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How To Take The Ultimate Selfie

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Time magazine just named Makati City, Philippines as The Selfie Capital of the world. And as a proud Filipino I have done my shares of selfie in the interweb.

There are tons of selfies in the internet taken using a smartphone, but those do not compare to the greate selfies I have seen was on Flickr, where people take the time to light or setup their shots and use “real cameras” to take their selfies, just to name one that I always follow is Dustin Diaz’s flickr.

There are a lot of ways to do a selfie using your dslr, so to each his own, this is a quick tutorial on how I do my selfies. [editor note: Laya’s Selphies are some of the best I’ve ever seen so you may wanna hit the jump see what he has to offer]

How To Take Magical Family Candids

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Some time ago the wonderful images of Elena Shumilova went viral. Suddenly there were dogs, rabbits and cute children everywhere. And I have to say – these images are extraordinary – we instantly begin to dream and to fell fuzzy. Something is going on with us while looking at these images. In some way, her work is magical.

After a while threads started popping up in forums, asking about the secrets and post production in Elena’s work.

The stuff I usually do is definitely different from soft warm portraiture, also I am not the photographer on the team – my job in the process has to do more with the technical planning of shots, lighting and retouching.

As a father of a two-year-old girl, owner of a DSLR and with a girlfriend who’s blogging, I had to expand my principles. So I started analyzing Elenas images and wrote some key elements in her images down. I did not want to copy her compositions,  or wanted to recreate her image ideas – which is technically not possible, because I don’t have a big dog, or rabbit around.

The idea was “applying some of her key elements on a normal family trip”.

Last weekend the family went out, the light was quite pleasing, I had my D800 and a 85mm f1.8 lens with me and so I was following my own “ basic shumilova-rules”:

Meeting People Before You Shoot Them

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So, today we’re going for another trip to the softer side of photography. Specifically we’re going to talk about portraiture, and the importance, benefits and winsomeness of meeting your clients before you shoot them, instead of just emailing a bit back and forth. If you take a couple of minutes and read through the post, and implement some of it into your workflow (if you haven’t already), I promise you it’ll make your portraits more personal, more intimate and just make for a much more pleasant experience during the actual shooting session. So, without much further ado, a couple of lists of reasons for, and ways of making the most of, meeting your clients before you shoot them. This week I’ve even tried to cut down on the fluff words (tried being the operative word here).

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