Finding my vision: the importance of personal work. I plan on photographing an abundance of personal work this year. I want to capture the essence of any new area that I visit. Shooting personal work really helps to find your inner voice. It allows me to create & define what I want to say with my photography. I love studying composition and light with the elements that are given all around me. The photographs seen here were taken in Washington DC on my free time at The FIND DC Workshop.
Street photography and personal work like this feed directly into how I approach weddings. When you spend a day in an unfamiliar city with nothing but a film camera and your instincts, you develop the habit of reading light and anticipating moments without thinking about it. That discipline shows up on a wedding day, when everything is moving fast and you do not get a second take. There is no posing happening in these Washington D.C. frames. There is no direction. It is just observation, timing, and film.
The film medium itself adds something that is difficult to explain until you print it. The grain structure, the way highlights roll off instead of clipping, the color rendering from the actual chemistry of the emulsion. These are not things you can replicate with a preset. The photographers who come through The FIND Workshop tend to understand this already. Jonathan Canlas built the workshop around the idea that intentional photography and real photography are the same thing.
Washington D.C. is particularly good for this kind of shooting. The architecture is massive and human scale at the same time. The National Mall gives you enormous sight lines and then collapses them into tight street-level moments around corners. The mix of government buildings, residential neighborhoods, and public spaces means you can walk four blocks and be in a completely different visual environment. The light in the late afternoon on the east-facing facades of the monuments is worth the whole trip on its own.
If you want to see how this sensibility carries into the wedding work, our Philadelphia wedding portfolio gives a full picture of how we approach ceremony and reception coverage when the stakes are real and there is no going back for a reshoot.
