5 WAYS to transform
LOUSY PORTRAIT
LOCATIONS B Y
K A T E L Y N
J A M E S
LETS BE HONEST ... WE HAVE ALL BEEN THERE. Lousy locations are a real problem in the photography world, and yet our clients are not aware in the slightest! They truly believe that a park with a plastic gazebo is the perfect setting for their portraits! They also believe that you are a magician and can make that gazebo look MAGICAL! Maybe you’re a wedding photographer and as soon as you show up on the wedding day, you realize that your bride is getting ready in a preschool classroom with fluorescent lighting and ZERO natural light! AHH!!! What do you DO?? Do you just pull out your flash and count it as a loss because once again, you aren’t going to have images to add to your portfolio that you’re proud of? I get it. I have spent almost a DECADE learning how to take hard locations and make them beautiful. HERE’S MY STORY! I started my business in college. I was 20 years old, and I didn’t have ANY money for marketing. So, I did what any young college student would do in 2008; I tried marketing via the internet. I marketed MYSELF. When I didn’t have work to share, I shared about ME. When I wasn’t booking, I blogged about what I WANTED to book. When I needed more images to share, I would CROP images that I had already blogged to make it seem like I had more images in my portfolio than I really did. Yea. That’s what I call hustling! I was desperate to MAKE IT… and I did!!!
he funny thing is…. that “cheap” version of marketing turned out to be the secret to my success. People fell in love with my story, my family, my relationship with my boyfriend, (then Fiance, now husband) Michael, and they loved being a part of the journey. So what happened? The demand GREW, my ability to make ANY location look high-end GREW, and my prices GREW. People started paying PREMIUM prices for me to photograph their wedding even though they were just getting married at a little church with a community hall reception. To this day, I’m charging $8,000-$10,000 PER WEDDING, and I’m STILL shooting in community centers and my client’s backyards. I don’t shoot JUST high-end weddings. It’s actually quite the opposite. I shoot a lot of low-end weddings, and I make them look like my clients spent 6 figures on their day. So, when I say that I understand “Lousy Locations”…. I truly do. I understand how frustrating it can be! But let my story and my experience be an encouragement to you. I’ve built my entire business on being able to turn “problem” locations into something amazing!!! And you can do it too!!!
THE SECOND STEP: In my mind, I have created almost a “formula-like” thought process that allows me to think through what needs to be hidden and what needs to be highlighted!! Here is a simple breakdown of my thoughts: 1. Find the light: Whether you take the bride or her details to the FRONT door of the building you’re in or all the way outside, you HAVE to find the light. This is a non-negotiable.
HERE’S THE FIRST STEP: We need to figure out WHY it’s lousy. Is it the background? Is it the lighting (or lack of lighting)? Is it too crowded? Is it not on-brand for you? Is it all of the above? The reason you need to figure out WHY it’s a lousy location is because that will help you FOCUS on what needs to be HIDDEN or AVOIDED and what needs to be HIGHLIGHTED! Finding the balance of what needs to be HIDDEN and HIGHLIGHTED is the key to curating beautiful work no matter WHERE you are shooting!!! I wish I had a few hours to sit down with you and explain EVERY secret to this process, but for today, I’m going to leave you with some of the MOST IMPORTANT tips to help you get started as you begin to transform your lousy locations!!!!
2. Create a clean & bright backdrop: You want to ensure that your background is simple enough to allow your subject to clearly take center stage. You want your subject to pop off of the background and that is hard to accomplish with a lot of distracting elements! 3. Decide on a color and style theme: Do you want your detail shots to be more of a darker/moodier look? What colors are you going to want highlighted and hidden throughout the shoot or wedding day?
THIRD STEP: Shoot your images to cater to your style and theme. This means that you make decisions and judgement calls on lighting and location based off of the overall look you’re going for. For example, if I was shooting at a farm but the bride wasn’t super rustic, I could photograph her details on a blush colored bridesmaid dress instead of a piece of rustic barnyard wood. A more specific example would be if I decided that I wanted to keep the details and the portraits as light and airy as possible, then I would strategically pick locations that cater to that look!
5 WAYS to transform
LOUSY PORTRAIT
LOCATIONS
1. Get creative with your CROP
2. High compression lenses
3. Shoot vertically
4. Create foregrounds to hide
distractions & add interest
5. Use bodies to block distractionsÂ
RIGHT: This image was shot in a dark carport during a rainstorm. I had Michael and the groom hold up the train of her dress to create a white background.
#1 GET CREATIVE WITH YOUR CROP This is easier said than done! There is so much that you have to think about when you’re shooting, and getting a PERFECT crop seems like it would be something that you could just worry about later, right? Right. You could totally just crop out distractions later. However, if you train yourself to crop out distractions and unwanted objects and elements in the background, you’ll find that you are more capable of making ANY location work! If you don’t train yourself to see things this certain way, you will overlook locations that will ACTUALLY work because you can’t see past the distracting element that COULD be eliminated! Here’s an example!
RIGHT: The top image shows the row of guest’s cars lining the road and the bottom images show how I cropped vertically to remove those distractions.
#2 HIGH COMPRESSION LENSES I shoot with PRIME lenses for my portraits, and this is a big part of what creates my style! The LONGER the focal length of a lens the more compression you’ll have in your image. Compression takes the background of your image and creates a WALL of beautiful bokeh! I love this look so much and it actually serves me REALLY well in lousy locations. I just recently filmed a lesson for our Lighting and Locations Course, and I was shooting in a CHURCH PARKING LOT! There were moms driving by in mini-vans picking up their children from daycare and there were “no parking” signs in the background. It was a location that MOST photographers would easily see as IMPOSSIBLE! However, because I was using a high compression lens (85mm 1.2), I was able to create something beautiful from something very plain and unattractive to the untrained eye! See below!
#3 SHOOT VERTICALLY I can’t tell you how many times I have used this trick in lousy locations! A lot of times, lousy locations can be remedied by simply shooting in a vertical orientation instead of horizontal. If you are in a GOOD LIGHTING situation but there are ugly elements in the background, just scoot close to your subject and shoot vertically to crop out the distractions. The closer you are to your subject, the more intense the fall-out of focus will be! So by shooting vertically and stepping in closer to your subjects, you’re able to eliminate the lousy part of that location! Here’s an example from a wedding that I photographed recently in DC! We only had ONE tiny piece of one street corner for ALL of their portraits! There were cars, street signs, construction cones and pedestrians everywhere! However, by shooting tighter and vertically, I was able to crop a lot of those unnecessary elements out!
#4 CREATE FOREGROUNDS TO HIDE DISTRACTIONS & ADD INTEREST The longer I shoot, the more I find myself naturally thinking to do this! Sometimes when I’m shooting and my location seems boring, I’ll backup until I find something that I can shoot THROUGH to make the image more exciting and more pleasing to the eye. This is what I did in tip #2 with the portrait of the bride in the church parking lot! I took a few steps back, and I found something that I could use as a blurry foreground. I used that to make my image more attractive and less obvious that I was in a parking lot!! Here’s another example from a recent wedding! We headed outside for portraits at sunset, and I was so disappointed to find that I had waited too late. The sun was already behind the trees and I had missed it! UGH!!! I had specifically promised my clients that they would get sunset “glow” and it was GONE!!!! We were also in a neighborhood location where there wasn’t anything super EPIC about where we were shooting. The only thing I had to work with were some blooming crepe myrtle trees!!!! Thank goodness I know how to create foregrounds because this image made my couple’s trek outside so worth it!! It’s one of my favorite images of the day, and I love that my foreground took a plain location and made it spectacular by simply removing distractions and simplifying the image in a way that points our eye to the couple!
#5 USE BODIES TO BLOCK DISTRACTIONS Have you ever given up on a location because of CARS in the background? I totally have. Or in this example have a decent location but construction scaffolding behind your clients?! But then I realized that I could very easily use my client’s BODIES to block out those distractions! It seems too simple to be true, but I use this tip all of the time, especially when I’m shooting in downtown areas!! The trick to body blocking is being able to see it ahead of time. You have to strategically think through how far away you’ll need your couple to be from the distraction to make sure that their surface area will cover it up! This is easiest with full skirt gowns and when the bride has a veil because you can hide a lot behind them!!
The top image to the right shows how bad and distracting the scaffolding was, and the bottom images shows how we used their bodies to block the distraction and still make that location work!
READY TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS? The truth is, everyone has to photograph in locations that are not ideal at some point in their business. You’re not alone. The exciting news is that the more you photograph lousy locations in an editorial and professional way, the less and less you’ll attract clients with lousy locations in the future!! You may be wondering “Well Katelyn…if that is true, why are YOU still shooting in locations that aren’t always ideal?” Great question! What I’ve learned about my own business is that some of our couples make big time sacrifices to have us at their wedding. We do shoot some higher end weddings but even at a $10,000 price point, we still have weddings at old, dark churches and community halls. These brides are the sweetest people on the planet, and they KNOW that if they put all of their budget towards us, we’ll make their wedding look like it was high-end! No matter what! This happens to us because of the way we have personally marketed for YEARS! We market more of our personality than we do a “fine art” brand and so we sometimes attract clients who would be our best friends but have a smaller budget… and I’m ok with that!!! It’s not wrong to be picky about your brand. We’re picky about WHO we work with, and some photographers are pickier about WHAT they are shooting instead. Because of the way we have built our business, we have had to become EXPERTS in creating something out of nothing! And let me just say this, my examples in this guide are nothing new to us! We shoot in locations like this all of the time! It’s kind of our specialty to make something simple and common look amazing! So I’m not bashing my couples’ choices of venues, I’m actually thankful for the chance to grow and challenge myself in situations like this!! This allows us to resonate and connect with what everyday photographers struggle with! If we were only shooting at fancy venues with high budget weddings, it would be hard to teach photographers who are just getting started or aren’t in the high end market yet!!
So whether you’re just getting started and you need to know how to make your lousy locations look AMAZING…. or you’re a more experienced photographer who is ready to hone your style no matter where your bookings take you, I hope this has been helpful!!! The exciting thing is, this is JUST THE BEGINNING of my lighting and location education!! We’re so excited that we’ve connected with you!! If you have any questions, shoot me an email: Katelyn@katelynjames. com and I’d love to try to help however I can. I may have to respond in between diaper changes and chasing a baby around the house, but I’ll get to it! I promise! I realize that you may have never heard of me and my business, and so if that’s the case, I would love to invite you to follow along with our life and business journey via Instagram! Click HERE to see behind-the-scenes and peeks into our life!! I’m excited to connect!!! Have an amazing day and happy shooting!!!, Katelyn (Michael & Evy!)