Up to this point, we have featured techniques and ideas on how to add a flavor to the ordinary wedding photograph. Today, we are going to leave the wedding scene and photograph a bride and groom. This week’s post comes from a fantastic duo from Calgary Canada. My friends Dave & Quin Cheung have been delivering amazing imagery setting the bar for photographers around the world. Take a look at their approach to making connections with clients. I'm willing to bet if you took this same inspiration to every wedding / photo session, you will walk away with some imagery that will touch the SOULS of your subjects! Dave writes: Our goal when shooting people is always to make the images them. This recent shoot was unique in that the groom-to-be is a pilot and wanted to somehow capture his passion for planes in their engagement session. We decided to try to capture some shots under the airplane landing path at our local international airport. Quin and I are always up for a challenge and what a challenge it turned out to be. A couple of issues which had to be overcome included (a) choosing our position and focal lengths to balance the size of our couple and airplanes overhead. Too far away from the planes shooting wide would make the airplanes look puny. Choosing a long lens to compress the couple and plane could limit our compositional choices. (b) The speed of the incoming airplanes. After witnessing the first few planes come in, we realized it would be difficult to compose the plane in the desired position while simultaneously ensuring the couple was doing their thang at the exact moment the plane was above them. Shooting with SLR also meant we were blind as to when the planes would appear in our viewfinder, leaving only fractions of a second to frame, compose and get the shot. (c) Bright noon sun. High contrast and top-down light helped our decision to add some light to the scene to balance our couple, sky and plane. Here one of my favorite images from the shoot which came out exactly as I had envisioned.

And here how we did it: I knew I wanted to shoot the couple kissing above me with the plane and sun overhead, so I put a 10-22mm on my 20D and moved ourselves to a spot directly under the landing path as close to the landing strip as allowed. Knowing the path of the incoming planes and location of the sun, we put the couple where we wanted then and setup a Quantum QFlash hard-left of them. To deepen the blue of the sky, a CTO gel was added and the QFlash was fired at full power. I also knew I wanted to shoot my 10-22mm lens at f18 or higher to add its characteristic star-like lens-flare only seen when stopped down. My final exposure was 1/200 and f18 which gave the balance of deep sky and balanced flash I was looking for. After the planning, all we had to do was wait for a plane and pray. :) When we saw a plane approaching from afar, we all took our positions and I had Quin countdown the second to when the plane would be directly above us while I framed the shot through my viewfinder. Just before it arrived, I asked the couple to kiss and fired off several shots. With careful planning and help from the Big Guy in the Sky, I captured the image shown above. Elements including the composition, light and just before the kiss moment captured in this frame makes it my favorite from the take.

Be blessed. d Dave Cheung DQ Studios . Fine Art Photography www.dqstudios.com WOW, Dave...i love the concept of shooting images "of" them...very inspiring! Your passion definitely shows in your work. I am a firm believer of following photographers whose passion has put them at the top of the game. DQ studios is for SURE, at the tip top! Dave & Quin are teaching a killer workshop where they have teamed up with one of the best wedding photojournalists on the planet, Huy Nguyen, 2005 WPJA POY winner. Huy, Dave, and Quin's workshop is dedicated to developing your artistic flavor¦ I personally attended one of Huy workshops in 2004 and it changed my world. Their Yin Yang workshop is looking pretty tasty! Cheers! matt