Avoiding Creative Burnout with Jesse and Moira La Plante

Jesse and Moira La Plante are award winning documentary wedding photographers based in Colorado, and Flash Masters ambassadors. They have won This is Reportage Photographer of the Year and WPGA Photographer of the Year along with countess other awards, and they do it all while using flash. In this live stream they share the working method behind their most original images.

The theme is iteration, which is simply this: do the same thing you did before, but change one variable. Jesse and Moira take you through more than 30 photographs from a single venue they have shot around 40 times, showing exactly what changed between each one, from boom lighting to rim lighting, gels, telephoto crops, halo light and blue hour. Then they open up their astrophotography work, including how they light couples under the Milky Way and why light pollution and a full moon are not the obstacles you think they are.

The second half is where it gets really practical. They walk through five real weddings where the location was genuinely difficult, a boring brown park in February, an alleyway with a white brick wall, a mountain overlook where every photographer stands in the same spot, and show every single failed frame on the way to the final image. Nothing is hidden. You see the bad photos, the wrong turns, and the small change that fixed it.

This is essential viewing if you have ever stood in front of a couple with ten minutes and no idea what to do. Jesse and Moira are refreshingly honest about how often it does not work, and they are firm that the intimidating parts of photography are often made to feel that way on purpose. There is no gatekeeping here, just two working photographers showing you how they think.

Top 5 Things You Will Learn:

• The one variable rule that gets you unstuck in seconds. Instead of moving location or rethinking your whole setup, Jesse and Moira change a single thing and shoot again. You will see this play out across five real weddings, from the first bad frame to the final image.
• How to get a clean rim light, and how to fix it when it flares. Their exact working height and distance behind the couple, where to hide the light so it does not bleed through, and the simple hand trick Moira uses to stop light spilling onto the ground.
• Why light pollution and a full moon do not stop you shooting the stars. Jesse and Moira bust the astrophotography rules most photographers follow blindly, including the night the full moon was the only reason you can tell they were at the Grand Canyon.
• How originality directly affects what you can charge, and whether you place in awards. Having judged competitions with thousands of entries, they explain why a technically perfect image that looks like everyone else's gets passed over, and how being visibly different lets you raise your prices.
• What to do when a location is genuinely awful. Their old 'Boring Venue Box' and the reflection trick they reach for again and again, plus why the difference between a good photo and an award winning one is much smaller than you think.