My First Engagement Photo Shoot

Jackie and John in Foliage – Cedar Memorial, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

One of my friends at work asked me to shoot some pictures for her (that looked nice) so her mom could put an engagment announcement in their hometown paper. I got all excited and went for the big production of lights and all that, but she really just wanted a couple of nice shots. Needless to say, she is happy we decided to go big.

I pulled together my crew of Erica and Eric to go help out. Erica was there to help pose since she’s a girl and is better at that then Eric and I who totally though technical stuff most of the shoot. She also rocked with her D80 and took over 200 shots in RAW that I’ve been helping her convert and develop into awesome jpgs. I picked Eric since he’s a good shooter and has an amazing portfolio. My plan was to shoot Erica’s D80 off and on, but I didn’t feel it and rocked out the Portra 160VC that I got from the Kodak Expired Film Giveaway and I’m glad I shot film. I really like the Portra 160VC, the saturation is nice in the scans I got and I’m pretty sure my buddy David at Target turned off the auto-correction.

We headed over to Cedar Memorial which happens to be a pretty large and well known cemetary in the area; it’s also really nice and has some good locations for photo shoots assuming you can hide the flowers at the headstones. I got a couple of nice shots that weren’t acceptable because you can see rows of flowers in the background.

The only bad part about the day was the realization that I put my Vivtar 75-205mm f/3.8 lens back together incorrectly when I cleaned fungus off the back of the first element. It doesn’t focus at infinity anymore. I’m tempted to try and fix it, but it took me a good half hour to get the focus barrel on the focus threads. My Vivitar 285hv flash also broke when the wind caught my brollie and light stand causing it to fall over. In order to work better with my Cactus radio triggers (which had no issues at all yesterday) I bought a hotshoe to pc cord adapter that I mounted on the bottom of the flash; that hotshoe adapter doesn’t fit the bracket on the light stand all that well and usually falls out if it’s tilted, somehow it didn’t this time and the flash’s hotshoe tore itself apart. It seems that I can replace that part of the flash so not all is lost; but I realized that mono lights are probably a better thing since I shoot lots of film and having modelling lights would be a plus. Not to mention the camera fails with the half dark frames, they popped up, but happily on frames that weren’t that great, so I’m not too mad about that.

I think the day was a huge success despite my gear failures. From the shots I’ve seen so far between the three of us, the happy couple is going to get some good quality images.