I love shooting engagement photos. They are a great time to get to the know the couple and what their tastes are. We really just let them be themselves. Just the joyful truth. When it comes time for the wedding, couples are used to us photographing them, and we have a better idea going in of what they are looking for.

For this shoot, we started at Botanica, then headed down to Old Town.

Merry Christmas from Mosaic Photo

This is one of my favorite photos that I’ve taken. This was a fixed display at an annual light display at Botanica: The Wichita Gardens. It was a too dark to balance the lights with the sky, but that gave me a little bit more flexibility in my shooting. I had brought along my tripod with a cool ball head. I played with a few different techniques, zooming the lens during the exposure, changing the focus depth, and camera movement.

Quickly, I saw that I could mimic the movement of snow swooping down. This shot was a thirty second exposure, with the camera stationary for the first half of the exposure. Then, I moved the camera with my tripod head’s natural arc for the rest of the exposure. This movement gave a nice motion trail.

Little was done in post processing. A custom white balance let the blacks go to a deep blue and also shift the whites to magenta. This image was used for a Christmas card at Lawrence Photo to send out to its friends and clients.

From your friends at Mosaic Photo, Merry Christmas.