St. Louis Wedding Photographer

MarySue and Jordan were married on Folly Beach in South Carolina. Below are a few shots from the wedding.

I’m finally catching up on posting recent photos…. Below are a portion of the shots from MarySue and Jordan Christ’s set:

In my attempts to keep my site current, I’ll be updating a bunch of galleries soon. I also wanted to take a moment to welcome the newest St. Louis event planning company – Dishy Events! Dishy was by a good friend and former client (wedding photo gallery to be added soon!), Dishy is poised to make a big impression on the event scene here in St. Louis. Dishy Events offers full-service event planning, day-of coordination and various a la carte services. Focusing on a down-to-earth yet professional approach to planning, Ashley Rath is sure to impress any client and the industry with her ability to organize an event down to the minute!

Here’s to wishing Dishy Events much luck on their new endeavors! I look forward to working with you in the future! If you’re looking for a great event planner, check out the Dishy Events web site at http://dishyevents.com for more details.

I’ve been absolutely buried for the last 4 months and have been slacking on updates to my site. I’ll be adding new galleries from weddings and engagement shoots from summer and fall 2009. I’ll hopefully have these up on the site within one week….

Catherine and Jared were married at the Bothwell Chapel on the McKendree University campus in Lebanon, Illinois.

View the full gallery.

I have accumulated a pretty big stockpile of Nikon and Lowepro equipment over the last few years and after having time to use all of it thoroughly, I thought it was time for a review that compares similar pieces of equipment and offers my personal thoughts on each piece.

Nikon DSLR Bodies (in the order that I purchased them):

• D70s (Purchased in 2004 after my first trip to Hawaii) – this was my first DSLR and it is still a great camera. I upgraded to the D2x for better performance and increased resolution.
• Nikon D2x (Purchased in 2006 after my second trip to Hawaii) – The D2x is a great camera that I still use quite a bit. The integrated vertical grip is a great feature even though the MB-D10 works on both of my newer bodies. The other great feature is the extra LCD at the bottom of the grip that displays ISO and WB. I find myself missing that feature when using my other bodies. I upgraded from the D2x to the D300 when the D300 was first released in hopes of gaining better hi iso performance.
• D300 (Purchased in 2007) – The D300 has much more accurate WB compared to the D2x. Overall, I feel that ever feature works better than the D2x except the autofocus. The autofocus motor should be able to perform at least as well as the D2x but in low light, it doesn’t lock focus anywhere near as fast as the D2x in the same situation. The D300 does gain about two stops over the D2x but it still does not offer quite the performance I was looking for and this resulted in my upgrade to the D700. Also, the shudder doesn’t sound quite as solid in the D300 as the D2x. The live view feature on the D300 does come in handy in certain occasions.
• D700 (Purchased in 2009) – The D700 outperforms all three of my previous cameras in every category. The autofocus actually feels like is it upgraded from the D2x which the D300 didn’t. The hi-ISO performance is much better than the D300. I don’t have any doubts about it where I did have to worry about the D300 in certain situations. The white balance is spot on and the shudder is very solid. The new live view is also a great new feature that I like.

DSLR Lenses:

• Nikon 70-200mm F/2.8G AF-S IF-ED – This is a great lens that performs very well. The lens is very sharp and provides very soft backgrounds. I have no complaints except that on the D700 I see a bit of vignetting.
• Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G AF-S ED – This lens is brand new and I’m still breaking it in but from my initial impressions, this lens is awesome. For indoor work, it gives the perfect focal range and I find myself no longer needing to change lenses or use 2 bodies to get a little more reach – unlike the 17-55mm.
• Nikon 17-55mm F/2.8G AF-S DX IF-ED – I like the 17-55mm lens but occasionally when shooting on the wide end, I get annoyed by the focal distortion. The lens is very sharp.
• Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di LD AF – I bought this lens as a backup and for the price, it seems to work pretty well…
• Nikon 85mm F/1.8 AF – for the price, you can’t go wrong. This lens works well for portraits.
• Nikon 60mm F/2.8D Micro AF-S – this is the newer version of the 60mm Micro lens and it works very well. I haven’t had an opportunity to shoot plants or insects/animals outdoors with it but from what I’ve seen out of it so far, it is awesome.
• Nikon 50mm F/1.8 AF – for the price, like the 85mm f/1.8, you can’t go wrong. This lens works well for portraits.
• Nikon 28mm F/2.8D AF – I also purchased this lens last month as a solid prime to use on the D700 for landscapes. I plan really breaking it out and doing some solid testing in the next few weeks as the weather improves.

Nikon Speedlights:

• SB-900 – the SB-900 is an awesome flash – it is definitely larger than the SB-800. It features much better controls and the switch allows you to power it on and select the modes. The only problem with the SB-900 is the overheating sensor. The flash totally shuts down when it heats up too much. This doesn’t quite work well when you are in the middle of a wedding and it decides it is too hot.
• 2x SB-800 – The SB-800 is a very reliable and powerful flash. The advantage it has over the SB-900 is that it doesn’t shut down when it heats up. I have two SB-800 flashes because they work so well.
• SB-600 – the SB-600 is a great backup or starter flash. I only use it as a backup when I don’t want to take the time to change the batteries in one of my other flashes. It works fine but the controls are very cumbersome and nowhere near as user friendly as the SB-800 or SB-900.
• SU-800 – The SU-800 allows you to trigger the rest of the Nikon speedlight line wirelessly as long as you have line of sight. The SU-800 performs very well indoors and even outdoors most of the time. I use this trigger quite frequently now and it allows you to really put your flashes to use. I have used the SU-800 with all four of my speedlights for portraits and large outdoor group shots. This is a must have for anyone that is serious.

Nikon Accessories

• MB-D10 – The MB-D10 is the vertical accessory grip for the D700 and D300. The grip is very solid and allows you to use an EN-EL3e or d2x/d3 battery for extra power. The grip also allows you to use 8 AA batteries and increases the FPS to 8. I have 2 MB-D10 grips because I love having the ability to shoot with the camera horizontally or vertically with ease. This makes all my advanced bodies feel much more like the D2x.

The Lowepro reviews will be added to this post shortly!

The Kappa Sigma Tau sorority of McKendree University held their 2009 formal at The Falls banquet hall in Columbia, IL.

View the full gallery.

Louis and Chandra Rigo were married on March 7, 2009. Below are a few shots from their wedding. The wedding ceremony was held at the Jewel Box in Forest Park, St. Louis.
[nggallery id=5]

I was in Forest Park last month shooting at a wedding when a small group saw me hauling my equipment around and jokingly asked me take a few photos of them. As I always do when asked, I did shoot a few candids of them.
[nggallery id=6]

Below are some of the photos I captured yesterday on St. Maarten. About half the ones I’m showing are HDR (high dynamic range).

I’m proud to say that I bought a Nikon D700 this week. I’ve been wanting better performance in low light and I think the D700 is going to make me pretty happy. I used it extensively at a wedding yesterday and so far, I’m quite impressed at a lot of the results. I noticed that it does a much better job of locking focus than my D300. I think the speed of the autofocus motor is about on par with my D2x. Once I get some time to process the photos from the wedding, I’ll post them with a more thorough analysis.

I recently took a one day road trip about a hundred fifty miles and during the trip, I noticed that my 11 month old 15″ Macbook Pro was only holding a charge for about an hour twenty minutes. This didn’t seem normal so I checked the battery information under the System Profiler (click the Apple icon in the top right corner -> about this Mac -> More Info -> Power. This shows all the information about the battery. Mine had 87 cycles and the condition said Check Battery.

I did a Google search and found out that there are known issues with some of the batteries in this model. I scheduled a time slot for the Genius Bar at the closest Apple Store and took it in. I explained to the tech what happened and I told him I did upgrade the firmware (an update addressed the issue on some models) and that I calibrated the battery recently. He looked at it and without hesitation grabbed a new battery and installed it for me. He sent the old one off to Apple and I was on my way with a brand new battery. Total time spent in the Apple store was less than ten minutes.

I really can’t rave much more for how awesome Apple’s support is. I really don’t recommend any other brand to anyone mainly because of the computers’ stability and service offered by Apple. I had a different issue with my 13.3″ Macbook where the handrest cracked. Apple replaced the whole keyboard, trackpad, and handrest – all in an hour while I ate dinner.

If you have issues with your Macbook Pro battery, first calibrate the battery and make sure your firmware is up to date. The thread (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490) explains how to calibrate your battery. Also read Apple’s tips for maximizing your battery life.

If you checked the battery info and find the condition saying Check Battery, check out these threads:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1556806&tstart=1
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1556806&tstart=1
http://www.apple.com/support/macbook_macbookpro/batteryupdate/
http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro/batteryexchange/

I recently shot some photos at the surprise birthday party for my close friend’s mother, Virginia Lee. The photos are up on my gallery.

There are many things that photographers do when building their website or contracting someone to build it for them.

One of the most common mistakes with the photography market is Flash. Probably more than 50% of photography sites are built using flash and most photographers/studio owners don’t know the implications of sites that are built using only Flash. Read one of my previous articles to learn about ways to make your Flash site more search engine friendly.

Besides building a site entirely in Flash, embedding important content like text in Flash or images can hinder search engines’ ability to read that content. By writing your important content in HTML, it makes it easier for the engines to read and index it.

One other common problem with photography sites is the lack of content. Some photographers build sites with almost only images (galleries) and no relevant content. Providing useful content about your services, studio/location, and history helps inform visitors and engines.

When you are developing content it is important to remember that search engines want to not only find content that is relevant and fresh but that content needs to be original. Copying content from other sites can cause search engines to filter out those pages on your site from their ranking pages. Along the same lines, when another site copies your content, it can lead to problems, especially if the engines think the other site has more authority or if the engines think they deserve credit for that content. You can check to see if your content appears on other sites by querying a sentence or part of a sentence in Google or Yahoo. You can also use Copyscape – a tool to check for duplicate content. You just enter a URL from a page on your site and it will search and return sites that duplicate portions of that content.

One of the last problems common to photography sites is the use of images for navigation that don’t use alt or title tags. There are a few ways to make image based navigation more search engine friendly. Using an alt tag is helpful but if you are just using a fancy font, you could check out Flir – this is a great image replacement tool that is very flexible. It displays your text in a fancy font but delivers text versions of that image to the search engines. If you don’t want to use either of these options, another good suggestion is to put text based navigation in your footer. This will provide the engines with another set of descriptive links.

In my next post I’ll discuss how to implement a WordPress blog on your site.

This is the first official post for my SEO for Photographers Series. There are a couple reasons why you should be aware of search engine optimization and optimizing your site. The first reason is that you want visitors to find your site and use your services. You always want visitors to find your site even if you are busy. Optimizing your site will increase the likelihood of the search engines finding all the relevant information on your site. Optimizing a website generally requires at least an understanding of editing HTML. If you do not understand or feel comfortable modifying the source code for your site, you might hire a professional.

In addition to helping search engines find important content on your site, you want to optimize your site because your competitors are probably doing it. If search engines can find relevant information easily and your site is optimized, it will increase the chances of your site ranking well.

One of the biggest problems most photographers face is the limitation created by using an all Flash website (read my previous post about SEO problems caused by Flash). In a separate post, I give some suggestions on ways to address Flash photography sites. It is worth mentioning that there is speculation that Google and some other engines will have the ability to read content embedded in Flash. The problem is that there is really no way that the engines can give content embedded in Flash the same weight as regular content created in HTML or another language that the engines can easily read.

The reason the Flash content won’t receive as much weight as regular content is that it would open the door for a lot of black hat (or unethical) practices to allow savvy individuals to achieve higher rankings than they deserve. Search engines have spent years evolving to prevent users from spamming or using other techniques to obtain high rankings that they don’t deserve.

When you are optimizing your site, it is important to understand where you can expect to receive traffic. Google is by far the biggest search engine in the United States (receiving more than 68% of all searches) but that isn’t the case for all countries. In Russia, a search engine called Yandex receives about 50% of PPC traffic (source: searchmarketingstandard.com). The point is that some engines give different weights to various factors that go into optimizing a site. Also, some engines convert visitors better than others – Yahoo converts people better than Google but google has roughly four times the users.

Back in February, I wrote an article about photography sites built in Flash and the implications of this. I’m going to start a new series of articles that will contain tips, guidelines, and resources for helping you market your photography site (or any site for that matter). I’ll focus on some of common problems I see with many photography websites and make recommendations on how to overcome those problems.

Here is what you can expect:

• An overview of why SEO (search engine optimization) is important
• Problems with Flash Based sites
• Common problems with sites owned by photographers and photography studios
• Implementing a blog for your photography studio
• Tips for blogging
• Importance of your domain
• Importance of links and ways to build links
• Installing analytics and monitoring traffic
• More as things come to mind….

I will also entertain questions as I publish this series. If you have specific question about the various topics as they are posted, please post a comment on the appropriate post or here. I will do my best to elaborate and provide resources to help support any information or recommendations I provide. Also, as I add articles to the series, I will update the above list to link directly to each article to make it easy to follow updates.

Ok Adobe.  I love Photoshop CS3 and CS4.  I would probably love Lightroom if I could actually get it to run.  I refuse to reformat my Mac.  I have attempted to fix the problem with every resource available and the only solution I have not tried is to reinstall OSX.  If Adobe can’t fix this problem with an update to Lightroom, both Adobe and Lightroom suck royally.  One would think that Adobe would spend some time actually addressing this issue in their updates but since it has been a problem since v1.5 or prior, obviously they are either too lazy or too incompetent.  If you have this issue and have found no solution or if you have found a solution, please share your experience.  I have discussed this issue in a number of other posts: Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Clair Grade School class of 1998 held their 10 year reunion at the K of C hall in O’Fallon, IL.  About half the graduating class attended.  See all the photos on my gallery.

Please ignore this post.  I’m doing a bit of minor testing to see how long it takes the search engines to pick up the link to great googley moogley.

I have said it time and time again, I love the Think Tank Airport International 2.0 rolling camera case.  If you haven’t seen one of these cases, jump over to Think Tank’s website (thinktankphoto.com) and take a look at their lineup which includes the Airport Security 2.0, Airport International 2.0, and Airstream.  A great compliment to the Airport International is the Urban Disguise 35 bag which can slide over the pull handle of any of the three rolling camera cases offered by Think Tank.  The Urban Disguise 35 is nice because it can hold a large laptop, including my 15" Apple Macbook Pro.  I’m always looking for ergonomic bags to haul around my army of equipment and the Urban Disguise combined with the Airport International is the one-two punch.

Microsoft’s new ad is a direct response to Apple’s, "I’m a Mac" ads.  The new ad depict people that are supposed to be everyday people and they say something about their profession and that they use a PC.  The ad totally sucks.  It really doesn’t do anything to help Microsoft except show that they don’t know much about advertising. Come on – is Microsoft so pitiful that all they can do is come up with a lame response to Apple’s ad?  Apparently so.  As a side note, this post was written using an Apple and I must throw in my $0.02 – Windows (especially Vista) sucks. 

I was out visiting my uncle in Belle, MO this weekend and brought my D300 and a few lenses along.  I generally keep my MB-D10 on the D300 and I always bring the AA adapter with some spare batteries with me.  I have never had the occasion to use the MB-D10 with the AA battery adapter but this weekend I endedup needing it.  I had two EN-EL3e batteries with me but I didn’t charge them after last use.  I got a few hundred shots out of them but I didn’t want to take a chance of losing power because I was doing some arial photography with my uncle in his Sesna Birddog.  I threw the AA adapter pack into the MB-D10 and made sure the camera was set to use regular AA batteries and to use the MB-D10 pack first.  The battery meter still showed one bar.  I tried everything I could through the settings menu and had no luck.  The camera wouldn’t recognize the AA battery pack.  I ended up having to remove the EN-EL3e battery from the D300 in order to get the camera to recognize the battery pack.  I have not had time to upgrade the firmware to the newest version that Nikon released but I’ll make some time to complete the upgrade and report my findings. 

With Nikon’s recent D700 announcement, a lot of people are looking for a quick comparison between the cameras.  When comparing the Nikon D700 vs the D300, there are a few quick features that will be the main weighing factors.  First, the D700 is a full frame and the D300 has the 1.5x crop.  This will play a somewhat large role in the use of lenses.  Most people are saying that the Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR lens does not work well on the full frame cameras but it should function fine on the D300.  Nikon’s new wide 14-24mm f/2.8 lens should work great on the D700.  The new MB-D10 vertical battery grip will work on both cameras so if you already bought a D300 and MB-D10, it will also work on the D700. 

The D700 will perform much like the D3 (when using the MB-D10).  The D700 will offer much better quality in terms of color, white balance, high ISO performance, The shots from the D700 that I have seen are far superior to those produced by my Nikon D300. Nikon has a bunch of photos up from the D700 on the Nikon USA website. The D700 and D300 should have the same LCD screen which is very sharp, especially in comparison to the D2x.

Related posts:

• Nikon D700 – A Nikon Full Frame in a D300 Sized Body
• Nikon D700 Photos Available
  
• Nikon D700 and SB-900 Ship

Nikon just rolled out the new D90 DSLR camera.  This camera will replace the D80 and retails at about $999.95.  This camera has a 12 MP sensor and shoots 4.5 frames per second.  Like the new D700, the camera has a feature that cleans the sensor.  Also like the D700 it has live view.  The shutter is rated for 100,000 actuations and the camera has 11 point auto focus.  See more information on Nikon’s site.

Big brother to the Think Tank Airport International rolling camera case, the Think Tank Airport Security bag is larger in size and capacity.  This case still meets US airline requirements so that you can carry it onto a flight.  This large mobile camera case is great for any photographers who need to tote a large amount of equipment with them.  The case would be ideal for anyone from wedding photographers to event photographers.  It will easily hold three or four bodies, four or five lenses, and a slew of accessories.

The Think Tank Airport Security 2.0 rolling camera case is built much like the Airport International.  It has a TSA combination lock for the main compartment and steel cables which can secure the bag to a pole or chair.  The bag has a compartment which can hold a 17" laptop and the case is deep enough to hold a 600mm lens.  All in all, this is a great case from Think Tank.  The bag weighs about 12 lbs, is 14” W x 9” D x 22” H, and costs about $360.

Jan’s 60th birthday party was held in O’fallon, IL.  The party was themed as the "White Trash Bash".  All the photos are online at http://djphoto.smugmug.com/gallery/5609427_LYgkT.

Nikon has started shipping both the D700 and SB-900.  Those who were the first to order have started to receive their shipments and the first user reviews and user photos are rolling out.  The Nikon D700 is supposed to offer virtually identically quality and performance as the D3 and the new Nikon SB-900 should offer greater power and versatility when compared to the SB-800.  As a quick note, the SB-900 is retailing right around $500 whereas the SB-800 costs much less – about $315 (from B&H).  The Nikon D700 is running right around $3,000.

Information about the D700 can be found on Nikon’s site at http://www.nikonusa.com/Find-Your-Nikon/Product/Digital-SLR/25444/D700.html and the SB-900 information is up at http://www.nikonusa.com/Find-Your-Nikon/Product/Flashes/4807/SB-900-AF-Speedlight.html.

Adobe released the official non-beta version of Lightroom 2 today.  It would appear that they still have not resolved the problem where Lightroom says, "An Error Occurred While Attempting to Change Modules."  I would think Adobe would pay attention to the complaints of many users who have experienced this problem but their recommendations sure haven’t worked for me and a handful of others.  Some people suggest totally removing all references to Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.  Others recommend removing the Lightroom catalog.  I would love to use this program if Adobe could work out the bugs… If you are thinking about getting Lightroom, I’d recommend jumping over to Adobe’s site and downloading the trial before you actually drop $299 on it.

Donald and Joyce Krumsieg celebrated their 50th anniversary party on Saturday June 14, 2008 at Horner Park in Lebanon, IL. 

View the full Krumsieg anniversary party gallery.

I thought I would share one of my favorite Hawaii sunset photos.  The shot below was taken at Ko Olina at the Marriott resort on Oahu, Hawaii.  At the time I was shooting with a Nikon D70s and a 18-200mm lens.  The sunsets in Hawaii are absolutely amazing and I can’t wait until my next trip.  I have more Hawaii photos on my gallery.