The Bui Brothers Workshop

So this year for me is one of continual growth and exploration in photography (actually which year isn’t? LOL!).  I love learning and I especially love learning photography from such down to earth people as The Bui Brothers, Lan & Vu.    Yes, they are brothers and yes, those are their real names.  They hail from Southern California and are fantastic photographers, videographers, social media masters and educators.  This particular workshop was organized by Gustavo Fernández, awesome green-certified wedding photographer and organizing guru of SF East Bay Photography Meetup Group and many others.  The goal of it was to explore light both natural and artificial and really put into practice that you can take a great photo anywhere (after a little location scouting).  We focused a lot of headshots and they taught us their formula for the perfect headshot.  So be warned, this post is very headshot-heavy.  🙂

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We started off just talking about different angles of shooting and scouting out locations that at first you think will not work but they do!   This was taken in a regular backyard:

Next came exploring side lighting – love this kind of lighting!:

Then we got to play with lights.  They showed us a 2-light system.  Once with a fancy Profoto set-up and then the exact same set up with regular hot-shoe flashes.  I loved their minimalist approach!

Then we got to play with overpowering the sun for this really awesome effect.  For this we had to use the more powerful Profoto set up at full power – it was suuuper bright out!

Thank you Lan & Vu for spending the day with us and for being an open book.  Thank you Sara & Chris Goetz for hosting the workshop at your house.  You guys rock!  🙂  And thanks to the models for the day, Madison, Crystal, Sam, Marissa & Goldie – you guys did great!