How to take a great photo: Put your mouse over the image and right click {New Braunfels Photography}

I'm not being serious in that title. That's NOT the proper way to take a good image. Yet some "fauxtographers" seem to think that's all it takes to get a great portfolio to sell to clients. One of my images (that I know of) showed up on the site of another photographer recently. Take a look at it. If you've followed my work for a few years you'll recognize this image that I took of Morgan about two years ago. Here's a link to the full gallery.

Do you see why I'm feeling a little bit violated here?

Today was my day off. I haven't had a Saturday off in forever and with the busy fall wedding season getting started, I knew that I wouldn't have another Saturday off until mid November. So I made a cheesy little excursion to Wonder World in San Marcos to explore the caves and pet some deer. It was totally spontaneous and fun for the whole family.

On the way home I pulled out my iPhone to check my e-mail. There was a strange message from someone I didn't know telling me that at least one of my images was being used illegally and there was a link to the site. The e-mail came from another photographer. She used a web image search to find me to inform me that this other photographer was claiming my work as his own. I saw the image and gasped. I was floored. I'd heard of this happening to others but I never thought it would happen to me.

It turns out this photographer who'd contacted me had been researching these images all day. She'd found many of the images were taken by others. She found stock images from iStock, and images from other portrait and wedding photographers from around the world. She contacted each of them when she was able to track their origin. I was the first to respond, she tells me.

I'm curious as to where this will go. It appears that they've taken down all their galleries now.

No doubt they are now aware of how serious the situation is.

Now I'd like to get on my soapbox and preach a little to the choir. I know you all are hard working people. You train for your jobs. You spend countless hours learning your skill. You spend a whole heck of a lot of money on learning your career. There are others out there who don't want to take the same time and spend the same money you spent. They'd rather take the work you've done and claim it as their own.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it's easy to snag the work of others, but also thanks to the internet, you will get caught.

Update: It appears that my image was used in advertising for them as well. Take a look at the screen shot my new friend captured on The Knot.

I wonder how many unsuspecting brides have hired these people thinking they are responsible for this image and all the other images you see below my image. If you look them up on the Knot now, you'll see they've removed all the images except one. So that's all they have? Shame on them!

Lisa On Location Photography

And now for something completely different {New Braunfels photographer}

Way back when, 20 years or so now, Lisa got her start in photojournalism photographing sports. She stalked the sidelines of Texas A&M football games, and later covered high school sports for various newspapers. She got pretty good at it. Keep in mind this was back in the days of film cameras, 36 shots to a roll, most of which she developed herself in the dark room. Pretty challenging stuff, even though many photographers made their living at it. I (being Jayme, Lisa's long-suffering sidekick) came to photography much later in life, after the digital revolution, and never had an opportunity to shoot sports. I played around with it a few years back, when I first got into photography, and while digital makes it a lot easier to start out, it's still an incredibly challenging art. The action moves so fast, you have to psyche yourself to shoot what's about to happen, and anticipate accordingly. If you wait until you see something interesting, you're going to miss it.

The Texas State University Bobcats hosted the Texas Tech Red Raiders in the newly-expanded Bobcat Stadium Saturday, in their first home game as a Division I-FBS team (that's Division I-A for old-school folks like me). Since I had to be on hand to deal with media if anything newsworthy happened off the field (the crowd of 30,000-plus being by far the largest ever to descend upon San Marcos) I decided to use the opportunity to practice my sports photography skills. Specifically, I saw it as an opportunity to try out my Canon FD 500mm f/8 reflex lens in the field. Lisa got me that old Canon mirror lens last Christmas, and I converted it to work on modern Canon cameras. The lens is manual-focus only, though, so even with some electronic enhancements, I expected it to be quite the challenge to shoot with.

You know what? I was right. A 500mm manual focus lens is very difficult to shoot action with. The fact that professional sports photographers 30 years ago used this kind of lens regularly is simply amazing to me. I suppose it's just a matter of practice, practice, practice until focusing become second nature, but still. Fortunately for me, digital is a great equalizer, and I was able to see what worked and what didn't immediately and adjust on the fly. I got several decent keepers, and threw away far, far more with missed focus and bad framing.

I can also assure you that a 500mm lens has a long reach. Which is great when you're shooting something far away, but once the action moves closer, it's challenging to make everything fit within the frame. Most of the images I'm sharing here were taken with the mirror lens, but the first, seventh and eighth were taken with traditional telephoto zooms. One way to identify photos taken with a mirror lens is to look for out-of-focus highlights that look like donuts. That's always a tell-tale sign.

It's fun to get out and try something outside of my comfort zone. I'm not anywhere close to making the cover of Sports Illustrated, but with enough practice I could get there. I could see my improvement from the start of the first quarter to the final seconds, and the journey is half the fun, right?

Lisa On Location Photography

Jonny and Krystle are Getting Hitched {New Braunfels wedding photography}

I see weddings almost every weekend and those are some of the most romantic moments in the lives of the happy couple. I am so honored to be a part of those moments. But every now and then I get to share in another special moment that's almost as exciting.

The proposal.

Jonny first contacted me while I was in the Dominican Republic for that destination wedding. His needs were a little more complex than my normal session. You see Jonny is from Houston, not New Braunfels, and he hasn't been here for years. So he didn't know where to pull all this off and needed my help. His plan was to take Krystle for a walk along a river after a romantic dinner during their vacation to New Braunfels, and somehow have her fish with a pole that had a ring tied to the end of the string. She needed to reel it in and find the ring, at which point he would drop to one knee and propose. Only she doesn't like to fish, and she really doesn't like to pose for photos for strangers.

That's where me and my sneaky assistant, Calista, had to get to work. I told him about a lovely romantic restaurant, the Huisache, that's just a few blocks away from the perfect quiet spot along the Comal River. We arranged the time when the sun would be at a perfect spot behind the trees. After he took her to dinner he'd suggest a walk along the river and Calista, sneaky little actress that she is, would approach them and beg them to allow her mom to photograph them fishing because she needed photos of people fishing for a science project she was working on. I would have a pole set up in a quiet picturesque part of the river. The pole would have a piece of costume jewelry ring tied to the end of it. He'd have the real ring in his pocket.

There was another little catch. We'd never met Jonny or Krystle and had just a some photographs on Facebook to go on in picking them out of the crowd of river goers along the river that evening.

Calista's got an eagle eye, however, and spotted them right away. She nailed her lines. But Krystle looked suspicious. "What kind of science project?" she asked her. Calista stuttered, "uh, about fish?" That's when I jumped in and asked her to reel that fish in. She didn't know how to fish, she told me, so Jonny showed her how. She reeled it in, saw the ring, Jonny dropped to his knee and swept her off her feet. She said yes.

They kissed, they hugged, they cuddled, they couldn't wait to update their Facebook relationship status. But they had to wait because I wasn't done with them yet. We stepped right into a little engagement session and fortunately, Krystle looked beautiful. "Aren't you glad I made you brush your hair before we got here," Jonny asked her. She was grateful and now it made sense that he'd be concerned about it when he wasn't usually.

Congratulations Jonny and Krystle. And thanks for calling me Jonny. It was fun to set up and fun to photograph. You two are so great together!

Lisa On Location Photography