Kylie Harrington

I had the privilege of photographing a beautiful young girl named Kylie Harrington the other day in Reno, Nv. We decided to do our shoot out at Rancho San Rafael which is a beautiful park that I had my own senior photos done at. this park has such a great variety of places to work with, it is so beautiful! Click here for more photos from the shoot!

World Gone GaGa

You pretty much would have to be in a black dark hole to not know of the famous Lady Gaga. I recently have listened to quite a bit of her music. I actually became intrigued with her for her appearance on American Idol, where she was a mentor for the contestants on the show. She seems to have a fantastic personality with a "different" insight for many people. I tend to be drawn towards those unique personalities and ways of thinking. She performed an unreleased song called, "You and I," which I immediately became infatuated with! I also heard her music on the show called, Glee which is my new favorite show. Her single called, "Born this way," performed by the Glee cast was featured on an episode about self acceptance. The more I listen to her music, the more I appreciate every single thing about her. She is a fantastic artist.

Chris&Kaeli

I had the privilege of photographing a wedding this past Friday, 5/27/2011 in Reno, Nevada. Kaeli and Christopher are an amazing young couple who have a great life ahead of them. I truly felt honored to share this special time with them. I spent so much time with the both of them and their family and friends, and I enjoyed every single part of it. Kaeli is probably one of the most sweetest, kind-hearted young ladies I have ever met. Chris is just an overall great person that you know is a naturally good young man. They are truly a special couple. Good luck to you both! Love you both!!!!

For more photo's go to Kaeli&Christopher's Wedding Album

Short&Sweet

Week 9 EOC: 40 under 40

By the time I am 40, I expect to have a lot of things done! I am only 22 years old and I already have my bachelors degree and am on my way to starting my own business. So I full expect to have a lot of things done by the time I am 40.
I am hoping that by that time I have my masters degree in art and am teaching at a prestigious school. I want to be able to teach and have my own business. Basically I will be splitting my time between the business and teaching.
I also want to be married with a family. To me, success in life is not only business but the aspect of having a stable home life. To me that means being married with children and a nice home. I want to be able to take care of my family, so they will come after I have a successful business.

Week 8 EOC: Are Celebrities fair game?

Celebrities really have no privacy. However, that is why they are famous. They because that way by exploiting their life to the outside world.

I think that when celebrites go out in public they definitely have no right to privacy. However I think the same way with other people! The ordinary person risks going out in public and exploiting their personal life that way.

On the other hand, I believe that when someone is at home, they have their right to privacy. They are not trying to go out in public and make a different names for themselves. They are not trying to do their work, they are just trying to live at home. Being a celebrity means that when you leave the house, you are basically working. when you are at home, you should be able to have that privacy!

Photo Challenge

This photo was also taken with a wide angle lens. Basically I used a slow shutter speed to get this blur affect. I also used a technique called, pan-action. Basically you have a slower shutter speed but you follow your moving object with your lens and snap the picture. This allows for your subject to be in focus and everything else to have a blur affect to it. This obviously is of a carrousel. The carrousel was moving and I used the pan action technique to show that sense of motion.

Photo Challenge

This photograph was taken with a 50mm 1.8 lens, using a hot light with a soft box. Again I like to use different cropping strategies to accent different parts of the picture. Here it was just to simply focus on the eye. The liens within the picture I think are really interesting. The shape of the eyebrow creates a nice line that connects to the line of the edge of the face. The darkets part of the image is the eye which draws your attention there.

Photo Challenge

This photograph was taken in the middle of a dry lake bed. This actually was taken after I finished doing the regular photo shoot. This group of people is a very wild bunch and practically started running around when I was done with them. So I got my camera and started photographing them running around. They started reminding me of zombies because they were all dirty running around with ragged clothes on and dirty all over their body. I used a wide angle lens with all natural light. The lightness of the ground sort of made me feel like I had a clean slate to work with. The dry lake bed is a great placed to do any photo shoot.

Week 7 BOC Papparazzi

Paparazzi photography is definitely a different type of photography that you really have to have the perfect personality for. I personally don't think I could ever do that because you are constantly bugging people and disturbing their life. As for the quality of the photography, I was never really impressed with it.

The most common thing you see in this kind of photography is the "straight flash" look. Of course when you are running around trying to get pictures of famous people the last thing you will have with you is an off camera light source other than the sun.

So for my photo I decided to depict that traditional paparazzi style photo with the straight flash. I actually used the pop up flash on my camera (once of the maybe 3 times I have used it). I put the hand up in front to block the face because that is usually what people do when trying to hide from the paparazzi. When you can't run, you shield yourself.

Week 6 BOC Photo Challenge

Painting with light is something that I can find myself doing for really long periods of time and not even realize that a few hours has gone by, but it is also really tiring. This is probably because you are creating only one photograph in about thirty seconds.

What I did for this was put my camera on a tripod, of course. I wanted to make sure that there was absolutely no background whatsoever. So I knew that I needed to have a large depth of field. Of course when you do painting with light you need to have a long exposure. So I decided to put it at the maximum length, which was 30 seconds for my camera, which is without using the BULB setting. I also but my camera on the self timer, so that way there is absolutely no camera shake from my finger pressing the shutter down.

I put a filter affect inside the camera which was a blue tint. So here is the image! No post processing! Just fun!

Week 5 EOC: Copyright Process for Photographers

For photographers there are a few different ways that you can copyright you work and protect your work from infringers.

As we all know the ownership of your work starts from the point of creation. As soon as you create that peice of work it is yours, but you do need to back it up.

The easiest way to make a simple copyright is to put it into the metadata. For example, on one of my photographs I will include the text "Copyright Rachel Louise Carter 2011. " I would be able to put "Copyright Rachel Louise Photography," if that business name is registered and I have a legitimit business license. If you do not, then your name will suffice.

Another way to copyright your work, is something I really never thought of but discovered is to write about how you created the work. You can see on all of my posted images that I described how I created the photograph. Whether it is the settings I used, or how I incorporated the lighting in different settings, is does verify that I knew exactly how to create that photograph. A description for your photographs will be very helpful in identifying who created the work.

When you want to get really fancy, you can actually register your work to be copyrighted. Now, you may not want to actually copyright every single photograph you take because it does cost money. But you certainly would want to copyright those images that are your star images. If it is something you know people would want to steal because it is an amazing peice of work, then I would definitely get it copyrighted.

Week 5 BOC: Competitive Analysis Project

When I started my initial search for photography companies, I decided to search, "Las Vegas Wedding Photographers," because those would be the people who are my competitors. Of course I came across a lot of web sites that were somewhat decent but I came across one that was particularly interesting. the website is http://www.altf.com/. This wedding company is based out of Las Vegas and do some amazing wedding photography that are very hip, and stylish for this day and age. When I finally got to see the images I really fell in love with the work. However, it was really dificult to make the actual website work. There were several categories across the top of the page that I clicked on that never worked or didnt appear to be working. Unfortunately that is a total turn off for a client. The sections of the page that did work were really nice and showed a lot of the photographers work. It just needs a little bit of tweaking. They did have a contact page that did work, so they are definitely not a glamour site, but a real working busines.

The second website that I looked at was http://www.blrphoto.com/. This website had a separate wedding section and a separate portrait site which I thought was a pretty good idea. However I went straight to the wedding site, and instantly it started playing a video and I noticed a section that said "cinema," which I was confused by. Do they do photo or video? Or both? This is clearly a large company because they are based out of Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Napa Valley. They also have about 6 different sets of photographers that work in all parts of the country. They are definitely a real business because they have all sorts of information all over their site. I am not sure I really like how there are so many different categories to choose from. Seems a little confusing.

Another website I checked out was http://www.redrockstudioslv.com/. My first impression of this website is that it is really cheesy. The wedding shots are very typical and really are not anything quite special to look at. Of course a lot of them are out at red rock (not somewhere I would choose to take a bride and groom) so I already don't like the feel. However I do have to admit that the site is very straight forward, and offers a lot of great information. It's laid out really simple: The images take up the entire screen except across the bottom there is a small bar that says gallery images, and our pricing. I think it really works out well.

Overall I think there was a lot of great information and especially a lot of great ideas with this research project.

Week 5 BOC: Wedding

For the wedding photo challenge I wanted to do something a little different because all I do is shoot weddings every single day of the week. Often I feel like when you look through a wedding magazine you don't really see the typical wedding photograph that a real wedding would have. You get a more posed, model type shot. So instead of the typical wedding dress, I put together an outfit that was of course all white, but was just a dress-slip and a white lace top. I went for a more grundgy, vintage style. I decided to not use any additional lighting, just ambient light. I also used my 50mm 1.8 lens, which also sort of gave it a fuzzier look which felt more vintage as well. I cross prossessed the image as well to give it a different look. I think overall it came our pretty well.

Week 4 EOC: Writing a Contract

A client for less than 500$ what should be in contract?

To me, contracts are very intense things that should have a lot of specific important words. For something as simple as a birthday party that will only be costing around five hundred dollars, it can be much more simple than that.

The contract should definitely include what exactly the photographer will be held liable to photograph. So if he or she needs to be there for specific shots. For example, if he/she needs to be there when the birthday kid opens their gifts, or when the birthday cake is brought out. The photographer can be held liable for those shots if they are not taken properly, and the client is expecting to see them.

They also need to of course be specific on the length of time that they are supposed to be photographing the party. If they are not quite specific sure enough it will get drug out for a longer amount of time than expected. You will hear the client say, "Oh, can you stay just a little longer please? We haven't gotten to opening the gifts yet?" And if it is not stated in the contract how long you are supposed to be there, then they can ask you to stay to finish the job.

One of the most important parts to the contract will also need to be stated how much the photographer is charging for exactly what the client will be receiving. If the photographer is charging five hundred dollars, for what exactly? Is it for the photographer showing up for 2 hours? Or is for the photographer to show up for two hours, and provide the client with a CD of images? It needs to be specific.

And last but not least there needs to be a signature. It needs to be legitimate. Get your client to sign!

Week 4 BOC: Sports Photography

For my sports photography challenge I went to a gymnastics competition in San Diego. Sports photography is really tough because lots of sports don't allow you to use flash photography indoors while athletes are working out because it can be dangerous and distracting. Therefor you have to rely solely on there being enough ambiant light inside whatever room you are working in. If there is not much ambiant light and you boost your ISO all the way up you may not be able to keep your shutter speed quick enough which will result in motion blur. You generally want to keep your shutter speed above 1/250th of a second. Luckily in this facility there was quite a bit of extra ambiant light, however I could of used a little bit more. I shot at ISO 1600 which is not something I really like to do, but I had no other choice. Overall they came out pretty well, I just would of liked to have boosted up my shutter speed a little more.

EOC Week 3: Where are you now and where are you going?

I am 22 years old now, and I feel like I have a good start to my life. I am about to graduate with my bachelors degree and move on to working on my masters degree.

I have always financially supported myself and that has always been something I have taken pride in. I find it really difficult to borrow money from other people, therefore I manage on my own and if it is not something I can handle, I don't do it.

I think I am headed for big things in my future. I know my capabilities and I know that I am ready full exceed them. When I start fully working in the industry on my own I think I am going to just take off with success.

Wedding photography is something I really enjoy doing and I know that once I start doing a lot of weddings on my own time rather than for a company I will start making a ton of money. It will be a great thing to be able to do!

Week 2: EOC Sacrifices

For my photography career there are some things that I am willing to sacrifice and there are also some major things that I am not willing to sacrifice. I have went back and forth on whether or not to sacrifice my choice on where to live for my career. But I have decided that I can do my career wherever I choose to live. So no matter what, I don't feel like I will be sacrificing where I live.

I am not willing to sacrifice family though. Family is something that will always be very important to me. I will never let my career take the spot before my family. Of course I will discuss with my family any huge career opportunities before I give up something that could be amazing. However, if it something that will in a way hurt my family I will have to think twice about whether or not it is really even worth it.

My morals and values are also something one has to consider when deciding what to sacrifice. I don't see myself ever having to sacrifice my own morals for my career. Living my life the way I should and the way I want is what I am going to do.

Week 2 BOC: Crime Scene

For my crime scene photograph I used food coloring for the blood! Inititally my idea was the keep the photograph in color, however once I started taking the images the food coloring wasn't quite thick enough to be believable blood splatters.
After I turned the image into black and white, it sort of gave an old school feel to the image. I think it is a really simple image as well. I didn't want to give a whole huge scene, just a simple detail shot with an idea of what may have happened in this crime scene.
I leave it up to the viewer to imagine what exactly happened here.