How to Ruin a Photoshoot Webinar Recap
By Ashlyn Rochester, Communications SpecialistÂ
Joel Reichenberger, a senior editor at Progressive Farmer, recently hosted ACN members and ag media professionals in a photography webinar that taught attendees how to get good photos when everything in the shoot goes wrong.
Using this latest project as an inspiration, Joel shared his experience getting photos gathered to support a story about farmers who work on civil war battlefields. His focus was in western Maryland and the Battle of Antietam in 1862. He shared photos and his story of how he took those photos and what he could’ve done better.
His priorities for the shoot were to capture the civil war theme so vividly that captions weren’t needed in print to explain the photo. There was a canon on the farm and “Boy, I shot the heck out of this,” he said. He also took pictures of The Bloody Cornfield, the house, soybeans, a statue memorial, and the farmstead.
Takeaways for attendees included:
- Research counts. Using google maps and careful research, Joel was able to map out directions and angles as he prepped for the shoot.
- Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Farmers in the battlefields that day were working and Joel says he wish he had asked a few more of them at that photo shoot to help him get set a little earlier.
At the end of his photo presentation, he said, “I’m happy with the photos I got, but I never quite got that perfect photo.”
Closing the webinar – he answered questions from members about using manual or auto settings on his camera, digging deeper into the battle history to find relatives of ancestors who fought in the battles and drone use. To catch the answers to these and hear the insights firsthand from this webinar- visit our webinar library! Members get access for free.