On the day of the Wong Family portraits, a wedding was setting up to take place, so we couldn’t photograph around the actual Montalvo building as we had hoped, but fortunately the large grass field in the front with surrounding walkways and the nicely tendered gardens (you’d be surprised how many gardens aren’t) provided plenty of usable backdrops for our family portraits. We spent a good solid two hours photographing the Wongs at various places around Montalvo. While it was quite warm by Bay Area standards (77° F), that didn’t stop us from having fun with the entire Wong Family. A beautiful Sunday well spent with a beautiful and fun-loving family! Also congratulations to Cal and Tina who was just engaged last week in Las Vegas!

A special thanks to Eric Lee for providing valuable lighting help and shoot advice. Here are some of the photos from Sunday:

We approach family portraits just like our wedding portraits: be daring and be different. That’s our approach and our style. If you and your family are interested in family portraits by Bui Photography, please contact us and let us see what we can do for you.

And because I’m constantly getting asked technical questions and thought processes regarding photoshoots we do, I’ve decided to incorporate them into our blog posts for those who are interested. Photographing large groups are always challenging, especially family portraits because occasionally you’ll get ones where there are generations of family (parents and their children and then their children’s children) and as professional photographers, you definitely want to make sure you get a good mixture. The camera and lenses you pack should be dictated by your shooting style, location limitations, and clients needs. If your shooting style is close crop portraits, you might not want to pack many wide-angle lenses, but rather more telephoto lenses. But don’t forget about location limitations such as available shooting space. Some places, because of the setup, you can’t stand very far back from your subject(s), so If you only have a working distances of 4-feet, packing a 70-200mm with an 8-feet minimum focusing distance will not be helpful. Lately, it’s popular (even trendy) to photograph at large apertures of f/2.8 or wider for the creamy bokeh, but if your clients select a specific place for its backdrops or elements, you definitely want to include those into your shots and f/2.8 isn’t going to give a sense of place in a photograph. Prior to the family portrait session, I did some online research on the venue using Flickr, a great resource for virtual scouting, but it definitely doesn’t replace physically scouting your location. So I packed my Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II with my Canon EOS 1D Mark II as backup (very important to always have a backup) and two lenses: the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM (24-70mm vs. 24-105mm debate) and the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM. I chose the 24-70mm because I knew I was going to have a large group to photograph and they wanted scenes of Montalvo included in the pictures, so the wide-angle zoom is very versatile in this situation. I brought along the 70-200mm as a backup lens and because long telephoto lenses is very flattering for subjects when it comes to portraits, but ended up not using it, but important to have a back-up lens. I packed a number of Speedlites with Quantum Turbo battery packs and light stands as my style is to shoot with artificial lights, even on bright sunny days, for the lighting control. I did pack a Lastolite 8-in-1 TriFlip diffuser/reflector as those always comes in handy. For most of the shoot, my aperture was never lower than f/8 for depth-of-field and shutter speed was around the 1/100th to 1/250th, depending on how much exposure I wanted on the background. ISO was around 100-400. I like to travel as light as possible when doing family portraits to move around quickly and not disturb the flow by having your subjects wait idly.

Now a bit about Lynn. She’s our only female wedding photographer on staff as well as one of only two Nikon photographers in our group. Originally Lynn started out doing event photography, but naturally deviated towards the exciting adrenaline rush of wedding photography when she joined up with us and being the dedicated wedding photographer she is, she was photographing weddings right up into the 8-month of pregnancy!

Now normally at Bui Photography, we favor magazine style type of shots, but in this case we opted to do more classy style shots. We were also planning an outdoor shoot, but when I shot these maternity photos, the weather was not so permitting, so we ended up shooting entirely inside Lynn’s house. From my experience, no matter how beautifully decorated a home is, rarely does it work as a photographic back-drop with common problems being distracting backgrounds, difficult color walls, available distance to photograph, furniture placement, and etc. And while most of the issues can be relatively worked through, it still does present some challenge.

Most of all the shots taken with a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II with a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM with a single Canon 580EX II Speedlite with a Lastolite EzyBox 24″ Speedlite softbox mounted on a Lumopro LP604. Speedlite triggered using Canon’s Wireless Flash System (E-TTL).

Expecting a child? Contact us today and see what we can do for you!