We had a brief but fun session and here are some of my favorites!

We found ourselves at the Wolf Trap in Vienna on a beautiful fall afternoon for portraits of the wedding party which I had a ball shooting, then we spent the evening enjoying a wonderful ceremony followed by what turned into one heck of a party in the barn - DJ David of mydeejay.com had the place rockin' until I really wanted to put my camera down and boogie with everyone else!

I'm telling you - between the excellent catering and decorations by Heidi of RandR Catering, the great music and gracious hosting provided by the Wolf Trap, I don't know how this wedding could have gone any better; hopefully the images that follow come close to painting the picture of this couple and their wonderful family as I saw them on that day. Tip: if you'd like to see even more images from this wedding drop by our Facebook page and while there don't forget to add yourself as a fan!

It's been nearly a year already since Jennifer and Mike were married up in West Virginia - hard to believe for me because it seems literally like just a few weeks ago. Well it was my good fortune to have the gang back once again in front of the camera recently for some family portraits, this time there was no snow and it was a beautiful, bright and sunny fall afternoon here in Virginia - picture perfect, as they say :)

The focus of my day was young Alexandria (Lexie)...better known by some on the field as the 'Snow Beast'. It was really an entertaining and hard fought match, despite Lexie's team having injuries to several of their key players coming in to the match.

Here's my account of events on the field as they unfolded before me -I hope you enjoy the show :)

Here are some sample cards just to give an idea:

Front 5x7 vertical folded card

Inside pages

back

5x7 flat front

back

5x7 folded vertical front

Inside pages

5x7 flat front

back

We also offer different sizes, such as 5x5 flat and folded or even a 5x5 trifold which is really nice!

Kids are so full of energy and so much fun to shoot! Thanks for a great time!

I really am amazed sometimes at how the smaller, more intimate wedding celebrations can pack so much emotion and verve! From a photography perspective I love the fact that I'm able to spend more time with the couple and really try to capture their individual style - with that said I decided to make this post primarily about the two beautiful, loving people who were recently married right in front of my camera; I hope you enjoy :)

I know I've said it a million times but it is still true that nothing beats the thrill of being involved in the special day of such special people - Noelle, John and their family were just a pleasure to work for and I hope that this sampling of images does justice to their wonderful event!

This tutorial is going to discuss the three methods your camera has of controlling the amount of light that is captured on it's sensor or film in order to make an exposure and to some degree what creative effect the use of each method has on your final image.

As you might have guessed by the title of this post, the three light controlling methods are: Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO.

Some may recall that I am on a mission in life to get people to learn to take photographs with their camera and stop letting their camera take pictures for them. I'll bet that most people are generally unfamiliar with the shutter, aperture and ISO (or film speed for you non-digital folks) and how they can be used to control exposure because they have locked their camera into some automatic mode and expect it to make all the decisions about these parameters for them - but how can the camera know what you're trying to accomplish when creating a photo? So again I challenge you all to put your camera on Manual mode for a while (often listed as 'M') and let's have some REAL fun!!

Now that you know the names aperture, shutter and ISO let's see if we can define those terms a bit for the uninitiated.

Aperture is a measurement of the size of the diaphragm opening in your lens through which light is allowed to pass to the sensor. Naturally, the larger the opening, the more light that hits the sensor. Thus controlling the size of the aperture allows you to increase or decrease the exposure of your image. Aperture is interesting because it is expressed in terms of f-stops such as f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, etc. f/2.8 represents a wide opening which lets in more light, while f/16 represents a small opening which lets in less light. The steps listed above are all representative of one full f-stop, though most cameras allow for additional steps in between the full stops. Increasing or decreasing one full f-stop means a doubling or halving of light, so for instance f/4.0 will allow half the light that f/2.8 does and also f/4 allows twice the light that f/5.6 does and so on.

Shutter speed (more accurately referred to as 'exposure time') is a measure of how long the shutter curtain within the camera body remains open to allow light from the lens to pass through to the sensor. Similarly to aperture, the longer the time, the more light passes through and the shorter the time, the less light. Shutter is expressed in seconds or fractions of a second such that the f-stops for shutter speed are 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, 1/1000 and so on. Again the f-stops work the same as for Aperture and ISO so that 1/1000 allows half the light that 1/500 does and 1/60 allows double the light that 1/125 does.

ISO is a measurement of the light sensitivity of your recording medium (film or digital). In the film world if you were going to be shooting in a condition where there was not a lot of light, you would need to load a high ISO film into your camera; digital cameras allow you to change the sensitivity of the sensor directly through a menu or button on the camera. In either case, higher ISO equals greater light sensitivity (more light in your photo) and lower ISO equals decreased sensitivity. Full ISO stops generally go 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200 and so on.

So these are the options you have at your disposal to control your exposure. All three work in tandem and can be used to create various effects or desired results in different situations.

You may go outside on a bright, sunny, cloudless day and set your camera shutter to 1/125 with an f/16 aperture and ISO 100 and that will usually give you the right amount of light for a nicely exposed landscape style shot. It's important to note that these values only represent how much light is being recorded by your sensor and many times, for creative reasons you may want to change the values while still keeping the same overall exposure.

Let's say you're not shooting landscapes on that bright day, but its a sporting event and you want to 'freeze' the action of the players. A shutter speed of 1/125 is not a short enough duration to freeze people running so you'd want to increase it to at least 1/500 to prevent any motion blur. Of course while the change in shutter speed may freeze the players motion its also letting in about two stops (or four times) less light; to get the exact same amount of light you'd then need to adjust your ISO or aperture to allow two stops more light. I'd change the aperture in this case and for sports I might set my camera to a shutter speed of 1/500, with an aperture f/8 and ISO 100. Keep in mind that 1/500, f/8 @ ISO 100 will allow the same exact amount of light to expose your shot as 1/125, f/16 @ ISO 100, but now you've made a creative decision to give you what you want in your final photo - something which your camera could never do for you on it's own!

Those are the basics, take some time to play around with your camera's manual settings and see what more you can learn! Some final things to keep in mind about these settings is that there are trade offs involved with most of them. Here are the major things to conside:

Aperture - when using a wide aperture (say f/2.0, f/2.8, etc.) the depth of field, or area that's in acceptable focus will become shallower. When using a small aperture (f/16 or more) you begin to run into a degradation of the image quality due to the phenomenon of diffraction.

Shutter - With very slow shutter speeds, say 30 seconds or more, there can be 'noise' present in dark areas of the image, particularly with digital cameras. There arent any image quality issues with using faster shutter speeds that I am aware of.

ISO - the higher the ISO, the more noise or graininess will be present in an image, most SLR cameras today should work reasonably well up to about ISO 800, though some of the more recent technology allows shooting usable images up to and beyond ISO 6400. All things being equal ISO 100, 200 and 400 should be where your camera stays until you simply dont have enough light gathering options from changing only shutter and aperture.

Hopefully you'll enjoy viewing their photos as much as I (with the help of my trusty assistant Tameka) enjoyed making them! Check out the cool Michael Jackson tribute from the bride if you can spot it - come to think of it this is the second MJ tribute to make it's way onto the blog this summer...

No muss no fuss, very simply just mention this blog post when booking your wedding to receive the discount.

It's amazing how much personality and expression the little ones have to show, even at the tender age of one - and I never get tired of seeing kids like Anya with those big beautiful eyes! There's also something about kids when they are new to the world of the walking that just makes them even more adorable than usual to me LOL so I was happy to catch a couple of moments where Anya was clearly showing off her walking skills.

Here are a few shots from the recent session of a beautiful young family, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

The reception at the Evergreen Country Club immediately followed the ceremony and everything was absolutely perfect! I have been very fortunate to have such great couples to work with and Sally and Joe are yet another reason that I love my job so much - thanks for having me and congratulations yet again guys! :)

If you're in the DC metro area and need to create a unique and extraordinary experience for your event, make sure you contact Sandra of Dominique's and tell her Amir sent you!

And they even got in to boogie with the wedding party before the night was through!