118: Fiona Elizabeth – What It Means To Be Competitively Creative & How To Shoot For You And Your Client

Fiona Elizabeth, Founder of Wedding Photography Mentor, has been in the industry for over a decade. Her recent accolade at the Icon International Photography Awards as a Category winner in the Boudoir & Fine Art Nude portrait division is another feather in her cap, placing Fiona among some of the world’s leading photographers.

With six professional photography qualifications in Documentary, Wedding, and Creative Portrait, including a Fellowship and multiple awards in the UK, Fiona has been judging photography and mentoring photographers for over four years.

Her mentoring and membership program is designed for beginner and intermediate photographers who want to grow, scale, and refine their craft in wedding photography, creating signature work that appeals to high-paying clients.

Fiona is passionate about helping other photographers succeed. Her nurturing demeanour, passion, and professionalism provide a safe space for photographers to be part of a motivational and inspiring community, resulting in fast-paced growth and development!

www.theweddingphotographymentor.com

So, you know, ambient light, it is a beautiful, it is really beautiful and it can create beautiful story. And I think it’s being observant of that. So interestingly, there are two things. Obviously we touched on natural light, with natural lights around us all the time. But if you were to walk into a room and you’ve got a mix of ambient and natural light because you’ve got light coming through the window, you’ve got to be able to read the light well first off. So there are two things I’m gonna touch on here first. So when we’re shooting indoors and we’re using natural light or ambient light, the first thing that we do is we turn off the ambient light. So any light that’s on, like a tungsten light or a lamp or a spotlight, turn it all off to begin. And so all you’re left with is the light that’s coming through from the window. Or it’s light, you know, the light source, it could be a VLUX or it could be a door, for example. A lot of the time I’ll open a door to get more light to come into a room.

Sometimes if the window is too bright you can put up a diffuser to knock a couple of stops off or most places will have like a net you know like a voile or something so you can you can control the amount of light which comes through the window and then you and then you can shoot with that light but if you want to shoot with ambient light you’ve got to be you’ve got to think about the story that you’re trying to create.

First of all you need a dark room. You need to be in a place where you can put the lamp on and there’s not really going to be much other light coming through. Because you want to use that light, that warm, that rich ambient light from the lamp or the light source to light your subject. Then you have to position the head and face, the eyes, predominantly into a place where the light source lights them and you’re creating nice light patterns across the face. You don’t want lights to be horrendously old today. As I start looking at my eyes thinking so many wrinkles. But you want to light the eyes, you want the eyes to kind of come alive. So you need to use your ambient light carefully.

Well, do you know what? I wouldn’t have struggled on my own for such a long time. I would have picked up a mentor sooner than I did so I could reach my goals, my creative goals, and my monetary goals quicker in a shorter space of time. So when I first started out, you know, I was very, very critical of my work. I suffered terribly from imposter syndrome. I was very shy and going into a wedding,

as a newbie, you’ve got to have a thick skin and you’ve got to grow that skin quickly. So yeah, that’s what I would do. Pick up a mentor quickly and I’d get to my creative goals and my monetary goals quicker than I did.