Pullman Train Yard HDR Shoot, Jasmine Star Business Workshop, and Jennifer & Derek's Wedding Sneak Peek Part 2!

I think I promised to write about Jennifer & Derek’s Red Top Mountain wedding up in Cartersville, Georgia in the last blog post… Well, since I haven’t sent the images off to the bride I’ll wait just a little bit longer. Instead of a 7-day turnaround on the images it might be a 10-day turnaround for this wedding, eek! Well, dear readers and Atlanta brides, here is a *second* sneak peek at their awesome wedding in the Georgia mountains!

I also had two other fun events this past week, the first of which was on Thursday  with our local camera club, the Southeastern Photographic Society (SPS). This is our chance to socialize with other photographers besides wedding photographers and get fresh perspectives on all aspects of photography. The meetup they arranged was an amazing opportunity to visit the Pullman Train Yards on the East side of Atlanta. While this is a popular place for UrbEx (Urban Exploration), we got to LEGALLY enter the grounds and have free reign to photograph the facilities.

The urban grunge of an old abandoned train yard naturally yields itself to High Dynamic Range or “HDR” photography. I wandered the yards and paired up with a great landscape photographer, James Duckworth, as we explored the various locations and shot a mix of photographs around the yard.

Of course, I just HAD to try my hand at Time-Lapse, and shot a couple of quick scenes around the yards. If I had more time I probably could have greatly improved the time-lapse since the clouds were not moving that fast and with the place being abandoned, nothing else was really moving either! The ideal time lapse would be capturing the light as it moves through the cracked windows like you will see in the first scene of this video, the only problem with capturing something slow moving like the sun is that it simply takes FOREVER since you are compressing hours of time into seconds on video.

Atlanta’s Pullman Train Yard HDR Time-Lapse from Zac & Betty FengLong Photography on Vimeo.

Lastly, this past weekend was yet another CreativeLIVE course and a chance to invest some time (and money!) into our photography education. The last course I took was Bambi Cantrell’s Posing and Lighting workshop where we got some tips on how to pose subjects and use light to make them look their best. This weekend the team at CreativeLIVE brought back Jasmine Star, who is definitely one of our inspirations as photographers ourselves. As a longtime reader of her excellent blog, we totally fell in love with her after I took and purchased her last course on CreativeLIVE which was a full 5-day course where they went through a full live wedding with Jasmine and her husband, JD. I really need to write a separate blog post on that whole experience and review that course…

So what did I learn after spending 12 hours in front of the computer again? This course was all about the business side of wedding photography, so don’t expect to see new “tricks” and “gimmicks” in our photography, but expect to see our vision for FengLong Photography come more into focus and the fog to lift slightly. Don’t get me wrong, we love, adore, and cherish our brides! And that’s what we want to continue, we want to increase our bookings while at the same time attracting the types of clients we currently have who are fun and easy going, but take their work and their wedding very seriously, just like us. They are brides around our age, ready to start their lives with their one true love, and in love with love!

Their was just so much content that we had to purchase the course to review throughout the week and digest all of the information. I didn’t purchase the Bambi Cantrell workshop even though that was an amazing experience as well, but Jasmine speaks from the “new school” of wedding photography using natural light, writing blog posts (hi, reader!), and totally connecting with her clients. Her rags to riches story of starting her photography business literally from nothing and getting to the point she is now is simply inspiring, and Jasmine is full of this same down-to-Earth, tell-it-like-it-is, means of talking about her photography business. Don’t expect super big changes around these parts, but gradual refinement as we get closer to our happy place with wedding photography :). If you are another photographer reading this, make an investment in yourself and your business and purchase this two day workshop, you will be glad you did!

Stay awesome Atlanta brides! Please contact us if you are in search of a wedding photographer, we still have open spots here and there on our 2011 calendar!

—-

Zachary Long is a wedding photographer based in Downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Together with his wife Betty Feng they form FengLong Photography. Zac and Betty are available for weddings in the Metro Atlanta, GA area and destination weddings throughout the United States and China.

All images (c) FengLong Photography

Please view our website and blog at www.fenglongphoto.com