This engagement portrait session was an absolute joy.  I flew into Atlanta, Georgia and met Meghan and Charles at their family Lake House outside the city at Lake Lanier.  It was mid-January, and it was a fairly cold day and it only got colder.  So we spent a few hours taking advantage of the chilly weather (which looked chilly as well).  But you will see that the chill in the air influenced the way the photographs look and event the treatment of the images.  I did not attempt to “warm them up” in fact they are fairly cool, if not neutral.  We even got a little fog for some of the shots rolling in over the trees on the other side of the lake.

Meghan asked specifically that we photograph with a 1990’s Vanity Fair / GQ style.  So the clothing, the grain, the posing, the muted color, the clean light, etc… all of it was my effort to give a bit of that look to the photoshoot.

I was shooting the engagement portrait with a new Canon EOSR mirrorless camera, which was a great opportunity to really put that camera through its paces.  It is a wonderful little camera, but I look forward to a more professional version of the R series cameras to come out from Canon, hopefully soon.  It is still much easier to shoot with a Canon 5D Mark IV or some other pro body camera.  That being said, the EOSR will be a nice addition to the bag with its small, lightweight body and completely silent shutter (great for the wedding itself) which will be held in a small church in the Bahamas this summer.

We were using the new Profoto B10 off camera flash (two of them) and they are magnificent.  All the power we needed, never ran out of batteries, never missed a shot and always created beautiful light.  One of our lights had a softbox and the other was sporting the OCF Magnum Reflector.  That was the light set up most of the time (especially when we were outside).  It was a bit windy, so the softbox was a challenge, but a little weight on the stand in the form of a log took care of that problem.

Getting to know Meghan and Charles at the lake house and on their engagement portrait shoot was a real joy.  And aside from the photos, that is the major value of doing an engagement shoot of some kind: getting to know the clients, and the clients getting to know the photographer.  It’s like a little test run and an opportunity for a little model training.  Meghan and Charles thought they could use some modeling lessons.  I think they were great right from the start.  But, we talked through some basic rules for being a subject on a photoshoot.  I won’t go through them here, but I will give you one very important rule:

Rule 1: If you’re uncomfortable, you are going to look uncomfortable!  Get comfortable.

Enjoy the photos from the session.