CRAVE | Atlanta

Last night I had the opportunity to photograph this event with CRAVE | Atlanta :

See the PHOTOS HERE.

CRAVE Business Chat: Secrets of Social Media Superstars

Speakers: Shameeka Ayers (The Broke Socialite), Tucker Berta (Serenbe), Katie Birmingham (Noon Midtown), Michael Erickson (Fifth Group Restaurants)
Topic: Secrets of Social Media Superstars
When: Monday, April 26, 7-9pm
Where: Noon Midtown, 1080 Peachtree Street, Suite 6, Atlanta
Price: $25 in advance; $30 at the door
(please RSVP by 12 noon the day of the event).
Includes wine, beer, soft drinks and a sampling of Noon’s new dinner menu!

Do you crave more opportunities to network with each other as well as spend more time with our entrepreness intelligentsia? After all, we are a community of intuitive, resourceful, passionate, business-savvy, adventuresome mavens! CRAVE hosts intimate, informal discussions which take place at a different coffee shop or casual venue each month, and will be initially focused on our monthly business topic; however we will boldly go wherever the conversation takes us!

Now – I’m sure nearly everyone in the room is going to be writing blog posts about the actual event – but we’re photographers – so I’ll write about the photography. Since we started our weekly newsletter that tells how we make our photos, I’ve really been forced to think about our process, and turn it into words. Not only words – but actual task based steps. Because talking about photography in some esoteric meandering artistic way is hardly useful for people just starting out that want to make better photos.

If you’re a subscriber to our weekly emails (which I must admit is late this week!) – you know that we basically write  a weekly instruction manual of steps and rules to follow that should help your photography skills increase. Sometimes the rules are to restrict you from repeating bad habits, other times they’re there to force you to just be way more creative by not falling back on your same five go-to compositions.

Our worldwide intern search was also wildly successful. So successful that we’ve decided to take on more than just the 2 interns we were looking for. But taking on interns is a big responsibility for us. Mostly because we don’t want them to suck. I suppose you generally don’t want your interns to suck at their jobs, but what I mean is that we can’t have our photography interns not making great photos – and that’s a lot of pressure you know? And then we remember that hey we don’t have to worry because we took on some really, really talented photographers that for some crazy reason, want to help us.

So with that – we’ve also been forced to step up our game. One of the areas that we really focus on is event photography. There are so many ‘event photographers’ out there but we really try hard to make our event photography different from everyone else’s.

Last night I decided to stick with some of the concepts that I’ve been throwing out in our newsletter.

• Do not turn your camera diagonally 45 degrees – it doesn’t make your photo artsy – it makes people have to turn their heads to the side
• See the lines and shapes and then throw people in there
• See the photo with your eyes and not through your viewfinder.

When you’re starting out, a lot of times you put the camera up to your face and then look around for a picture. The problem with this method is that you’re going to miss seeing everything else that’s going on. But if you can sit back, watch the room and ‘see’ the photos with your eyes and not just through that little viewfinder – it opens you up to being able to see the photos that are ‘about to happen’ – and at some point, sometimes, you don’t even need to put the camera up to your eye.

It’s probably nothing more than a cool trick – but about 1/5th of these photos was shot without looking through the viewfinder – and I say that not to brag (because I can do way better than that!) – but to stress that as photographers we sometimes spend too much time only seeing the world through that small window in our cameras. The camera becomes our ‘eyes’ – and to me this is backwards.

Check out the rest of the Photos Here.