Missy Cochran Oregon Photographer » Wedding and location Portrait Photography all over Oregon.

I just got an email that I want to respond to on the blog for everyone’s benefit.

Alicea writes:
” I realy like ur images and I like your logo. We are going nuts trying to find a logo designer that has some style and won’t break the bank. Who did your logo? Also just curious as to what lens you were using in the featured wedding and what aperature you were shooting in the pic of them at the alter.”

Melanie and I worked together to create the logo ourselves! I hear all the time from photographers who are very established in this business that your branding is everything! Like Alecea, I am not at the point where I can afford to get professional branding done at this point, so I said to myself, “Self, you need to come up with something that you can stick to for the next 3-5 years while saving for some professional branding makover.” You see, I tend to change alot and become dissatisfied with the old and trying obsessively to rise onward and upward. Since I wanted to do something I could stick with, I decided to do some reasearch and start thinking about different ideas. For those of you who are members of the [b] school (if you are not a member, I hightly recommend it!), I found a really cool thread about branding at this link.

At weddings, I use a varity of lenses plus I have a second shooter with access to those same lenses. I am sure that I used a couple different ones for the shots referred to, so here is the list of lenses that I use during a ceremony:

These are all Canon lenses:
50mm 1.4
85mm 1.8
70-200 L IS 2.8

Also, during a dimly lit ceremony we always shoot wide open and avoid flash whenever possible not only so that it doesn’t distract from the ceremony, but so that we can take advantage as much as possible of any ambient light.

Missy Cochran ~ is a lifestyle and wedding photographer in the Portland Oreogn area
my website ~ blog home

It was a dark and stormy night. We creeped up to the sign in a car with the lights off. clickclickclickclickclick what the heck was that noise!?! Upon realizing that is was a mini portable tripod attached to our friend Chrissy’s camer, I whipped up into a cheesy smily pose while Mel looked cautiously around to see if anyone heard us or if anyone was coming. Chrissy set the timer on her camera, jumped into the frame, and “click” we instantly morphed into insane tourists trying to drive by the Roloff Farm at midnight. We were detoured by the “no tresspassing” sign on their long driveway and decided to go to WinCo instead for some juice.

A few days ago, out of the blue, my friend, Chrissy, called to say that she wanted to come over for the weekend. Anyone know knows me longer than ten years may also know Chrissy, since that is the last time I saw her. Ten years ago, living in Florida with my family, we had sleepovers all the time with Chrissy and my sister, Mel. Since a sleepover wouldn’t be complete without Mel, she came too!

We went to Qdoba right before Mel had to leave us, the day after we stayed up till an insane 5am. “What could we have been talking about till 5am?” You many wonder. The answer would be quite simply “Roloff Farms”. Once Chrissy found out that the stars of the reality TV show “Little People Big World” lived in my zip code, she became obsessed!

Me:”Man, it’s 5am, I am sure tired.”
Chrissy:”You know, I just had a random thought, ‘Roloff Farms’.” And that is about how the rest of our conversation went. The whole time.

I am a clean plater–like my momma taught me.

Here are some pics from our second outing to Roloff Farms, once again we respected the “No Tresspassing” rule all the while Chrissy wondered if telling the Roloffs that she was their “biggest”fan would be offensive.

This is the car that drove past us while were hoping to see some TV stars from our car. Unfortunately Chrissy’s rearview mirror hangy-thing was blocking the view and we never saw who left that day.

Once we finally gave up on Roloff Farms for the day, we went downtown and had some fabulous Thai food and I chased the meter maid who almost gave Chrissy a ticket. Probably the most productive thing I did that whole time was save Chrissy $25. I must also say that I have had my fill of Roloff Farms even though we didn’t see much. I am just glad Chrissy doesn’t live in Hollywood, she might just become a stalker or something. Oh, and if any of the Roloffs ever read this, no offence, but Chrissy is by far your biggest fan.

Missy Cochran ~ is a lifestyle and wedding photographer in the Portland Oreogn area
my website ~ blog home

January is usually my month for a little R&R to recuperate from a busy years of weddings and portrait sessions. This year is a little exceptional because I really trying to incorporate more family sessions in the website and establish a bit of a style for it. I am so excited about how these turned out! I love love love the lifestyle look and candid feel of them! And I was so impressed at how naturally affectionate they were with each other.

Missy Cochran ~ is a lifestyle and wedding photographer in the Portland Oreogn area
my website ~ blog home

Okay, so I have some explaining to do. If any of you have seen our website in the last little bit, you will notice that we are making some changes. Melanie is deciding not to book any weddings or portrait sessions this year of for the next few years. You can still follow her blog which I have a link to on the right side of my blog, but it will be mostly personal work. “Why is Melanie slowing down?” You might ask. Well, it’s because she has two babies that want her attention and she wants to be an awesome mom. She is thinking about getting back into it all in a few years when her kids are in school. In the meantime, she is still planning to second shoot with me this summer whenever she can. It doesn’t look like they will be moving to Texas this year either so that means that she will probably be with me for most of my weddings–wah hoo!!

And now for some more explanation, When Mel and I were first starting artisan we spend a good little while trying to think of the perfect name. We thought we had the absolute best name ever, “Artisan Photographics.” Artisan because we consider ourselves to be very artistic and photographics because it isn’t just photography, we pride ourselves in our ability to process our work with photoshop and the best editing software to make it really stand out. It was a total bonus that it began with an A and would be at the top of every alphabetical directory. Life was perfect until…we realized that Artisan Photographics is about one of the most generic photography business names on the planet. We saw Artistique Photographie (nice people, bytheway), Artistic Photography, and even A Artistic Photography just to name a few–in Oregon alone!!

Inspired by photographers who personalize their online presence, I decided I wanted to do the same. Not only are we changing our name and our logo, but I intent to post a lot more blog entries that are personal. I know you all want to know what I eat when I am camping, but seriously, that is the stuff I may share. Everyone should know that I am not afraid to make silly faces, so you will probably see more of that as well. I want to post video and pics from my point and shoot–yes, I too use one of these amazing little devices.

We will be phasing out the old brand very slowly, it will probably take about a year before we have the logo completely swapped out, but it will be obsolete soon enough.

I just have to share these.  Mel took them while she was in Utah of Mike (our brother) and his fiance, Becca. Mel said they just wandered around for about 4 hours and stopped anywhere that looked interesting. Isn’t that cool? Mel took control of what they wore and everything. It’s a very Artisan style photoshoot.

This post is for photographers and it’s all free.  Who can beat free info about photography?  Any photographers out there who want some guidance I have some realy cool stuff to throw your way!  It’s maybe not the best way, but it’s worked for me so far and it’s what I value.  Click below to read the rest of the story.

I started making a series off assignments to help other photographers get going and have some direction.  I am just going to post them as I think of them.  It’s all very flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants!

Assignment 1:

 is designed to help you create direction for your style.  It is also designed to find out how compatable our styles are with respect to shooting together.  There are no wrong answers so focus on what you love no matter what anyone else thinks!
 
Your mission should you choose to accept it is to create a google reader account to track the blogs of your favorite photographers.  If you make it your homepage, you will see updates for your favorite photographers every time you log onto the internet.  Once it is created, I would love to look at who you found and I will share with you mine, so that we can get ideas from each others selections.  This will help me to get to know you artistically and appreciate your vision for yourself as you incorporate many elements into the style you want to develop.
 
Good sources for finding photographers are:
 
google
mywedding.com
theknot.com
Professional Photographers of America (PPA)
Digital Wedding Forum (DWF)
wpja.com (wedding photojornalism association)
WPPI
 
Here is the link to make a google reader account: http://googlereader
 
The next part of this assignment is to familiarize yourself with my favorate photographers.  When I communicate about photography, I reference my favorites a lot and it is helpful when we converse about the subject to reference the same people.  Melanie and I often say something like, “I was totally inspired by the light is was so whitebox!”  Whitebox is one of my top three favorites!  Along with Jose Villa and Fred Egan.  Whitebox epitimizes what I love in photography about light and color and fun, I love Jose Villas film look and timeless classical images, my favorite kind of fine art.  Fred Egan’s photographs are infused with free spiritedness.  I like to think of myself a combination of the three when it comes to weddings.  I draw from different inspirational sources for families, kids, babies, etc.  I hope that my assistant will not try to shoot like I do, but try to lean toward the inspirations that I draw from, does that make sense?  I am always trying to grow and stretch myself this way! 
 
Here is the link to my favorite photographers: http://delicious.com/misphotographics
To make this part of the assignment quantitative, I would like you to make a folder of your favorites from these websites and email them to my when you have looked through everything.  Tell me who you loved and who stood out to you and why.
Assignment 2:reader.google.com

Read your camera manual and try out everything in it.  Read it twice if you have to.  Figure out what features you will use on a regular basis and which ones you don’t care for.  At least you will know they are there.  Pay special attention to ISO, Aperture, Shutter Speed, and manual mode, you will probably always be using your knowledge of these. 

Assignment 3:

Buy Lightroom and read the manual.  I feel this program is more inportant than photoshop itself!

 Assigment 4:

Go to Becker School!  This is a free education use it!

There, that ottah keep you busy for a while.  Like I said, it may not be for everyone, but if I could go back to day one and tell myself what to do to progess quickly, that is what I would say to myself.  Actually the Becker School is pretty much cooler than anything I can do for you, so watch everything for a wealth of info.  I am very much in agreement with Becker’s philosophy of helping out and giving back and networking with other photographers.

I can’t get the fine art feel of “A Year of Mornings” out of my head!  It’s a slow January, as it always is.  I love this time of the year because I am caught up with the bulk of my work and I actually have time to read books.  I go crazy this time of year because there aren’t enough pictures to take of people.  Taking pictures of people is the best, but I am using some of this extra time to practice some more abstract concepts like those I found on New Years.  Below are some pictures I took this morning around my house.  It was so fun to experiment with photoshop and try some things I haven’t done before.  I want to do a little mini shoot every morning to keep my creative juices flowing and hopefully it will help me to add a bit more of a fine art flair to each photo session too.

It’s been a lovely New Years morning.  Jeff and I slept in, which was a great contrast to our 5:45am jaunts to the gym.  Although I went to bed early forgoing any festivies, Jeff stayed up past midnight ushering in the new year with Heroes V one of his favorite games.  While I let him sleep in even later than I did, I jumped online and ignored work for a little while to feed my intellect the substance of my motivation.  I have an account with google reader that allows me to blogstalk all my favorite people.  The past couple months I have been browsing quickly through and moving on as if it were a chore to be completed–not the mentality to have when looking for inspiration.  This slow, raining morning I took my time and read every blog.  One photographer I really like, had a link to some really cool fine art photography pieces and I fell in love with the concept.  Check it out!  Fine Art Story boards.  Anyway, I created one!  It’s very abstract but tells the story of a couple I took engagement pictures of buying salt water taffy at the Oregon Coast.  Here it is…

Cool, huh! So, they are a custom print size and if you want one from your photo session, they will be the same price as the print that matches the width. For example, a 14×7 (which is the correct aspect ratio for this print) would cost the same as a 11×14 print.