

A catchlight is when indirect light fills your subjects eyes and lights them up. We're pretty hooked on them, they have an awesome way of bringing the eyes—and entire face—to life. To know if you’re getting a good catchlight, look for the source of light reflecting in your subject’s eyes, and notice how much the eyes light up compared to a direct light or backlit photo. We're secretly crazy about backlighting, but we've noticed most clients prefer a radiant face to a radiant halo of glowing hair at the top of their head. Weird, I know. That said, even as a lover of backlighting, when we're shooting indoors I am a sucker for catchlights, and I'll always choose indirect light in the eyes over the hazy background and darker face you get with backlight. You can get awesome catchlights with indoor window light during the day by having your subject look toward the window. Try it...you'll fall in love with it.

7 Tips for Photographing Newborns...

Newborn babies are the coveted prize in photography. An adorable sleeping creature that would look cute no matter what? Sign us up! Let’s put that baby in a stockpot! In a basket! Wait! –A headband that looks like a flower! In a field of flowers! With butterflies! And maybe a big gift box bow!

Then I realized that Anne Geddes is the landlord of that entire market. And that it’s rare for a portrait client to actually want a picture of their baby in a stockpot. What people do want is a picture of their baby, that looks like their baby. Because in about 5 minutes their baby isn’t going to look like this anymore.

Set the Scene

In an ideal situation, you are photographing a newborn that is less than two weeks old (when they tend to be more “mold-able”), in the morning (when they tend to be a more willing participant), just after being fed (when they tend to be a little more tolerant), and in a warm room (where they tend to be a little more comfortable).

Having everything ready to go before shooting a single shot is taken will serve you well: various blankets for background and warmth, cloth diapers for when someone pees on you (let’s hope it’s the baby), any clothing you plan to use and back-ups of every possible thing. We prefer minimal clothing on newborns, but this is just personal preference. Amble natural light is important because even if you do usually shoot flash, it’s often disruptive enough to wake a newborn and rule number one in photography, parenting, and life is: Never wake a sleeping baby. If there is anything I’ve learned, it’s that.

Be prepared to work fast because babies can be ticking time bombs, but slowly because they are delicate ticking time bombs. You are methodical. You are confident. You are patient. You are the baby whisperer. Because we are speaking in ideals. And if you’re us and we are still speaking in ideals, you also have on your cute jeans and are having a great hair day. Because, why not?

Find the Purpose

Photographing newborns is one of the few times we make a point of asking clients what they are planning on doing with the end result. Often it’s for use in a baby announcement or just as “baby pictures” documenting this time. But if it’s going to end-up as a 24″x36″ canvas above a fireplace, I want to know beforehand. Or if I’m going to need negative space to create an announcement card, I’d rather shoot with that in mind then trying to backtrack later in post.

Another thing to think about is the ratio of images of the baby alone and the baby with parents or siblings; there is no right or wrong answer here but knowing what you or your client is wanting in advance is key. Newborn shoots are not (usually) guided by a free-spirited toddler and therefore require more of a plan from you than shoots with older children. And you never know when a baby will decide that pictures are just not what he wants to do today and let’s you know this in a very unsubtle and loud way.

It's in the Details

And why shouldn’t it be? Baby details are sorta amazing. I mean have you seen a baby toe recently? Talk about something I’d like to dip in butter and call a snack. We have all seen baby parts photographed in the same boring ways: wedding rings on toes, close-ups of belly buttons and umbilical cords (ew), tops of bald heads in big grown-up hands. We are guilty of doing every one of these, multiple times over. We now see that the shots that will stand the test of time will be very simple close-ups that highlight just how small newborns are: tiny hands holding a parent’s finger, brand new feet that have yet to see wear, yawns and other adorable expressions that only look adorable on a baby.

As Cute as they are Awkward

Oh sure, we all know they are adorable, but what are you supposed to do with them? They are flimsy and tiny and often naked. This is where I think we get into trouble and put them in baskets and stockpots. Because we can. Instead of creating scenes, it’s better to just think of “positions”. Babies can only do about two positions unassisted—laying down this way or that way. Work with that.

They may just lay there, but the beauty in this is that they often let you adjust them however you want. Tuck legs up under bodies, pull flailing arms into blankets, curl them up into someone’s hands. The baby is the star of this show and is plenty cute to pull off this role without a big supporting cast of props. A key to getting the position you want and having it stay that way long enough to get the shot you want is to keep your hands on the baby longer than needed after positioning them.

Think of it as long hug—you don’t need that extra ten seconds at the end, but it feels nice. Get the baby settled and then stay there for a bit longer. The warmth of your hands and the consistency and reassurance is often exactly what the baby needs to “hold” the position you are seeking.

Got extra arms? Use them!

We like to include siblings as often as I can, no matter the age. This gets tricky because the very definition of tricky is a two year old holding a newborn while exhausted parents watch the situation go down. Enough pillows and promises of lollipops though will get you a shot or two and a little variation in the final images. Interaction is the name of the game here—look for whatever the emotion is that’s happening and play on it. If it’s pride, comment on it to instill confidence and document a sweet moment in sibling history. If it’s indifference, engage the older child so they forget there is even a new addition in the photograph and are happy to be your star for a moment.

Stop Worrying

We all love a good worry and consider ourselves to be quite good at it. But as jobs go, photographing newborns is about as close to shooting fish in a barrel as you are likely to get. It’s easy to feel the pressure given that babies are so fragile and grow every single second. The truth is any picture you take of a newborn is a gift. Just as any time spent getting to photograph a newborn. We don’t get sappy often, but newborn babies are pretty special. Enjoy it.

Especially if the newborn belongs to someone else and you get to walk out of there without a crying baby and go home to a bed where you’re permitted to sleep through the night.

Top Tips for Better Maternity Photo Shoots

Maternity photography has really gained in popularity through the last few years. Photographers are getting more and more creative with women and their baby bumps. It’s fantastic to see so much brightness and life in this new wave of photography. However, with any specialty there are always a few things to keep in mind when starting out.

1. The Time is Right

It’s hard to say when the exact right time to photograph a pregnant woman would be, but in most cases 7 months is the ideal month. This is usually when the baby has dropped a bit in the tummy and when moms are still relatively comfortable in moving their bodies. If you wait until after the 7 months, sometimes it can be uncomfortable  for the mothers, plus they have a lot on their plate the closer they get to their due date.  As a photographer, you’ll also want enough time to edit and print these images before the baby arrives. This should be plenty of time for your client to order images and share them before the wee one enters the world.

2. Preparation is Key

Maternity photography should be treated just like modeling or head shot photography. Have your client come prepared. Moms should make sure their nails are groomed and you might even suggest having the moms have their hair and makeup professionally done.  It’s a little bit of pampering but it goes a long way in making the clients feel great about themselves. Have a candid discussion with your client regarding what to bring and make sure they bring water, snacks and a robe (for in between shoots) so they can feel as comfortable as possible. Also, remind them  not  to wear anything too confining around the belly before the session (like elastic pants). This can often leave marks on the tummy in which you’ll have to photoshop out later. So save yourself some time with this little tip.

3. Try New Angles

Ok, so you’ve done the traditional photo of mom standing up with her hands on her belly, now what? With maternity photography, it’s important to get the best angles and lighting as possible for the expecting moms. Try shooting from above. This is a great angle as it is almost always flattering . At this position, you can focus on her bright eyes or her hands on her belly. She can be looking straight at you or down at her bump. Any of these combinations will work as this angle is flattering and slimming to the face.

4. Get Creative

Think outside the box and get creative. What I love most about today’s maternity photography is the abstracts. I love the focus on the belly and flowers. Or maybe the feet are in focus and the tummy is out of focus. Or you can be clever in announcing the sex of the child by including elements to give clues. Try a pair of boy’s baby shoes in the photo or maybe fill the room with pink balloons. It’s fun to get creative and your client will have fun as well.

5. Get Loved Ones Involved

It’s not just mom who is excited about the arrival of the baby, it’s the dad, the partner, the pets, the siblings, the grandparents, the aunts, the uncles, you name it, everyone is anxiously waiting. So now is the time to capture their excitement too and include them in the maternity photo shoot.  Dads and partners can come in and wrap their arms around the mom. Siblings can come in get up and close to mom’s belly. Finally, let Fido in on the action too, he’s a part of the family too and his life is about to get a whole lot better with more table scraps coming his way in a few years.

The important key to remember with any of this is to always make sure your client is comfortable. Keep relaxed but take this seriously. Your clients will love the extra attention and details you give them. Photographers are family historians and this is one of the most important jobs in the world.

Gift Vouchers!

Who doesn't love a gift voucher? We sure do, so here's what we're thinking...

If you purchase a gift voucher with us in the month of July, we'll give you 10% OFF!!!!!

Natural Light... ❤

There are several components that make up a beautiful, luminous portrait, including how you interact with you subject, composition and balance. Finding the perfect moment and location and of course the LIGHT!  When we create a photograph, we seek to capture that sweet space where are and life merge into a moment bathed in natural light...

WE LOVE A DISCOUNT!

Guess what! 

We are running a discount offer! Print out this "coupon" and recieve these discounted rates on your next photoshoot! Woohoo!

Contact us on: tlzettler@telkomsa.net / 084 818 2223