Hello.

NOTE: If you are here just for the photos, please scroll down to the two posts below.

Welcome back! Below this post you'll find photos from two weddings I covered this weekend for OTS Photography. I'm really getting a lot of valuable experience working for OTS, as well as crafting my own style and gaining a feel for the hardest part of wedding photography (at least for me): Posing people.

As a photojournalist, this was never a problem because the work was strictly hands-off, objective photography. Though I do a lot of photojournalism at these weddings - and it is my strong point - I have had to learn how to pose my subjects. Complicating this is the fact that most average people know little about posing themselves. When asked to pose for a photo, people can do the strangest things.

For example, go to your average football game and point your camera at a gathering of Greeks and watch the heads fly together as if suddenly magnetized. At one UGA game I remember asking a soroity girl if I could take her picture while she and her boyfriend cheered. I looked down at my camera to adjust the exposure, and when I brought the camera to my eye my frame was filled with laughing girls and boys all jostling to get in the photo!

When I set up a backdrop for a headshot, most people will automatically stand with their backs pressed against it as if in a police lineup. Point a camera at a child and their face will light up like they've been thrown from an airplane in this weird half-smile, half-grimace while they squeeze the word "cheeeeese" out from behind clenched teeth. Some children also have the lamentable practice of flashing gang signs.

So you can imaging posing a group of eight to ten adults for a family or formal portrait. It's a challenge. Luckily for me, I've got two great, practiced posers for bosses: Jennifer and Anthony Stalcup. Over the last two months I've watched them take groups of people and arrange them like flowers into a human bouquet to please any eye. They're never impolite, even though in large measure their success is due to their drill-sergeant-esque command of the confused human mass in front of them. They're amazing, and they routinely hand the camera to me and let me give it a try from time to time.

Truly, my strongest suit is my photojournalism skills, my ability to capture moments that last 1/500th of a second, my ability to predict human behavior: A skill learned from years in the newspaper industry. I think the photos below will attest to that.

Peace.

Stephen "Notes" Jones