I'm finally getting around to blogging about the WPS convention I attended with my second shooter, Sharon McMahon, and intern, Kara Johnson, earlier this week. The event took place at the lovely Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, NC. I had a blast networking with lots of friendly North Carolina photographers. I left motivated to put the work I love doing out there for all the world to see. I learned a lot about the business of wedding photography, was introduced to some cool new gadgets and learned several shooting tricks that should make my job easier and my work better. Here are a few photos from the live shoots that took place Sunday and Monday evening.

We had awesome models available, so everyone had the opportunity to take beautiful photos. Here are two of the models from the live shoot with Tim Sayer. While Tim was doing his amazing epic lighting tricks with another model, I focused on the other two models who were taking a break from posing for the camera.

Here's a photo of Tim showing those in his live shoot group how to create epic lighting by underexposing the ambient light to supersaturate the background and popping in properly exposed gorgeous soft light from a beauty dish.

I don't have any photos showing what the epic lighting looked like, because I didn't have my radio transimitters or a beauty dish with me, so I can't show you how amazing Tim's photos looked, but I can show you what Tim looked like while shooting the photos.

After the workshop, I was inspired to wake up early and take some epic photos of Erin and Jenn, the owners of the Lazy Turtle Farm in Hillsborough, where we were staying. Here's what Erin and Jenn look like in epic lighting, without beauty dish or soft box or anything else to soften the light from my Quantum flash. I think the harsh light works here, giving the subjects, who had been working on the farm for three hours by 9 a.m., a gritty feel.