Weddingbee Blog

A couple of weeks ago the mister and I decided to go to Santa Barbara for the weekend to see one of our favorite bands and to get away from all things wedding.

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But even the dreamy sounds of my man Paul Banks couldnt keep my mind 100% off the wedding. The beautiful beaches of Santa Barbara screamed “Take a picture of me!” and we decided to take advantage and stage a DIY photo shoot in hopes of getting some quality images for our wedding website.

Armed with a tripod, our Cannon 30D, and couple of inspiration pics, we headed off to find the perfect location. Our first stop was a park off of Cabrillo Blvd where we tried to recreate this picture.

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Yeah, that was a total fail.

We quickly decided to leave this shot to the professionals and moved on to the vintage carousel.

Much better. We originally wanted to get shots of us riding the carousel, but unfortunately there was a two-dollar charge per person to ride, and we only had two bucks cash on us. At this point we noticed our camera battery was running out of juice, and we decided to head down the coast to get some shots by the beach and possibly some pictures like this with our little roundie.

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We were lucky and found a deserted scenic turnoff right off the 101 freeway with spectacular views of the ocean and the beach. It was here that we got some of my favorite pictures of the day.

I’m so happy with the images we were able to capture in the short amount of time we were shooting. They are by no means professional photos, but compared to our previous eyeball-only pics they are a 100% improvement.

If you’re interested in staging your own DIY photo shoot, there are a couple of things to keep in mind before you head out:

• Clear off a couple of hours on your calendar to dedicate to your shoot. Setting up each shot with the tripod can suck up a lot of your time, so you want to make sure you have enough time dedicated to your shoot.
• Do your homework. Scout out possible locations prior to heading out for your shoot and research potential poses. Heading into your photo shoot with a good game plan will help you maximize your time while you’re out on location.
• Don’t get too ambitious. Focus on perfecting a few shots rather than getting a lot of mediocre ones. We focused on nailing a few images and ended up with about seven workable images out of the over 30 pictures we took.
• Your equipment doesn’t need to be high tech. All you need is a simple point and shoot with a delayed timer, a tripod, and a good working knowledge of your camera, and you will be able to get a quality image.

And above everything else, have fun! If you’re having fun it’ll show in your images and no amount of posing or expensive equipment can fake that.