The snow is starting to pile up, we’re wearing long underwear on a regular basis, and our muscles are sore from a fresh season of skiing and shoveling sidewalks.

To break in the season, come eat, drink and be merry with us on Wednesday, December 14th in our steam heated, 100 year old studio! We’ll have special treats from our friends at the Keweenaw Brewing Co., 5th & Elm coffee & bakery, and the Keweenaw Co-op.

In addition to this deliciousness, we’ll be demoing camera equipment and answering questions you have about gear for your own Santa list or someone else. We’ll have an array of SLR, ILC, point & shoot, and rangefinder-style cameras for you to play with.

AND… we’re having a scratch & dent sale on an eclectic variety of 30″ prints that you can buy right off our gallery walls for your stocking. As added incentive, we’re giving half of the profit to our furry friends at the Copper Country Humane Society.

Oh yeah… we’ll have a punch bowl too! Join us…!

(Here’s the Facebook invite too)

Holy cow everyone – great questions! We picked four from the day, and here you go. Looking forward to the next ones!

Q: I’ve looked online everywhere, and followed the advice of others but still fail to make my snow look white when I shoot on my SLR. Any tips for shooting photos in the snow? All the photos I’ve seen Adam shoot, the snow is as white as it should be. HELP!

A: Its painful to see so many blue winter photos, but it is indeed tricky. There are two ways to correct this, one at the capture stage, and one at the post stage. To capture, make sure you are NOT using an auto white-balance setting (you might see this as an “AWB” in the menu.) Cameras are smart, and getting smarter, but nothing beats being able to tell the camera what you want. Exposure & color algorithms are programmed to look for neutral colors and compensate based on what it interprets the scene and the color cast to be. Bright snow – especially in the middle of the day when the color temp. of the sun is already a rather blueish 5500-6500 deg. K – will almost always turn photos blue and under-exposed, so force the white-balance setting through the menu system or controls to the actual ambient light. Depending on the time of day, a daylight, or shade setting will give you a consistent, controllable color. If your camera allows it, just change the manual white balance setting to ~6000 deg. K. OR do this really manually by shooting a reference card. But if you are lucky, your camera has a little snowman icon as a white balance setting

The other option is in post-process, and that is to simply adjust the myriad of color temperature tools in programs like Aperture, Lightroom, and iPhoto might even do this… In Aperture or Lightroom, once you set one image to the proper (or preferred) color, you can easily sync the entire set to look the same. As a rule, as minimal amount of time-consuming-post-processing the better, so the closer you get to capturing the shot in the first place, the better!

Q: I’d love to use you guys for my summer wedding in the Houghton area, but not sure I can afford you. Do you offer variable shooting prices, etc? And can I pay you in money from the UAE?

A: And we’d love to have you as a client of ours! We start with a flat rate and build up or down depending on location / distance, number of photographers, days of shooting, etc. Each client is a little bit different, and we work with everyone personally, to make sure that we can provide what they are looking for and what is within their financial means. We’ve cut travel rates if our lodging is provided, we give discounts to military, we discount for sheer flattery, etc… While we can’t accept dirham as currency, the Brockit wine rack always looks better when it’s sagging from the weight of bottles from central Italy and northern California, hint hint…

Q: Is it difficult finding work here in the Keweenaw?

A: Yes and no. There is a cyclic nature to photography during the year, so over the years we’ve balanced ourselves between commercial / adventure, wedding and portrait work. (actually, that should read “wedding / adventure”) Having a large studio also allows us to shoot at any time, and in any weather. Our workflow is thin in comparison to larger cities, but we are happy, busy, quite traveled, and have a nimble team with some pretty stellar clients. We take none of it for granted and spend a lot of our time helping non-profits, fundraising efforts, and supporting fine arts.

Q: What makes you think everyone wants to look like a rock star? What if I want to look like me? Can you handle that?
(Sorry, that’s three questions.)

A: We know that deep down, everyone wants to look like a rock star. When people look at a photo of themselves, even on the back of the camera, and they exclaim, ‘woah! that’s me?!’ we know we’ve succeeded. Its our job to flatter by bringing out your natural beauty. If you want to look like yourself, you are probably already familiar with the sound of your blingy jewelry clanking against the side of a cocktail glass at noon in a chromed-out Prevost coach… We can handle that.

(did you know that Adam is actually terrified of heights?)

Ever wanted to know intimate things about us? Why do we shoot Nikon? Do people really pay us in whiskey? Do we make everyone get in the water for their shoots? Did one of us really jump out of a helicopter? At the recommendation of one of our favorite assistants, we’re going to open ourselves up for questions on a weekly basis. We’ll narrow the focus each week for topics on gear, modeling, workflow, weddings, assistants, etc. but to start it off – today anything goes…!

Ask us whatever and on Friday morning we’ll reply to as many as we can and post the whole Q&A here. We’ll use your first name or keep you anonymous.

*** ANSWERS ***

Deal? Go for it… Just use the form below.

We rely on both: a good crew, and good tools. We’re notoriously fussy about both.

Gear requirements:

reliable
weather-proof
capable
flagship / premium level
fashionable

Crew requirements:

(see above)

We pulled these two photos this morning to show how it all works together, and to show off Kora and Anabelle hard at work on a double shoot. While its rare to have two little ones on a pro shoot, its not unusual, and they’re not just playing around – they test lights, haul gear, charge batteries, make clients laugh & smile, clean backgrounds, sweep floors, and are a riot to have around. Oh – a couple organic cookies from the Co-op usually suffices as payment too….

The gear they’re holding isn’t just for looks either. The softbox is a double-diffused (for this shoot) Photoflex Octodome NXT mounted to a Photoflex LiteReach. This combo is complex, but so so so versatile and able to be collapsed, folded up, and fit neatly inside the main Crumpler bag & stuffed under the seat of any regional jet. The strobe is a Nikon SB900 or SB800 (this looks like the more compact 800…) which is mounted to one of PocketWizard’s brand new FlexTT5 transceivers, and is being triggered by a combination of MiniTT1 transmitter / AC3 zone controller. Phew…! The setup allows us to sync the strobes above 1/250 (1/1250 in this shot!) and gives some beautiful, diffused light in any location. As long as we’ve got someone to haul it & hold it that is…

The beautiful Drake girls were lucky enough recently to score a raffled prize of a photo session with us, and WE were lucky enough to have their name drawn! It was also a good chance to show off what we excel at: natural photos of beautiful people in locations that are special to them. When the weather is nice, we like to work outdoors (though we have a reputation for enjoying torturing models in the most uncomfortable types of weather) so we happily headed out to the Drake farm to shoot in trees, fields, on rock piles, etc.

There is not one of these girls that isn’t stunning, their mother included… We did some grouped shots and then used each scene for some portraits. While each set of shots have about the same level of final exposure, they’ve got remarkably different settings. The trees were thick and green in the woods which made a dark canopy, and the fields had full sun. It’s a misconception that photogs like bright sunlight actually… Sun = shadows = tricky… So the shots in the woods were at about 1/60th of a second at a moderate ISO (1600) while the field shots were stopped down a bit to f/4 (yes, we consider this ‘very’ stopped down for our preferences) and at 1/1000 and a lower ISO. Shots were batch-processed for color and exported.

We’ve been gritting our teeth as we look at heavily Photoshopped images lately. We’re not purists (we’re shooting digital afterall!) but we take a very hands-off approach to processed images. This is fodder for a longer post, and a topic in our classes (one is coming up in Dec) but we kinda pride ourselves on shooting the final shot when we hit the shutter release. Are you paying us to shoot or are you paying us to edit!? The Drake girls are no exception. Beauty needs no manipulation.

And again… W O W. So much beauty, and so much fun. We were thrilled to work with Megan and Jon – laid back, charming, and totally in love. In the winter, we shot this gorgeous couple in our studio and a bit outdoors for their engagement shots, then we drove up to Lake Linden in the early summer to work with Megan on a bridal shoot in the historic Laurium Manor Inn. A very special thank you to the owners of this amazing place for always letting us come up and shoot on their property. Have you been there?! It is truly spectacular. Massive, ornate, and completely intact. It operates as a B&B now, and has everything from the original icebox (love!) to the elephant skin wallpaper in the dining room. Crazy and amazing. Megan was a natural and needed little coaching from us on being comfortable in front of the camera.

For their wedding, the Brockit crew took an early morning, caffeine-assisted drive south to an undisclosed location which was the site of a vintage resort now turned private, family estate – complete with lake, beautiful dock, and trails over the river and through the woods. BUT we did not know this. We did makeup and prep at an off-site house about 12 miles away, and although we are not backyard photographers, we were anticipating perhaps a large backyard wedding. When we pulled up to sprawling property, massive tents, and parking for tour buses (kinda) we were happy to have the 2-way radios that are a mandatory part of the gear. Plus, its really fun to say things like: “photog 1 to asst. um… what’s your 20, over” “photog 1, I’m charging batteries in the garage, over.” “copy that, we’re needing the groom to get his butt to the dock please” “roger roger, one groom on the way, over and out.”

Megan and Jon had a gorgeous ceremony, backlit by sunlight off the lake, and between the sunflowers, the purple dresses, and a striking couple, we pretty much just pointed the cameras in random directions and opened the shutter curtains. The time between ceremony and reception is always our favorite, and we pulled the stops out on this one. Lens flare through the trees, ankle deep in a slippery waterfall, and lots of kissing and laughing. We can’t believe nobody slipped and headed downstream though… and as if to test our luck, we convinced (this wasn’t hard) the bride and groom to hop in a rowboat while we chased them in a canoe. Kudos to photog asst. and shooter Louisa who helped steer the canoe and document this beautiful ridiculousness.

Their reception was highlighted by an array of sweet-smelling cakes (holy awesome work by Gopher’s Cafe in Marquette) an engaging DJ, and food catered by our friends at the Library up in Houghton. Oh – least we forget the tour-bus. Yes – this was to run people from a couple locations during the night but this plan was slightly delayed when the driver high-centered the 45 foot bus in the sandy driveway. This was totally photogenic and even more amusing when a tractor was used to pull it out! We’ll share the photos once we’re sure the statue of limitations has passed.

We finished off the night with some star-sky night shots of Megan and Jon on the dock, which is the topic for an earlier blog post and covers some fun technical and artistic details of how we worked to get this shot.

So, yes. W O W. And if all this wasn’t enough, Louisa was further inspired and documented her own thoughts when she got home. Its truly inspiring, and you’ll have to wait for it…

Megan and Jon – best to you both.