In this series we are talking about types of prints, and in this video it is all about paper prints. Most people think of the glossy prints you got from a grocery store photo lab. There are actually many options for paper prints. Check out this vlog about different paper types and what to consider when choosing a paper type.
New Vlog Series: Types of Prints
Now that you have great photos, what do you do with them? You want to display them so you can enjoy them. There are quite a few options available for printing photos. In this five part series we talk about some of the options available for prints and pros and cons of each type. Check out the first video:
Senior Photos: Bring your Pets
Pets are family members. You may want to bring your best friend along for your senior photos. It is important to have a photographer who is comfortable with animals and has experience with them. Kathryn has a degree in Animal Science and also worked as a veterinary assistant for a few years before starting Photos By Orion. She has a lot of animal experience, in general and as a photographer. Check out some of our tips for having your pets in your senior photos in our last video in our vlog series about senior pictures.
Senior Portraits: What to bring
In our previous video we covered the “When?,” Where?,” and “Why?” questions about senior portraits. The second video in this series is about what to bring with you to your senior sessions. The most common question we get about senior portraits is “What to wear for my senior pictures?” Check out this video to get all your answers to that and more.
What you need to know about senior photo sessions
The senior year of high school is a big turning point in a young person’s life. A senior photo session is one of the early milestones you go through during your senior year. There are many questions that people ask about senior sessions. Here is video one in a three video series about senior sessions.
Senior Sessions: When? Where? and Why?
5 Tips for live streaming your wedding or event
With the world being effected by COVID-19 there have been many changes people have needed to make. This includes weddings being cancelled or postponed. With weddings beginning to take place again they are not happening the way they were before. Many guests are not able to attend in person for a variety of reasons. Live streaming your wedding is a wonderful option for those who can’t be there in person but still celebrate with you.
There are many things to consider when deciding if you want to live stream, including what we talk about in the video below. But for the quick overview of what to consider before livestreaming your wedding or event, here are 5 tips we cover in the video to help you get started:
- Make sure you have enough internet bandwidth to stream well. The last thing you want at your wedding or event is to have the screen freezing, the audio cutting out, or worse, disconnection issues. How much internet speed do you need? We cover that in the video below.
- Location, location, location – Where you put your camera matters Your camera is the eyes of your online participants, so where they “sit” matters a lot. To be sure they have a great view, make sure to set up in a close up space very near the front where all the action is so they can see it all happen!
- Have a facilitator – Having a dedicated person there watching the stream feed, how your bandwidth is holding up, and making sure the sound is good is very important for making your event or wedding day go smoothly for those who attend virtually. You want to make sure they feel like they are there and appreciated for their attendence!
- Sound will be vitally important, so plan ahead – Next to seeing everything happen, your sound quality will be the other big factor in giving you online guests the best experience possible. It doesn’t matter if they can see you standing there if they can’t hear you say “I Do!” Make sure that you plan for how your online guests will hear you, as well as what the experience will be like (for more tips in this category watch the video!)
- Your online audience is still an audience, think from their perspective – Ultimately this is about having those who can’t attend in person feel like they are still there participating in your wedding or event. Taking some time to both think and experience it from their perspective will help you give them the best experience possible and let them know they matter to you!
To get all the info for having a successful live stream of your wedding check out the video below! Happy Planning
Keywords: photography, videography, live stream, wedding, wedding video, Salem, Oregon, Willamette Valley, salem oregon wedding photographer, salem oregon wedding videographer, drone wedding
Check out one of our latest videos
This year due to COVID-19 Our Saviors Lutheran Church in Salem was not able to have their traditional Vacation Bible School program. We worked with them to make a 3 day series of videos for children to be able to watch at home. We filmed, edited, added music and on-screen graphics. We look forward to creating more videos like this.
Check out the video for Day 1 below.
About Orion
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’d tell others about myself.
I have a lot of interests, besides photography. I’ve been told almost my whole like that I’m rather geeky. So when I looked up what a geek really was, I discovered that they were right all along. The Oxford dictionary defines a geek as:
noun: geek; plural noun: geeks
- 1. an unfashionable or socially inept person.
- a knowledgeable and obsessive enthusiast.”a computer geek”
- 2. USa performer at a carnival or circus whose show consists of bizarre or grotesque acts.
verb: geek; 3rd person present: geeks; past tense: geeked; past participle: geeked; gerund or present participle: geeking
- engage in or discuss computer-related tasks obsessively or with great attention to technical detail.”we all geeked out for a bit and exchanged ICQ/MSN/AOL/website information”
- be or become extremely excited or enthusiastic about a subject, typically one of specialist or minority interest.
I’ll let society tell me if I’m socially inept, but I think the verb is more of who I am. I really enjoy specializing in niche knowledge. Some of the things I feel comfortable specializing in include: photography, running, technology, gaming (both board and video), history (especially local), music (both performance and composition), laboratory-related things and bad jokes.
I think my list could go on more, but I’ll leave it at that for now. First, photography. There are two things I really enjoy about photography, taking and making photos the best I can and how technology can help capture unique photos. Technology in photography right now is moving at a rapid pace. It seems that there’s always some new advancement available, for example drones. That’s why I was inspired enough in drone photography to go get my commercial drone pilot license. New toys…I mean tools are cool to play with , but currently there are so many advancements built into cameras that allow for things like faster delivery of photos. I won’t geek out too much, but I find all this stuff fascinating and I love using the technology I have in creating great photos.
I am also a long-distance runner. I actually just competed in my first marathon, and while I have been encouraged for several years to sign up for one, I had to find the right one for me. Since I really enjoy trail running, I decided to sign up for a rather hilly marathon at Silver Falls. Ok, so running at Silver Falls is really two things for me, running AND photography. I really enjoy running the trail of 10 falls to see how the water flow is so that I can go back and capture the waterfalls in different situations. Waterfall photography is a passion of mine. Just check out my gallery and you’ll see a bunch of waterfall photos in there. Yeah…I go out to see waterfalls often =-) Lastly, I learned my love of running from my Dad. He also gave me my love for photography.
I’ve been somewhat a video gamer for many years, but I often don’t play the really popular games. Perhaps that’s the geek in me coming through. I really enjoy cooperative strategy games like Warcraft 2 or Age of Empires, both of which are probably considered ancient games today. While I have enjoyed playing board games when I was a kid, I’ve discovered there’s a new rise in board game popularity and there are new games coming out all the time, Again, I really enjoy cooperative strategy games like Battle for Hogwartz and Pandemic.
It seems that I’ve listed more interests of mine that I think I should talk about in this article. I’ll save those for another time. Hopefully I’ve piqued your interested and perhaps I’ve provided a little bit of a window into who I am which I find is really important when hiring a photographer. Things just seem to flow better when you know who you’re working with.
So here I am. This is me. I am orion.
My Very First Photo
Orion recalling the first photo he took the time to get right.
Do you remember the very first photo you ever took that wasn’t just a quick snapshot? Maybe it was the first time you took the time to compose the shot because you wanted it to look just right. Perhaps it was the first shot that you concentrated on how the lighting was affecting the subject.
I remember my first photo. I have spoken about it to people over the years, but I can’t remember the last time I saw it until recently. I was searching through some boxes of family photos to hang on the wall when I came across a print of my very first photo. I was shocked it was still around.
I took the photo with an old film camera of my Dad’s. It was a Mamiya/Sekor 1000DTL, a camera popular in 1970 according to KenRockwell.com. It looked like this, with the dust and everything:
I recall the weight of the camera as I held it and I remember the sound it made whenever you advanced film. It was my Dad’s camera and I remember being a bit nervous using it, especially that first time.
I was rather precariously stretched over running water at the time. I was about 12 years old or so and I’d gone up to a special place on the North Santiam up by Detroit, Oregon. I was basically performing a back extension with my stomach on a rock and I’d lodged my feet into a rocky groove on the shore. My torso was hanging inches above the running water and I was holding the camera up to my eye, trying to compose the shot to make it look as good as I could imaging. I checked the lighting by placing my finger over the shutter release and looking through the viewfinder at the light meter. I waited for my movement to be slow enough to take a sharp picture.
SNAP!
I triggered the shutter release and the viewfinder went black for a moment. I can’t actually recall taking a second shot. I was just a bit fatigued holding myself over the water and worrying about how I was going to get out of the position without getting the camera wet.
Looking at it now, it’s really nothing much, but at the time is was monumental. Who would have thought that I’d be a professional photographer way back then. …maybe my Dad, but who knows.
The subject of my image was a small mushroom growing out of a stick lodged in the running water. It’s life was hanging as precariously as I was when I captured the image. The stick had a bit of moss growing off the top somehow and out of that tangle grew the small mushroom, my main subject. Below the surface of the running water, leaves had caught the stick and were threatening to pull it completely in the water, submerging everything it held and sending it downstream, but I froze that moment in time with the snap of the shutter.
When I showed my wife the photo I’d found, she commented that it was a well-composed shot. The lighting is good too and while the focus isn’t perfect, I’s say I couldn’t have done better at the time. A tripod would have helped, or perhaps a longer lens, but none of that occurred to me at the time. I just wanted to capture a shot I could be proud of.
I think I can be proud of this shot. I will always remember it as my very first.
orion
3 Tips for taking portraits with your pet
As a family photographer, I am privileged to work with many diverse types of families. Many times we work with children, and young children need special attention for getting great photos with them. But young children aren’t the only kids that need special consideration in photography. I am talking of course about your fur babies!
Over the years I have worked with dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, horses, and even chickens in portraits with my clients. I love to see the interactions and love that is very obvious when these fur babies come in.
I have found over the years that there are few things that will make the portrait experience more enjoyable when your fur babies join you. So here are 3 tips for making portraits with your pets easier on them and you!
Tip #1: Don’t go against your pets personality
You know your fur baby best. And just like any 2 or 3-year-old, working with their personality not against it will make the whole process much easier.
If your dog is always on the go, it is best not to try and get him to sit still.
If your cat doesn’t usually get held, chances are someone will end up bleeding if you try to hold her for a photo.
Plan to work with your pet’s personality and your result will be better.
Tip #2: Communicate info about your pet to the photographer
Photographers will do their best to work with you and your pet, but any help you can give them will make things go smoother. For example, if your pet always comes to the sound of their name, then it is probably not good for the photographer to continually call their name and have them walk out of frame. If you have a dog that gets aggressive if someone gets too close, let the photographer know so that they can keep their distance. Anything that will help is important to communicate to your photographer.
Tip #3: Keep an open mind and reasonable expectations
Just like working with toddlers, pets will have good and bad days in front of the camera and that’s ok! The important part is that they are there, not that they are perfect. Sometimes it is the quirky imperfections that make a memory endearing, like this kitten who only wanted to be on his dad’s back! Sometimes, that is what makes the cutest photos.
I hope these tips help you the next time you have a family portrait scheduled and you want to include the whole family!