The Blog Has MOVED!

The Blog Has MOVED!

Alright, well after much hard work by my wonderful husband Thomas our blog has been converted to wordpress and moved. We've moved it to our server at www.whitneylewisphotography.com/blog. Be sure and update your bookmarks, and if you haven't bookmarked my blog- here's your chance! :)

Let your friends know that any further updates will be found at www.whitneylewisphotography.com/blog. See you there!

Look at me! Look at me!

Look at me! Look at me!

I love taking pictures of children. I love their smiles, adorable outfits, and the amazing amount of vitality and life that shows up in their pictures. Taking pictures of children is one of the rewarding things that I do as a photographer. It is also one of the most difficult. The sheer amount of energy that little kids possess combined with all the fascinating distractions around them make it difficult for them to look at the camera when they are supposed to, especially in a posed setting. The more children in the shot, the more difficult it can be to get them all looking the right direction.



I love having parents around, as they often know what to say or do to make their children smile and look around. However, here is an important tip to make your children's pictures come out well-

If we are having trouble getting everyone to look in the right direction, before you starting waving your arms, making funny noises, and saying "look at the camera! look at the camera!" consider where YOU are standing. 99% of the time they are going to be looking at YOU, so in order to make sure they are looking in the camera's direction, you want to be standing directly BEHIND me. Otherwise they may smile, laugh, and open their eyes nice and wide, but the majority of the time they are going to look at the source of all this entertaining distraction, instead of at the boring camera lens pointed in their direction.

Thus, remember the rule- unless you are standing DIRECTLY BEHIND the photographer, it might be best to just let me be the entertaining distraction. Parents often are the best people to bring out an awesome smile, but unless you're standing in the right place, it doesn't quite work. If it's not practical to be directly behind me due to space constraints, let me do all the work. I am more than happy to make funny faces, weird noises, jump up and down, and generally make a complete fool of myself in order to get everyone to look at me. It's in the job description. The problem comes when I am just one of a crowd of people jumping up and down making funny noises. :)

Of course, this only applies if we're looking for shots where they ARE looking directly at the camera... sometimes it's great when they are not.

Why Wedding Photography is So Expensive

Why Wedding Photography is So Expensive

I often have a bride and groom come to me grateful for my relatively low prices, but still amazed at how high photographers prices are! There are several reasons for it, one being the nature of weddings (can't be reshot or rescheduled, so you'd better have a dependable and talented photographer!)


I found this post and thought it might be interesting for some of you to read. Why is wedding photography so expensive? I'll summarize:

1. Time. The photographer's day does not end when the wedding is over. I usually spend 3 hours editing for every hour spent shooting.

2. Equipment. I currently have three digital slrs (one for backup, one for studio), two flashes, 3 lenses, a reflector, a tripod, and about 45gb in memory cards for weddings. I also have a car as weddings require travel (and cars require gas). I have two computers and some not-so-cheap editing software. For studio shoots, I pay for an extra room, props, light stands, backgrounds, and the above mentioned equipment. Reality hit really hard when I realized I had $7k worth of equipment in my bag at a wedding... it's a huge financial investment!!


3. Website and Advertising. To keep my business going, I need a high-quality hosting service and website. I also pay for business cards and magnets.

4. Other costs: DVDs and mailing costs, cell phone usage to talk to clients, TONS of hard drive space to store your photos... Wedding albums and reception display frames are much more expensive than I would have expected also (included in some packages).

5. Education. While I didn't study photography in college (my major is actually music!), I have invested a lot of time for online photography learning, free assistance to other photographers, free photoshoots for practice of new techniques, about 40 hours of workshops and classes, and I plan to continue to take classes as there is always more to learn.