Paul Francis Photography

Over the years I have found different websites, services as well as techniques that have helped me run a more efficient service for my brides and grooms. For the next few weeks I will be posting additional information to help other photographers who may be interested in improving their photography or workflow. Feel free to ask any questions in the comment are below and I will do my best to respond!

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Over on the FAQ Page, among other things, you will find a list of different pieces of equipment I use on a wedding day. You’ll see that there are a whole range of lenses from primes to zooms to wide angles but I wanted to use this post to talk about what lenses I use for family portraits. The lens of choice given the available space is the Nikon 85mm 1.4. Not only is it sharp, but the 1.4 aperture allows in plenty of available light while blurring out the background to help eliminate distracting background. The only downside to this lens is that you need to back up a bit to fit everyone into the picture, especially for full length portraits. If you are taking pictures in a smaller room, it may only work for a waist-up picture or not at all. If the group is larger and in a smaller room I will often use my Nikon 50mm 1.4 since I can still blur out the background a little, but there is a tradeoff. It will not eliminate as much of the background since it has a wider field of view. Take a look at this graphic example for instance:

Image from http://thehdrimage.com/

The picture below is a great example showing how the two lenses compare in a real-life situation. Just a little background on the setup; Melanie and Adam were married on a day with 95+ degree weather, in NYC. Because of this we took as many portraits as we could indoors to keep everyone comfortable, which meant we had to work within the limitations of the rooms and their sizes.

The shot on the left was the first one I took using the 50mm lens because I had just taken a portrait of a larger group, but I did not like how the objects above the bookshelves distracted from the subjects. For the second photograph, shown on the right, I switched over to my 85mm and backed up as far as I could, from my memory my back was against the opposite wall. Melanie and her family did not move from their spot between pictures, but as you can see there is a big difference in what is shown in the background, and this is because the 85mm has a narrower field of view making for a much nicer portrait composition.

Over the years I have found different websites, services as well as techniques that have helped me run a more efficient service for my brides and grooms. For the next few weeks I will be posting additional information to help other photographers who may be interested in improving their photography or workflow. Feel free to ask any questions in the comment are below and I will do my best to respond!

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This is a fairly simple and quick tip but a helpful one nonetheless. One of my favorite ways to get an amazing photograph on a rainy or snowy wedding day is to backlight the couple with an off-camera flash. I use wireless triggers to fire the flash off at the same time that my camera takes the photograph and the results can be quite stunning. While most pro cameras can handle a decent amount of rain with their weather sealing, the flashes and wireless triggers need to stay dry. This is why I always keep several ziplock bags in my camera bag, they can be placed over a flash in a couple seconds and keep everything dry as can be seen in this quick setup I did:

And here is an example from Emily and Noah’s beautiful 2012 wedding of the results that can come from such a setup:

Over the years I have found different websites, services as well as techniques that have helped me run a more efficient service for my brides and grooms. For the next few weeks I will be posting additional information to help other photographers who may be interested in improving their photography or workflow. Feel free to ask any questions in the comment are below and I will do my best to respond!

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One of the free services we offer to all of our brides is a personal wedding gallery where all of their photographs can be shared with family and friends. After trying a few different services over the years, I ended up settling on Zenfolio. Several photographer friends highly recommended their services and once I had a chance to setup an account and make some comparisons I saw the clear advantages.

So not only does Zenfolio provide a place for the couples to visit and relive their own wedding day, but it also makes it easy for family and friends to order prints of themselves from the wedding if they wish. It also provides an extra backup for wedding photographs after we finish with any necessary touchups and sorting. But I don’t wait until I am finished going through the photographs to upload them, I start the night of the wedding when I arrive home. I have a separate, private section setup on Zenfolio where I upload each and every wedding photograph, no matter how late it is when I get back. This gives me a great deal of peace of mind when I go to sleep that each couple’s wedding photographs are safely backed up in an additional location.

Another feature I love about their interface is their easy and intuitive file organization system. As you can see below, I organize photographs in galleries by year and category. This makes it easy to go back and find a photograph from any wedding:

Within each couple’s gallery I have their wedding photographs separated in sub-categories to make it easier for the couple or guests to find the pictures they are looking for. The “highlights” folder holds a smaller set from the entire day for guests who may not have time to look through the entire set. Everything you see here is the backend that I see when logged into my account. The second photo below shows what guests see.

I like the clean, simple format I have setup. All of this is customizable within the Zenfolio system, I have even seen some pretty well put together websites that are entirely based on the Zenfolio platform. Not only do they give you this incredible functionality but they also provide tons of tutorials to get you started. They also provide excellent and responsive customer support. They are also not content to sit back and relax with the well developed services they already have but send out monthly updates with new features. I had previously used Smugmug and their features paled in comparison and they rarely released updates so Zenfolio has won me over and provided a solid system for my business.

If you are interested in checking Zenfolio out, feel free to head over to their site and give it a try. Zenfolio offers a free Trial account for two weeks so you can see if you like it. You can use my referral code AFC-T47-ZKQ during sign up to save 10% off your own subscription. Once you subscribe you’ll get your own code as well to pass on to others. Please know that I am not sponsored by Zenfolio in any way shape or form, I am happy to promote this excellent service since it took me a few test rounds with other services to find what I consider to be the best.