2013 is already turning out to be a very exciting year at the Heidi Hope Studio!  Now that we are finally caught up from the Holiday madness, we are starting up our Ask Us Anything feature on the blog again.  For those of you new to our blog, we accept questions via our facebook wall and select the most popular questions to answer for you here!

This week, Mariah and I will be answering your questions together.  Let’s get started!

Question:  Hello, I love the softness in all your images! What is your favorite lens to photograph babies with? – Tania

Mariah’s Answer: Both Heidi and I use the 50mm 1.4 lens for most of our studio shoots. It’s a fast, sharp lens that lets you get close to your subject in a smaller space, and it gives beautiful depth of field! We also love the 85mm 1.4, but we usually use that outdoors, where you have more room and more depth to capture. The 35mm 1.4 is a wide-angle lens we keep on hand for really tight spaces on-location!

Question: How do you stay sane and balance being a full time mommy/wife/editor/photographer?  – Stephanie

Heidi’s Answer:  I don’t know if I stay sane per say, but I try to maintain some amount of balance by prioritizing my “to-do’s” in life and keeping a separation between “work time” and “family time.”  It was much harder in the beginning.  Starting a business, especially when your husband is your business partner, is an incredible amount of work and stress.  We had to learn to keep work at work when we left each day so that we are able to focus on our family when we are at home.  We also have an amazing staff now who helps me with the creative process every step of the way.  I can’t imagine juggling all of this on my own!

Question:  I absolutely love your light, and airy aesthetic. Any shooting, camera settings, or editing tips for capturing that beautiful creamy “glow” without getting hot spots? Will you be offering any editing workshops in 2013? Oh, pretty please??- Jeanne

Mariah’s Answer: Thanks Jeanne! We love a really light and whimsical look. First, we start with great light to work with! Our studio give us soft, bright light year-round, and we’re able to work with consistently awesome light. For camera settings, we shoot in Manual mode (allows us to push the exposure when we need a ‘glowy’ backlit shot), and always produce RAW format files. We’ll make sure our highlights are correct during the initial edit in RAW (we set our RAW window to show us blown-out highlights in red), and watch our highlights as we color edit in Photoshop, especially on skin tones. We almost always lighten our images with Curves in Photoshop, and soften parts of the image (sometimes even the floor!) with a skin-softening action to give it a dreamy look.

There WILL be workshop information announced soon, so stay tuned!  🙂

Question:  Love the look of your images, what type of lighting setup do you use for a shot like this? – Kathleen

Heidi’s Answer:  Thanks Kathleen!  We use all natural light at our studio.  We have a wall of large windows, and we soften the light with curtains when we need to.  The image you’re referring to on facebook (below) was taken with the window camera right.

Question:  Love seeing your SOOC shots with what settings you used. Could you post some? ( I know this is more of a request than a question) – Amanda

Heidi’s Answer:  Here ya go Amanda!  This is a fav from last week:

Question:  I would love to hear a little more on the ‘behind the scenes’ setup of HHP… What are the daily responsibilities of your studio manager, and what would the most time consuming tasks be for the Manager??  Thanks for always keeping me inspired!! – Crystal

Mariah’s Answer:  Hi Crystal! We have 5 employees that work at the studio every day: Shaun manages the business, Heidi and I photograph, Meg designs and orders all of our products, and Caroline edits and assists everyone with the million things we all do! Shaun is the guy who answers the phone and emails, keeps track of the books, makes the schedule, and conducts our in-person image viewing appointments, where he assists clients in choosing and planning their custom-designed products. The tasks vary from day-to-day (if we announce a special, he definitely has more phone and email time), but he consistently spends most of his time making sure our clients are happy! He also happens to take the trash out and do the laundry, which we appreciate him for.  🙂

Question:  Do you use actions,and if yes what are your favorites? – Fofu

Heidi’s Answer:  We use actions for all of our batch processing.  We also most frequently use some color actions that we have developed for ourselves that fits our studio lighting really well.  I love experimenting with editing though, and over the years some of my favorite go-to actions for playing have been from Florabella, Paint The Moon, Jinky Art and Oh So Posh!