Michelle & Johnny serve as the creative force behind Paper Antler, a husband & wife wedding photography duo in my new home town of Minneapolis. They volunteered their time to serve as models during a creative shoot-out last week at the Elevate Workshop held in Northern Minnesota. I adore their work, their personalities, and compassion. They are happy people, together so beautiful.

In 2012, they plan to photograph 50 weddings in 50 states in 50 weeks to raise $50,000 to support victims of human trafficking, one of the fastest growing crimes in the world. To learn more and support their efforts, click here.

1 + 1 = 2 perfect people!

The workshop challenge was to create a set of three photographs telling a visual story using smoke bombs, sparklers, or party poppers as a prop in the photo. In the rain. We were given 10 minutes, timed with stopwatch precision. Participants had to shoot in JPEG with zero post-processing, editing, retouching, or cropping. Just the bare essentials.

I chose to step outside my comfort zone using augment natural light with a ring flash as an on-axis fill light. Typically, I’ll use my typical 5-light studio setup or just as a secondary fill-light illustrated here. The idea was to balance the fill light of the ring flash with the natural, ambient light to create almost a film-like quality with rich dynamic range — straight out of camera.

Happy Friday!