The beach is a beautiful, serene setting for taking photos. It is romantic. At 7:30pm there aren’t many distractions in the background. Except for the beautiful California sunset. It causes me to take a deep breath and as I exhale, I press the shutter release. And I try to keep cool in my head and pretend like I knew this shot would come out this way. But I couldn’t resist. “Whoa!” I show Ana and Ralph their photo on the LCD screen of my Nikon D300. Ralph’s eyebrows raise and Ana smiles. I look up at the sunset and mentally I’m telling the sun and sky, “thanks”.
Ana came prepared to the shoot with 3 changes of clothes and a plan that I can guess came from doing research on flickr or smugmug. It’s great when people have their own ideas of what they want in their shoot. I don’t have to do a poll to find out what my target audience wants.