Yung Rip

Last month I got a call from a music industry executive in Australia who represents a new hip hop artist - Yung Rip. He is in Memphis recording his new cd at Ardent Studios. I got a chance to photograph these images with the new Canon 5d MarkII camera. Here are just a few of the images from the session. I'll keep you posted when the cd comes out and which images they choose for the cover. The great thing about working with new artists, they have lots of drive and incredible talent, you never know when you may be working with the next grammy winning artist.

Save The Dress-Memphis Wedding Photographer

Here's our hot new photography feature that everyone's talking about. If you want one for your wedding or engagement session, just ask about our special package offer. Our videos can be downloaded to your Facebook, Wedding Website, or wherever you want. Check out our new video and imagine yourself in these images....pretty cool! You can also get some pretty cool music from a list of great artists in our stock music plan. Tired of the same old boring videos? We can change that!

Memphis Wedding Photography Classes - Photo Art

Here is part of a recent collection I shot in Mobile Bay last summer. The Photo Art collection is one of our most requested techniques for brides who love art! We also teach this in our workshops and one on one mentoring classes. Find out more about our workshops on the website. We teach photoshop processing techniques and a variety of art techniques. We teach classes for advanced photographers, and new enthusiasts. We can also bring in our advanced team, one who is a recent graduate of The University of Art in San Francisco to teach larger workshops. Ryan is a master in the entire Adobe CS4 Suite, and has an incredible talent for art. On this image, I did a layering process with about 6 layers and created an overlay along with distressing to create this piece. Visit our website at www.michaelallenphotography.com to find out more about our collections.

Lindsey & David - Memphis Tennessee - Michael Allen Photography

Here's a sneek peek of Lindsey & David's wedding on January 17th, 2009. They had a full Military Style wedding at Griffin Chapel in rural Memphis. Here are just a few of the highlights from their wedding.

Michael Allen Photography Memphis - Southern Bride Destination Weddings

 

Here are a few pages of the new 2009 Spring Summer Edition of Southern Bride Magazine due to hit the newstands in January. I loved shooting this session, and chose one of my favorite locations in Perdido Key Florida, a remote key with beautiful surroundings and a rainforest landscape design at the Eden Resort. I hope you enjoy the photographs shown in the layouts from the magazine. For the session my wife Janice provided the hair and makeup designs, and the support team at Southern Bride Magazine assisted with the models and location arrangements, as well as assistance from Orange Beach Weddings, For the session, I used a Canon 5d with a 70-200mm IS lens, and a large california sunbounce reflector, and a variety of additional scrims and reflectors from Westcott. We contracted the models from the local region, and as you can see, they did an incredible job on the session. Part of this collection was shot for our Destination Weddings collection, to give brides an idea of how to turn an ordinary beach wedding into an incredible destination wedding with an international flavor. When I started the shoot, I set the model away from the building, but as I turned and began to notice how the building looked like the bow of a huge cruise ship, I moved the set quickly toward the balcony of the resort to take advantage of the available light. The session began at high noon, which some photographers shy away from due to the intensity of the sunlight, but in this case I used it to my advantage and popped in some extra sun with my reflectors. For the next segment of the session we traveled to the historic district in Mobile Bay. I'll post those next. I hope you enjoy! 

Michael Allen Photography Memphis - Flemings Prime Steakhouse

Here are some recent photographs from a corporate session with Flemings Steakhouse. Flemings is one of my commercial clients. Flemings is one of the best,high end, fine dining restaurants in the country, winning numerous accolades nationwide. Located prime cities offering the finest in dining experiences,

Flemings offers some incredible cuisine and fine wines.

For this session I was asked to photograph the local owner-partners in the Memphis location for the companies website and various media publications. For this session I used a Canon 5d with a 24-205 mm IS lens and a Canon Fisheye Lens with a colored corrected soft box from Westcott, a diffused fill flash, a small hot light to accent the background, and combined the ambient lighting of the restaurant. I kept the ISO from 500 to 640, and the aperture at 125, with an f-stop of f4. For the room settings I again used some small hot lights to accent the room, and adjusted the color temperature to match the ambient lighting. I left the images a bit on the warm side to add to an evening dining experience.

Michael Allen Photography Memphis - The Gift

Last month I was asked to photograph a story line that is being edited into a HD Video presentation for the Holidays at Hope Church in Memphis. The basic story line is about a recovering alcoholic father and his first Christmas back at home with his wife and daughter after treatment. His daughter gives him a gift that reminds him of how wrong he is in his daily life, and how much of a blessing he has in his family. This is a pretty exciting photography/ HD video that will be shown to over 25,000 people who attend the Hope Christmas services on Christmas Eve. It's not often that I get the opportunity to have that many people see my work in one place, so I'm very excited to be involved in this project. These images will be edited by the production editors at Hopes state of the art facilities, cut in Final Cut Pro and rendered to full 1080i HD and shown on 2-25 ft x 35ft HD screens using the latest Christie HD projectors. I did a similar project for Hope this summer, which I will post at a later date. Here are just a few of the several hundred images that I shot for this project. I shot this with a Canon 5d with a Canon 24-105mm IS lens in available light with a california sunbounce light reflector & light modifiers, I did a mild boost in the vibrance level, but the images needed very little color adjustment. This project is a great example of a cinematic style of photography that I offer to many of my commercial clients. Here are just a few of the images from the shoot, they are not in any particular order, but I hope you enjoy the images. (All Images Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved - Michael Allen Photography)

Michael Allen- Editor's Choice Award- Capture Memphis Book

Here's an update from the special Capture Memphis book which was released at a special book release event last week. The book is now published and available for sale at Davis Kidd Booksellers and other local Memphis book stores. We are very excited about this breaking news!
This years "Editor's Choice Award" was given to Michael Allen Photography for the collection of photography featuring Special Events in Memphis! We are so excited to have one this prestigious award. This is a tremendous honor to be selected as the best of over 10,000 photographs submitted in the competition. We are also very excited to have many of our photographs published in this great new book showing off our great city! The book is now available at most major bookstores in the Memphis region. Be sure to visit www.capturememphis.com and order a copy. Thank you Memphis for this great honor! A few select Memphis Photographers won similar awards for their photographs, including Mark Allen, Michael's brother who is an avid photographer in the city. Several other Memphis photographers are featured in the book for their top voted photography as well. Capture Memphis is an incredible book that depicts the absolute best photography in Memphis! Shown above is one of the award winning photographs that appear in the book from the Hope Summer Concert Series. Follow the images below and visit the Capture Memphis website.

Thinkwell Creative

Here are a few samples from a recent commercial shoot for my clients over at www.thinkwellcreative.com. We did a full business session to build up their stock images for their new website. Each month I get to work with 3 or 4 businesses who are staying on the leading edge by keeping their portfolios current. For this shoot we spent the morning at Shelby Farms, brought several props from our planning session, and came up with several concepts for their campaign. These photo sessions are great for businesses for keeping ahead of the competition, highlighting what your business does best, and involves your staff by building enthusiasm and team collaboration. If your business would like to book a session, contact us and we will walk you through the creative process for designing your photo shoot for your business. We can make it simple, or go all out for a full production shoot complete with makeup artist, set design, on location or production studio facilities.

Capture Memphis & Michael Allen Photography

Be sure to check out what's going on in Memphis at the Capture Memphis website. It's great to see all the amazing photographers posting there beautiful work. This summer I selected a few of my most recent photographs to enter into the Capture Memphis contest. I'm very excited to have several of my photographs voted in the top rankings by several hundred thousand fellow Memphians. The photos will be included in the "Capture Memphis Book" to be released at Davis Kidd Booksellers in November. If you would like your own personal copy featuring the very best photographs of Memphis by some of the best photographers in the region, be sure to visit www.capturememphis.com and order a copy.

Trash The Dress -John Michael Cooper Workshop - Memphis - Michael Allen Photography

In July I had a great opportunity to attend an advanced workshop by the world famous John Michael Cooper, along with 15 or so professional photographers from across the country. John Michael Cooper is known for starting the "Trash The Dress" craze that is sweeping the world.

He and his wife Dalisa came to Memphis on their recent nationwide tour to teach a workshop about their photography style, business workflow, and a little creative session for all of the participants. John's website is www.altf.com and he is a great guy, very wide open about teaching his profession, and not quite as wild as his photography may imply. My friend Jake Morrow hosted the class, and there were a wide range of photographers in the workshop for the day. Everything I show in my photographs here on the blog are shots of John Michael at work, showing and teaching his style, camera techniques, and creative ideas for models and concepts for each session. The "Trash The Dress" concept is basically a style of photography where the bride and groom are photographed after the wedding, and not as concerned about keeping that beautiful white dress so perfectly clean. Not every dress is totally trashed, but the locations where the photos are taken are very unusual and very artistic. In fact, John Michael taught his concept was mainly a publicity stunt to drive his business, it took off and the rest is history. Some of the photos I shot here show John Michael at work with several models, and one part of the concept session was a tribute to Malcom X. I hope you enjoy seeing some photos of the workshop. 

Ginny Owens - Bebo Norman Concert - Michael Allen Photography - Memphis

Here are a few shots I took for the Hope Summer Concert Series a few weeks back. One of my favorite recording artists is Ginny Owens. I've worked with her a year or two ago, and she is amazing. Not only is she very funny, she is very down to earth and friendly. At the concert, she was playing the grand piano in the 5000 seat concert arena, she has a very soulful, soft way of playing, here I am firing away with my Canon 5d, which is not a very quiet camera, I hoped that the shutter noise would not be too much of a distraction. I asked her later in the green room if she was able to hear my camera, she laughingly said yes, but she did not mind. She will be coming through Memphis this year to record her new album, and I hope to work with her in the studio. Another amazing artist is Bebo Norman, I hope you enjoy a few of the photos from the concert that I shot. There will be more posted on the Hope Concert Series website if you want to see more.

The Red One Camera - On Location Shoot - Hope Production Crew

This Sunday I had a lot of fun working on the set of a local production company in Memphis for an inspirational documentary segment for my great friend Brian Albrecht at Hope Studios. The team was comprised of myself, Jerit Abart, Brian Albrecht, Andy Dean www.deanfv.com (who owns The Red One)

Shannon (our talent for the lemonade making segment), and several other guys from local studios in Memphis. I've been a videographer for many years, mainly on high end productions, and love to work on certain projects as they come up. For this project, I worked in a couple of roles as key grip, and audio engineer for the production. I was very interested in working on this project with Andy, who has the new Red One very high end

production Cinema camera. This camera has incredible capacity, utilizing a full frame 35mm sensor, shoots in RAW, and is essentially the next generation of digital film camera, surpassing most any camera in the world. I recommend going to The Red One website for more technical info at www.Red.com if you are interested in film production, video production, or professional still cameras, as it's

pretty amazing. Andy also has a full production truck with all the pro gear, a full kit of Zeiss lenses, and state of the art digital capture essentials. Here are a few stills i shot of the morning segment of the crew at work. We had a blast, and worked all day indoors, out in the rain, after the rain stopped, we got to enjoy some Memphis humidity, and then some scorching rays of sun in the afternoon, all in true hollywood production fashion. I'll try to set up a link on my blog when the piece is finished for you to see.