Wanamaker Photography Blog

Behind The Scenes Of A Photography Studio

The final entry of our coverage of the 2008 High School Graduation series ends with Eldred High School. While Chris was attending the S.S. Seward Graduation, I headed north to Sullivan County to cover the graduating class of Eldred High School (which my younger brother was a part of).

After a few days of rain and a close call at the Minisink Valley Graduation the previous evening, Saturday turned out to be extremely beautiful and very hot! It was one of the hottest days in recent memory!

As the ceremony got under way, students received awards for various achievements and accomplishments throughout the year as well as throughout their entire life as a high school student …

With nearly 60 graduates, the ceremony was brief … and I am sure that the students appreciated that it was because of the ever increasing temperatures. As the final names were announced, I positioned myself to capture one of the traditional shots at every graduation …

As everyone made their way to their parents, my brother and two of his friends stopped for a quick, candid shot!

Back in May, my baby brother, Robert, had his Senior Prom. I still cannot believe how fast time has gone by! It seems like just yesterday he was in Kindergarten! Anyways, enough looking to the past …

Being the photographer of the family, he asked us to follow him from the Eldred School to the Riverview Inn in Pennsylvania where the dance was being held. I accepted (of course) and decided to treat him like a celebrity that day!

As the time came closer, we kept checking the weather as it was supposed to rain on and off during his entire trip to the dance. As we arrived at the school, things seemed to hold off long enough for us to grab a couple of shots before heading in for the announcement of the couples. So we picked out some locations around the front of the school and grabbed a couple shots before heading in. In this shot, we asked Robert and his date, Katie, for a little attitude …

After the announcement of each couple, we headed back outside and got everything ready to head to our next stop … a local playground. Utilizing the kid that is in all of us, we decided to play on the swings for a bit and grabbed this shot …

After being attacked by the all of the bugs, we decided to head down to the Hawks Nest and test out some shots there. As we headed down along the river, the rain could hold out no more and downpoured on us. Forging ahead, we grabbed our umbrellas and towels and decided to give it a try anyways.

Robert and Katie were already parked further down the Hawks Nest with a heavily modified Subaru WRX. As we closed in on them, the rain began to let up and we setup our shots as quickly as possible. We’d check the traffic and when all seemed clear, Chris would jump out into the middle of the road and grab a few shots before the next car would come along. Here was one of his shots …

As the rain moved in again, we decided to head out and down to the Riverview for his last few shots before dancing the night away! On our way down, the rain let up and the lightbulb went off. We wanted to grab just a few more shots before heading to the dance … so we pulled off the road and headed out onto the bridge between Matamoras, PA and Port Jervis, NY. We grabbed our umbrella just in case that downpour followed us.

We started playing around with some different ideas once we got onto the bridge and captured as many shots as we could before the weather got ugly again. As cars passed by, the passengers kept looking at us trying to figure out what was going on. After capturing these shots, we decided to wrap things up and let Robert and Katie head out to their dance …

After leaving them at the dance, we headed back and literally started working on the images. Playing with them inside of Adobe Lightroom was incredible and everyone loved the shots. Robert and Katie felt like celebrities for the day as they had their own paparazzi following them around!

Now I get to look forward to his graduation!

Busy … Busy … Busy … That’s about the only way that I can describe the last month or so! Things have kept us going so much so that we haven’t even had a chance to update the blog!

Soccer, Baseball, Lacrosse, School and all of our other Spring events have all come to an end … which means we now have a chance to breath a little and look at what we’ve accomplished! It also gives us a chance to work on our creative ‘eye’ while getting things ready for the fall season!

As we look back over the last few months, we’ve covered numerous Minisink Valley Lacrosse and Baseball games, attended two of the area’s largest Irish Dance Feis Events, photographed Youth Soccer Players, attended Prom as a couple’s personal paparazzi, continued with our Senior Portrait Sessions and captured loving moments between couples during their Engagement Photo Session. Needless to say, we have a lot of photos ready to be blogged about!

Looking over the calendar for the next few months has a much lighter schedule for us, but plenty of exciting work we cannot wait to get to! The 2008 Eldred High School Graduation, an annual Puerto Rican Pig Roast, summer sports portraits for i9 Sports, numerous Weddings and some additional Senior and Family Portrait sessions!

Next month, we’ll also launch our new Wanamaker Photography VIP program … so details will soon follow!

Overall, it will be nice to have a bit of a breather where we can recharge our own batteries, enjoy what is shaping up to be a beautiful summer and start getting our gears into motion for the fall. Be sure to come back and check out our blog and website often as we’ll be updating it a lot with many of the incredible images we’ve captured over the last few months!

Carly came to us for one of our Senior Portrait Sessions. Actually, she is one of our Ambassadors for the Eldred High School in New York. With that title comes a free photo session and images to take with her to show off to her classmates. In return, Carly will provide us with the information of other interested Seniors so we can setup their Portrait Sessions as well!

During Carly’s Senior Portrait Session, we took some standard and unique photos indoors and then headed outside while the sun was still strong. I wanted to experiment a little with a prom gown she owned … so we decided to incorporate some images of her trashing her prom dress.

However, before we totally ruined the dress, I took her back to a wooded area that had a couple large boulders … one of which I sat her on. I shot a couple frames before this one and then she just tilted her head and looked right into the lens with her amazing blue eyes … so I snapped this shot and absolutely loved it! (We’ve got more images of Carly coming really soon!)

I shot this with our Canon 20D with the 70-200mm lens at F4 at 1/160 with the ISO all the way down at 100.

Before the Eldred vs. John A Coleman Basketball game got underway, the player introductions were held in the middle of the court and this was one shot that I was able to capture as the team came together. I had a few others, but the focus point was somewhere behind them … so I had a nice sharp wall and fuzzy players!

This image was shot using our Mark III with a 70-200mm lense zoomed to about 150mm. We used an off camera flash, wirelessly triggered with the camera set to F3.5 at 1/200th with the ISO at 400.