Ask Ryan Brenizer

Remember it’s not about what they can do for you, but what you can do for them. The biggest things to me in an assistant are punctuality and attitude, as well as loyalty. Basically we know that the first wedding you do to us will be a giant gift to you, but the 25th or 50th will be not as great for you (law of diminishing returns) by the end but a big help for us. So being able to commit for at least a few months of weddings and to be trained to be a great help will increase your chances.

I could do 95 percent of my career with the 28, 85, and 70-200.

I do, only because I know what my favorite prime lenses are going to see before I put them up to my eye, so I can frame shots without a camera up to my face limiting my peripheral vision.

I’m really glad you asked! I am going to be developing the be-all and end-all of instructional videos for really, really cheap, like coffee-and-a-scone cheap. There are some videos out there now which I’ve helped with, but I’m not very happy with them, I want to start it all from the ground up. I just need a bit of time and a video guy.

Always manual unless the ceiling is really complicated.

I belong to Junebug and Fearless because I know and like and respect the people behind them and their missions. I do not belong to any other professional organizations. WPJA helped me a great deal when I started and still helps my girlfriend get a lot of clients even though she doesn’t even have a blog (the luddite), so everyone’s mileage will vary.

Try with less cluttered scenes to start and practice keeping the camera very centered while shooting. It takes time and some patience. Watch out for parallel lines.

Thanks and good luck! It was really interesting, and not your normal wedding. It was at the punk rock club CBGB, and the bride walked through trash and past homeless people to start her walk down the aisle. I was hooked.

I use continuous until shooting receptions, when I like the AF beam (which only turns on with single mode on Nikons). But my cameras have a very nice AF system. I’ve used plenty where focus and recompose is the only way. Women tend to think you’re shooting their chest, but otherwise it’s generally fine.

Yes, I own one, and yes, I was a bit burned out on reviews but I wish I’d reviewed this months ago. People should yell at me to do it next week (I have three weddings this week, so my procrastination is justified).

One thing: The 500D came out a year after I developed and popularized the method. But also there are tens of millions of active photographers out there. My very first post on it on my old (now erased Amazon.com blog) was “I know I can’t be the first person to have done this,” even after a month of asking everyone on Flickr to see if anyone had seen anything like this before (they hadn’t.)

So I made sure I was the first to really work on making it systematic, trying it with lighting, with flash, trying candids, etc. Nothing is really new under the sun, but we can all try to poke at the edges of the envelope a bit.

UPDATE: Ah, I misunderstood around the edges due to language issues but I think I managed to answer a question in the process even though none was posed, haha. Interestingly random forest undergrowth was some of the first stuff I tested on too.

I haven’t, but I’m currently working with B&H to test some pano heads. And by “currently” I mean “presently” and by “presently” I mean “whenever I get off my tookus.”

My gallery takes anything up to 64MB, so sometimes I’ll just cap it on a nice, sharp 10,000 pixels on a side, and then include facebook-sized images as well.

For reference, he means this one: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151546175193522&set=a.182365318521.126410.6503288521&type=1

I was using a Switronix torchlight and I believe a Lumiquest softbox on it. I just broke one of the battery connections the other day, but I’m going to try to turn in my “big box of broken gear” on Friday for repair.

Closest eye is generally best, like with any super-fast aperture lens. This is just f/0.4 instead of f/1.4…