Paul LeGrand Photography

Godbeams and Shadow Details

2009-09-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

OK, most of the population doesn't even give a rip about HDR, or for that matter, have the slightest idea what it means even after you tell them it means High Dyanamic Range. But you're not most of the population. You scour the internet to read photo blogs, you get emails from DigitalPhotographySchool.com every morning and don't consider them spam, and you time your vacation request so you can shoot the full moon rising over Half Dome just like Ansel. But you still don't try HDR? Why? Reason #1, you've got to use a tripod. Reason #2 it's too complicated. Reason #3, you've got to buy special software. Well, here's an end around all three excuses. Number one, using the tripod. In order for HDR to work, you need to take multiple exposures of the (almost) exact same scene. With a still life, this is easy. With people, it's not. The shot you see here was shot handheld, but I used auto bracketing to take three separate exposures at +1.0/0/-1.0 exposure compensation in less than 1 second. Auto bracketing gets you around the tripod issue as long as you hold the camera steady for the whole tic-a-tic sequence. Number two, it's too complicated. No, not if you get the auto bracketing thing down and find a subject that doesn't have a lot of things that move in it. You need at least a three shot sequence, and you need to download a program called Photomatix from the web, pick out the three shot sequence, and drop the three images into Photomatix and follow the menu. Number three, it's too expensive. No, Photomatix lets you download their program for a long time for free. Eventually, it starts to put a watermark on your images to coerce you to buy the key, but by that time, you'll have made up your mind and you'll probably either love or hate HDR photos. Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle. I like the airbrushed look that HDR can produce, but I'm also kind of a purist who wants a shot to work right through the lens with no image manipulation. I do like HDR, and I use it when I've got extremely high contrast scenes to deal with that I know my chip won't be able to handle any other way. I go into this knowing ahead of time there's a risk my shot's going to look like the latest World of Warcraft ad graphic. The godbeams, and the details inside the car would never have shown up in a single exposure of this scene, but with the computer picking out the best of each of the three images, it's a winner. That is, unless you're one of those people who hates HDR, and most of the people who fall into that category are jealous photographers who've either never tried it or tried it but quit.

Balancing Act With Light

2009-08-06T12:58:00.001-07:00

This isn't exactly a simple technique for photographers, but hey, film is cheap when you're using a digital camera, so give it a try. The important thing about shifting your camera into manual everything is it gives you control. Get out of program mode, get out of autofocus, and get your electronic flash on a cord, or even better, on wireless setting! Now you're cooking with gas. The lighting for your background is determined by the amount of light that's able to pass through your lens and the amount of time your shutter is open. Find a shutter speed and aperture that works to give your background sky the deep rich blue color you get in the 15 minutes after sunset! This will probably take a slow enough shutter speed to make quite a bit of motion blur in your shot. Now comes part B! Freeze your subject in the foreground with an instant of blinding light in their face. This technique uses manual exposure, manual shutter speed, and manual focus. The only thing on auto is your TTL flash, which should get the foreground lit right if you dial up the power using about +1 stop of flash compensation. Hard work to get it right, but worth the wait when you pull it off successfully. Oh, and this may sound weird to some of you, but if you trust in Jesus, and read his word, and pray over your camera gear that you can use it it a way that honors him, it makes a difference in your pictures, as well as in your life.

The Exposure Trick That (Almost) Never Fails!

2009-06-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

The three shots above definitely have one thing in common. They're all difficult to meter. At Yellowstone National Park, all the pictures from the "front side" of the geyser were way too cliche. Getting away from the masses, I found this couple sitting on a trailside. The backlighting of the water was glorious, and there were dark shadows in the foreground. With the limited dynamic range of today's digital cameras, getting the right exposure becomes absolutely critical. The Griffith Observatory in the hills over downtown LA presented a similar challenge, though this time the only backlighting was a faint glow in the blackening evening sky. The windows with their incandescent glows cast a bold, almost candlelight orange hue to complete the scene. The church with a diffraction fringe around the top of the steeple completes the set of three problem lighting conditions. Though there are a lot of tricks of the trade that can be employed to bring out all of these shots, but it's not about post processing using photoshop layers, shooting in .raw and tweaking the levels, or using auto bracketing. Whenever you're faced with a difficult contrasty landscape scene like these there's amazingly simple cure to help nail critical exposure. Meter the sky.

Behind the Scenes Easter!

2009-04-12T23:10:00.000-07:00

Shepherd of the Hills put on an absolutely amazing Easter service today, but the credit all goes to JESUS! It's something that really touches your heart when you see how God shows up in the lives of ordinary people, and in His name, something extraordinary happens. Two services, 8500 seats, 900 volunteers, and a whole lot of lives changed by the experience.

The pictures you see above are all part of a behind the scenes look at the whole production. The dancers and choir in their jeans and shorts doing their final sound checks on Saturday before Easter, the director and the technical director working a live edit in the video production truck, the band's percussion section, and the riggers are all part of the hard work that leads up to the event.

This article is more than a story about all the behind the scenes work that went into Easter services at Shepherd of the Hills church. The one thing I can tell anyone interested in building their artistic talents is GET INVOLVED! The experience you will gain will stay with you for a lifetime. At a megachurch, think of all the resources of talent you will find. Our video production crew is mostly made up of working professionals. The same thing is true for the praise team singers, the sound people, the riggers, the emergency response teams, and many other positions. Sure, we all have our businesses to run, but there's more to life than your day job. Of course, by becoming involved you'll meet people who can help you take your artistic talents to a higher level. Of course, you'll be able to do amazing things you never would have thought possible. There are so many secular reasons to become involved with a group of people like this for purely self-motivated reasons. Drop in any time! I'm usually on camera for the Saturday evening service. So come by and stay for the praise and worship singing even if you're not really into the whole Jesus thing. God is looking for worshippers, but if you want to just come and hang around and listen to some really talented singers, feel free to come enjoy a first rate gospel music experience.

And oh yea, that Jesus guy, he just might show up in your life too....

Addicted to Speed

2009-04-11T09:11:00.001-07:00

There's certainly an art to sports photograpy, and a lot of wildlife photographers have come to realize that the art of shooting race car drivers or football players is quite similar to the art of catching an animal in action. Split second timing, and conciousness of both the foreground and background, and critical focusing all come into play. Patience, and cat-like reflexes come into play. Of course, being at the right place to get the picture and having all the right presets programmed into your camera make a difference too. Look at the setup where the photographer in the yellow vest is photographing the oncoming race traffic. There's a little bit of K-rail and a chain link fence with some big cutouts in it. Having a big lens like the 300 f2.8 ends up being a help because you can put it in aperture priority mode at, say, f4, and have a nice shallow depth of field, which helps isolate your subject, the oncoming car, from the background cars behind it.

A lot of wildlife photography involves anticipating what the animal's going to do next. In cases like the duck coming in from a landing, this is easy. The takeoffs, however take a little more knowedge to capture. Understanding how the animal thinks may pay off here. Just like knowing your way around a racetrack helps with race car photography . Every track has spots that are good for passing. Every passing attempt has a setup. It's a lot easier to see this from the driver's seat that it is from the sidelines. If you see the track from a driver's eye, you're going to learn how to shoot. If you see the lake from the bird's eye, it's got approach flight paths, landing zones, and good places to start takeoff runs. There are rivalries and ground the competitors try to hold on to. The racetrack and the wildlife sanctuary aren't too different from each other once you get to know them. The racer setting up a pass gives up a little entrance speed on the proceeding corner so he can be slow in, but get on the throttle earlier as he comes out. The bird looking to take off may look right, and then left, and then hit the gas.

If we want to understand car racing, we can read books. Alternatively, we can get an SCCA membership, join a car club, take some hot laps at an open track session or an HPDE event, or even go to a race driving school. Of course, when it comes to wildlife photography, we can't become a bird for a day, so our best course of action is to read books about animals and learn everything about them before we go out in the field. In both auto racing and wildlife photography, a little bit of homework before the shoot goes a long way.

One other parallel. The big holes in the fence give you the opportunity to get a great shot, but something dangerous that you didn't anticipate might fly out at you. So do your homework, stay alert, and go get that once in a lifetime shot!

High Contrast Images Under Construction

2009-04-02T22:13:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation with a gallery owner named Ruth the other day. She and I have both been around photograpy for a long time now, and we each had some of our old stories of "back in the days." Now don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a monologue about how when we were kids in order to get to school we had to walk five miles through the snow carrying our desks.

I remember the old days before digital. You could do all sorts of special effects back then. They had tools like rubylith, and register pins, and internegatives, and lithographic film. The trouble was, most of these tools were too time consuming and hard to use, so most people didn't use them.

Today, digital cameras are easy to use, and instead of shooting 36 or 72 shots at the homecoming game, you can shoot 900. When the cops went from six shooter revolvers to autoloaders with 18 round magazines, it gave the good guys more firepower in a gunfight, but departments quickly learned that the "spray and pray" mindset was dangerous.

The exact same thing is true in digital photography. "Spray and pray" doesn't work if you don't grasp a technical barrier in front of you. In the case of the two photos above, the technical barrier is high dynamic range. Even if we expose for the blue sky and let the let the silouettes go completely black, the details on the sunlit ground end up being too dark to make a good print. Why? Because a .jpg has really limited dynamic range. But there's an easy solution. By switching my exposure quality from .jpg to .raw, I picked up enough dynamic range to get the foreground look I wanted in the shots. I then took the .raw image and opened it up in PhotoShop's camera raw converter. I open a normal version of the file, which was properly exposed by metering off the blue sky when I shot the image. After that, Iopened up a second vesion of the .raw file, tweaking the contrast settings in the camera raw editor to get the light I wanted in the foreground areas. It was then a simple matter to sandwich the two versions of the same .raw file on top of one another in photoshop, and mask away the washed out sky using a layer mask (which is actually a tool that's been around since before photoshop was born.) To make a layer mask back in the old days, you had to spend hours using an x-acto knife and a sheet of rubylith, so nobody did it. Now it's easier, but you'll only find the solution to the problem if you're inquisitive enough to realize there are times when shooting more .jpg's won't solve the problem, and you need to get out of "spray and pray" mode to find the answer.

A full cut of CTO?

2009-01-29T10:13:00.000-08:00

A full cut of CTO? What on earth is that, and why could I possibly need it? Whenever I go out on a shoot, I'm always thinking about how to take my photography to the next higher level.

When you go out shooting a portrait, are you concentrating a lot of your energy on making sure your pictures are sharply focused? For most of us, the answer is no. Sure, we put a certain amount of effort into making sure that the lens is focused, especially with new equipment, but after a while, focusing becomes second nature. Let's think beyond that. What's going on with the background, and with the light. It's outdoors, and it's about 3:30 in the afternoon, still a little too early for the golden light. The sunlight is behind our model Rosalyn's right shoulder. It's a day after a rainstorm. The grass is a gorgeous green and the skys are clear and blue. Due to some harsh sun backlighting her, it's clear that I'm going to need to add some light on Rosalyn's face, but if I just blast away with an electronic flash, the shot's going to look cold.

With a new Nikon, there are lots of times you can shoot without even thinking about white balance, but this was not one of those times. I wanted the look of warm sunlight on the model's face, and I wanted to do it without throwing off the natural color of the grass, the bricks and the sky. The trick: Place a Rosco Cinegel CTO (Color Temperature Orange) Jell over the flash and bump the flash power up about 2/3 stop. This gives the shot that afternoon sunlight look and the model's skin tones look warm. If I tried this shot without the jell and flash combination, adjusting white balance in photoshop, the results would not have been pretty. Getting it right at the moment you trip the shutter is the key. Visualize. Check your preview monitor and histogram. Fix what's not what you want, and keep shooting and checking. It works!

The Five Second Rule

2009-01-23T22:43:00.000-08:00

Ok, us guys have all heard of the five second rule. If something good to eat falls on the ground, it's fair game to grab it up and put it in your mouth as long as you get it in five seconds. But the other week I was reading a photography magazine article saying something about five seconds being the right exposure time for a lot of motion blur shots. And you know what, amazingly enough, it seems to work. Of course, any artsie stuff like this needs to come with a caveat. You need to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince using any creative photography technique.

The Envelope Stuffers

2009-01-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

Such exciting action! Sometimes editorial photography just bursts at the seams with opportunities for action shots. Then, you have the envelope stuffers. Some stories tell themsleves. This was not one of those times. I had to really look to find the shot that portrayed the story. These guy and gals who sit in a room and stuff envelopes are really special, and there's a lifetime of wisdom to be had from each one if you can coax it out of them. When a church needs to fill a position like a praise team singer or an leading actor in the Passion Play, it always seems like volunteers line up for a shot at their own 15 minutes of fame. These guys are just the opposite. Some of them are retired folks who've been quitely pitching in behind the scenes for 15 years. They come in on Fridays before the weekend services at their church and stuff inserts in all the church bulletins. Thousands of inserts. Week after week. On the surface, there's nothing in it at all for them at all. And that's the real story. An unselfish love. They come because they want to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. When I got done with my shoot, I had a pile of outtakes. Faces of the volunteer workers, closeups, even a group photo with everybody holding bulletins in their hands. But it was the over the shoulder shot of this anonymous, older gentleman's hands at work that best told the story.

Shooting Bikers

2009-01-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

Shooting a group of bikers presents some unusual challenges. When shooting people pictures, bonding with the people you're photographing is always a key element of success. When they're glad to have you along, the harvest will be bountiful. When you introduce yourself, the first thing they should see is a SMILE! On this day of shooting, I built new friendships with guys with bicepts of steel and hearts of gold. Photographing vehicles can be very technical sometimes. With the bikes, I did some experimenting around with strong backlighting and fill flash. The top shot has the flash power bumped up to fill in the rider's faces. It worked. I got a little lens flare even though my lens was spotless. Keeping your lens elements clean is key for anything facing into the sun, especially when using wide angle lenses that don't benefit much from lens shades. I also took a number of shots using slow shutter speeds. The middle shot above was taken using a 1/60th shutter speed and continuous autofocus. The bottom shot was taken with a little negative exposure compensation, and was tweaked in photoshop to bring out the texture of the leather some more.

What a great day of shooting!

Night Photography in Historic Downtown Los Angeles

2008-12-22T17:58:00.000-08:00

It's not too often you get to use the words "historic" and "Los Angeles" together in the same sentence. Last week I had the opportunity to lead a group of photographers on a night shoot in Downtown LA. We enjoyed a meal at Phillipes, the restaurant where the french dip sandwich was invented, and then set off on a walking tour through Chinatown and Olvera Street, where the buildings sometimes date back to the 1800's. Which for LA is "really old." I mean, in this town, the music from INXS and New Kids on the Block already qualifies as "oldies."

Night photography here is fun. Chinatown's a place to start shooting early in the evening, the shops are open and lit up, and there are people scurrying about. One of my favorite things about low light photography is the way the lack of light allows you to add motion blur to your images. A tripod and a cable release are a must here. While using a tripod and your camera's self-timer might work for landscape shots, nailing down the motion blur you want to capture in the city takes split second timing. A passing bus, a cop on a code three run, a cyclist, or almost anything else that moves is an opportunity. A street photographer working at night needs to know his camera the way a special forces soldier knows his weapon. Alright, he doesn't need to be able to disassemble and reassemble it blindfolded, but it does help to be able to change shutter and aperture, dial in exposure compensation, bracket shots, and use the camera in full manual. And be ready to plunk the tripod down, frame, and shoot in a couple of seconds. It can be done. All it takes is a little practice. What works? Anything with action and color, strong lighting, abstractions of line and shape, or a story to tell. Get together with a friend and go out shooting together!

Worm's Eye View

2008-12-10T22:31:00.000-08:00

Pastor Kevin is leading the charge for Jesus in a way that definitely falls "outside the box." As part of the sports ministry at one of California's mega churches, he's up early on a Saturday morning leading a group of mountain bike riders up a trail overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

Always look for unusual angles when you're out shooting. The shot was taken by picking a small aperture, using an off camera, corded TTL flash to frontlight the rider, and holding the camera a few inches off the ground. The autofocus found Pastor Kevin, the flash fired, and the result was an image that captures the essence of Pastor Kevin's ride for a cause bigger than himself.

Dragging the Shutter

2008-08-09T09:57:00.001-07:00

Showing action can be an important part of conveying the image your eye sees. Here Deano and the Dynamos, a Christian Music Ministry, are performing at one of the largest churches in Southern California. Deano's jumping and whirling and playing his guitar is so dynamic, it's hard to capture in a still image. In the closup of Deano, I wanted to caputure a sense of motion, so I selected aperture priority mode and set the camera at f-14. The technique of dragging the shutter, that is, intentionally choosing a slow shutter speed, can work with or without a flash, but often the best results come with a flash. If your camera has a flash option for "slow sync" and "rear curtain sync," try turning both of them on. This technique works best with a high powered electronic flash like the Nikon SB-800, but the real key to making it work is taking lots of shots to get the one "keeper" that will become your personal treasure.

The Missing Man Formation

2008-07-03T18:06:00.000-07:00

IN MEMORY OF PHOTOGRAPHER JEFF MILLER 1955-2008

Today I said farewell to a friend. He died at the age of 53, which at one time would have seemed old to me, but no longer does. There are many great lessons in life, and we all learn them along the way. It's important to work hard and play hard, and to use the talents God gives you.
A good life lesson, once paraphrased by Bill Gates, is "life's not fair. Get used to it." Jeff's greatest love in life was flying. He was a commercial pilot with 7000 hours flight time, when a trip to the flight surgeon pulled the plug on his career overnight. He had been diagnosed with diabetes.
Re-starting his life, he did some entrepreneurial things to make a new career for himself. He got involved in volunteering, and found himself hanging out of helicopter doors in a harness, holding a camera instead of a stick and throttle. He helped organize the Heroes Airshow, and shot photos for the fire service, including the LA City and LA County Fire Departments. The diabetes eventually took one of his legs. When Jeff went to the County Fire Department to renew his fire line credentials, there was a new fire department official at the desk who was skeptical as to why a disabled man in a wheelchair would need a departmental ID. Today, that same official spoke with pride of how Jeff didn't quit. One of the photos on display showed Jeff in the door of a helicopter, flying over a scene with his camera. One leg was against the helicopter's skid bracing his position, the other leg was still freshly bandaged from his then recent leg amputation.
Life is finite. As you come to terms with that reality, you learn to worry less and pray more. I liked Jeff's approach toward life. He had passion, and he was organized. He never spent a moment of his life drunk or on drugs. When he died, he wasn't rich, and he wasn't famous, and he had little in the way of material possessions. His most treasured earthly possessions were simply a flight harness and his camera, but he lived his life to the fullest and he made the most of the talents God gave him.
When helicopters come in for a landing, the ground controller will raise both arms vertically to signal the pilot that he's on the right heading. At the memorial service, I took this picture as three LAFD Huey's flew the missing man formation over us. As they came in, Jeff's sister, doubtlessly raised on a diet of aviaion, instinctively raised her arms overhead vertically, giving the same signal I've seen Jeff give time and time again on the airfield. I took the picture you see here.

Jeff, you're on the right heading.

Amen.

Photojournalism 101

2008-03-26T08:43:00.001-07:00

A group of Christians from Shepherd of the Hills Church are doing a "community days" project. People are donating time and materials to help beautify Mayall Street Elementary School. Here, a team of people are putting in a garden.

Let's talk about this from a photojounalism standpoint. Getting an overall shot that captures the essence of what's going on is critical. In order to get the angle I wanted, I decided to double park and scramble up onto the roof of my vehicle, standing up and getting images with a wide zoom lens. This shot captured the overall story. Getting ten feet off the ground made the difference. From street level, you couldn't tell what was going on. So don't be afraid to look for an angle that works, even if it takes thinking outside the box to make it happen.

Try to add a foreground that helps tell the story. Here, a volunteer works hard planting a flower garden. This shot captures the essence of the task. From a technical side, the secret to making this shot work was balanced fill flash. With direct sunlight as the only light source, the subject's face would have been dark beyond recognition. Using a camera mounted TTL flash I was able to capture the details of her face. I needed to adjust the exposure compensation, decreasing the exposure by -0.7 stops, and powering down the flash by 1.7 stops, to keep the foreground from being overlit.

Seeing the Light

2007-12-17T17:03:00.000-08:00

A big part of successful photography is pre-visualization. PBS put together a documentary on Ansel Adams where Ansel talked about his images. Instead of using the phrase "take" a picture, he described how he would "make" a photograph that would capture the image he saw in his mind's eye.

In this photograph, elements of strong lighting and linearity bring together dramatic elements that help make the image pleasing to the eye. When I pre-visualized the picture, the elements that stood out to me in my mind's eye were the two triangles formed by the sides of this "urban canyon" as it recedes back to the vanishing point. Shape and balance and depth all play a role in making this image aestheticly pleasing. None were obvious to the casual bystanders, who for the most part took snapshots of their friends with their backs up against the railing instead.

Urban Sunset

2007-12-10T23:52:00.000-08:00

Our stormy weather of late has produced some fabulous clouds. The day that the storm breaks us is the classic time to get the best scenic photos, and the golden light of the last hour of the day caught me struggling with rush hour traffic on the way back over the hill from Hollywood. There really aren't a lot of special tricks to getting good sunset pictures. Just basic fundamentals. If you're looking into the sun, your optics better be nice and clean, just like your windshield needs to be for a sunset commute. Watch your shutter speed, and be ready to put your camera on a tripod once the light levels go down. I like to shoot sunsets using aperture priority and the right amount of exposure compensation. Digital cameras make it so much easier than the old days of film. Take a test shot, check the histogram to make sure you're not running off either end of the scale, and then fire away. This sunset shot was made using a gradient filter that reduced the amount of light hitting the bottom portion of the image, which gave me the little bit of foreground detail I was looking for. Like many landscape images, previsualization helps you be able to make a picture that caputures the feeling of the event as you see it in your mind's eye.

Portraits

2007-11-25T23:00:00.001-08:00

I love portraits that tell a story. Here, the story is the intense concentration of the young musician. The bow coming across the face, the eyes, and the deep shadow area between the neck of the instrument and the player all help keep the focus on the intensity of his concentration. The lighting setup was straightforward, and actually more simple than a lot of other portrait shoots. A single, point source was used, set a few feet higher and to the left, where the music stand would act as a scrim and keep the light from falling on most of the top surface of the violin. This draws the eye to the strings, which now stand out from the dark background.

This is one of those shots where a large pair of softboxes, which typically are used to give nice catchlights to the eyes, would have made the shot ordinary. The lack of catchlights in the eyes and the darkness of the instrument itself is what makes this shot work.

A small aperture was used to provide the needed depth of field to keep both the subject and the instrument in focus, but also to let the blackground fade quickly to black. Once the image was capured, there was very little post production, just a little tweaking the levels and some dodging of the background and the rail of the bentwood chair.

How To: Capturing Action

2007-11-22T20:51:00.000-08:00

The key to capturing a sense of action in your shot is picking the right shutter speed, and then panning the camera to follow the action. In the shot of the motocross rider, a shutter speed of 1/250 freezes ALMOST all the action. You want a little bit of motion blur somewhere, so the rider doesn't look like he's suspended on a string. 1/250 lets the spokes of the wheels blur, but keeps the rest of the image sharp. Most digital SLR's have "continuous focus" modes and a mulifunction button on the back that will let you pick which part of the image you want the autofocus to lock in on. I selected a zone on the right side of the frame, then turned the camera vertical to get the shot. With continuous autofocus tracking the rider, the camera fired off 4 shots of him in the air, and two more of the landing, all perfectly focused. Not all shots lend themselves to autofocus, however.

In the bottom shot of a motorcycle roadracer, the bikes moving away from me at over 100 mph were more than the autofocus in my Nikon 300mm f2.8 lens could handle. I picked a spot at the apex of the corner, and prefocused the camera on that spot using manual focus. When the rider came down the straightaway, I panned with him, keeping the rider centered in the frame. When he got to the apex of the corner, making sure to keep panning, I fired off a this shot at 1/500 .
A 1/500 shutter speed usually will freeze anything, but these bikes move at airplane speeds, and there's still enough motion blur from the panning to capture a sense of how fast these guys really are.

Life in the Fast Lane

2007-11-22T20:46:00.000-08:00

In preparation for the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach Celebrity race, celebrities including filmmaker George Lucas, sportscaster John Salley, actress Emily Procter, and tennis champion Martina Navratilova get in some hot laps at the Fast Lane Racing School. The "battle of the sexes" event pit them against a host of other celebrity and professional drivers. Over the years, the event has raised over 1.3 million dollars for charitable causes.

How To: Event Photography

2007-11-22T20:15:00.000-08:00

A lot of wedding and event photography is about posed shots, but spontaneous moments may erupt at any time. The shot on the top captures the flower girl's apprehension as they get ready for their grand entrance into a room full of people at the reception.
The shot on the bottom came in the middle of a bunch of posed shots. On hearing "Let's do one with a kiss," the father of the bride, standing in the background with his wife, humerously announced "We can do that!," and this shot was made just at the moment the bride turned back toward the camera again after looking to see what the commotion behind her with her mom and dad was all about.
Always be ready to caputure those unexpected moments!