Kayla wanted snow. She got it.
This session was scheduled last minute, when Kayla saw the weather forecast she reached out to me and asked if we could do some photos in the snow. My answer: Hell yes.
Kayla and Matt were dream clients. Sometimes when I'm giving direction, I tell people to do things that I KNOW make me sound crazy, but I'm hoping for a genuine reaction. These two are as genuine as they come and had full trust in me to make images. This is huge. This was a bigger deal with this session than most because I really had to trust myself. I had to trust that the images were coming out clearly and as I wanted because I absolutely could not see. The camera was too snowy to see the screen and the snow was falling too hard as I was looking into the lens. So if you're reading this for photography tips, here's a big one. Understand your settings so you know what you're getting is technically correct, but trust your eyes over your lens. Look out from behind the camera and see what's in front of you with your own eyes. Trust yourself.
Let's talk about light for a second. This day was dark to begin with, and it was almost sundown so it was even darker. I do not consider myself a natural light photographer because I will use a flash or light if I need to, but for this image I did not want to light the whole scene with a flash and I did not want to highlight those snowflakes. Enter the streetlight. This was just enough light to light up their faces without lighting the background behind them. (Light falls off to the square of it's power. Physics!)
On a side note, I did not enhance that blue, but I did bring down the saturation of the oranges so the color on the faces matched the background a little better. I'm not an over-processor, but I will do what is needed for a good image.
Stats:
ISO: 800
F/Stop: 3.5 - I could have opened this up all the way, but I wanted to underexpose a bit to show the snow in that light.
Shutter Speed: 1/100 - This is fast enough to freeze the motion of the couple but left a little blur in the snowflakes.
This image was shot at 27mm using an L-Series Canon 24-70 f2.8 on a Canon 5D Mark III.