I’ve been working on a magazine submission for one of our bride’s this week. Her wedding has a very good chance of being featured in a well respected wedding magazine (we’re keeping our fingers crossed), and we wanted to send the editor images of her invitations, programs, address labels, etc.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to shoot still life? I totally prefer taking photos of people over still life because people have all the emotion to work with, but wow, when it’s still life…my respect for food photographers goes way up! The food in Cooking Light gets much yummier looking for sure!

In our Getting Published 101 Kit, I write a lot about what magazine editors are looking for when you submit individual stock images or full weddings for publication. I have found that one of the key components that makes or breaks a wedding being featured is the amount of detail images. You can have the most beautiful bride and groom photos, but if you don’t have detail images too your chances of getting published just went way down.

Why? Editors know that brides buy wedding magazines to look for new and creative detail ideas for their own upcoming weddings. Whether it’s the untraditional veil

or making your programs look like actual Playbills

or the gifts for all the dinner guests

and the heirloom pearls and favorite teacup

brides love details! I did when I was a bride. And I still do!

As I’ve been working on these wedding images, I’ve noticed that the 85mm (fixed/prime) lens works best. The below shots are all the way down to a 1.4 F-stop/aperture. This means super blur every where expect the point I’m focused on (the focus point was the pearls on the invite). I feel like the low f stop helps add emotion and dimension.

When shooting details think low aperture/f stop. If you’re a wedding photographer, consider buying a macro lens for your details. (I used the macro lens on the above teacup/pearls image.) There are maybe 10 images I shoot with the macro in the whole 12 hour wedding day, but those 10 macro images may be the very thing that gets the wedding published in a magazine. And that publicity is definitely worth the cost of the macro lens. 🙂

For more tips on getting your images published, check out our Getting Published 101 Kit. We’ve had great feedback from photographers who have purchased it!

Also, the Early Bird Special for the Chicago Workshop ($799 instead of $999) ends tonight at midnight PST! If your planning on coming, make sure you don’t miss out on this 20% savings!!! You can register here!

Can’t wait to meet all of you in Chicago!! And yes, the forum is still in progress so hopefully all of you Chicago ladies will be able to chat there sooner than later. 🙂 (again, fingers crossed)