In addition to giving seminars, once a year I attend a seminar with one of my favorite photographers so that I can keep my style fresh and swap ideas with industry leaders. This year I chose David Beckstead, one of the top 10 wedding photographers in the world in 2007. For you photographers reading this, I will be adding a seminar assessment to this post in a few days (it was a fabulous seminar!!!)- for the rest of you, I wanted to share some of my favorite images that I shot during the model shoot:

Nicole and Tim held their beautiful destination wedding in Mexico last weekend- it was a gorgeous day, with the ceremony at Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe in downtown Puerto Vallarta. View the slideshow here, or take a look at some of my favorites from the day, which started with a True Romance Shoot downtown:

I loved these place cards- simple, but they say “beach wedding venue” in the best way. Nicole is an event planner in Chicago, so she had a lot of beautiful touches:

I am kicking off the Michelle Turner Photography seminars in two weeks (the first seminar is in Maine, with other seminars in Boston, Charleston, and South Dakota).  To celebrate that and the release of my book, Wedding Photography Now (which is available from Barnes and Noble or Amazon), I am kicking off a series of posts for photographers!

Every week I get a number of emails from other photographers asking me about how I process my photographs. To be honest, a lot of the magic happens in camera- it’s about finding the right light, composing and exposing the photograph correctly, and using the right lens/focal length/aperture combination to produce those beautiful, dreamy, out-of focus backgrounds.

However, I also do a fair amount of post-processing to achieve the look that I am going for. I use a lot of my own actions and textures, but I also use some that are available for purchase from other photographers, and I thought that I would share those here! Remember, the key is not having a lot of actions, but rather knowing how and when to apply them.

This photograph, for example, had the following steps applied:

A) Color/Contrast correction in Adobe Lightroom 2 (Beta) and a midbump.

B) Yin/Yang from the Boutwell’s Totally Rad Action set.

C) The Shadow/Highlight filter in Photoshop CS3.

D) Big Run Color from Parker Pfister’s Action set.

E) The clone tool to manage highlights.

F) Jesh de Rox’s textures, set to overlay and masked out on their faces.

G) Kevin Kubota’s Magic Sharp action, applied selectively rather than globally.

A) Color/Contrast correction in Adobe Lightroom 2 (Beta) and a midbump.

B) Yin/Yang from the Boutwell’s Totally Rad Action set.

C) The Shadow/Highlight filter in Photoshop CS3.

D) Tilt Shift from Parker Pfister’s Action set, masked out.

E) Red Leaf Vintage Textures, set to Multiply and masked out.

F) Black and White conversion with one of Jeff Ascough’s actions (simply the best black and white out there).

G) Jesh de Rox’s textures, set to overlay and masked out on their faces.

H) Kevin Kubota’s Magic Sharp action, applied selectively rather than globally.

I’ve had a lot of questions about this next photograph, which had very little done to it:

A) Color/Contrast correction in Adobe Lightroom 2 (Beta).

B) Vintage Cross Process with Red Leaf Studios actions.

C) Kevin Kubota’s Magic Sharp action, applied selectively rather than globally.

Arguably one of my favorite photographs:

A) Color/Contrast correction in Adobe Lightroom 2 (Beta) and a midbump.

B) Yin/Yang from the Boutwell’s Totally Rad Action set.

C) The Shadow/Highlight filter in Photoshop CS3.

D) Tilt Shift from Parker Pfister’s Action set, masked out.

E) Big Run Color from Parker Pfister’s Action set.

F) iCorrect Portrait to bring back the skin tones.

G) A fair amount of cloning and healing in Photoshop CS3.

H) Jesh de Rox’s textures, at least three, but I may have used four different textures here, including one of my own.

I) This photograph is a large print in my studio. To blow it up, I used iDC photography’s resizing action.

J) Kevin Kubota’s Magic Sharp action, applied selectively rather than globally.