My creative process isn’t for everyone so don’t read this if your not interested.

People ask me what my settings are for my photos all the time, the truth is settings DO NOT matter. You can achieve a well exposed image with several settings. Think about the exposure triangle like a Rubik’s cube (kinda) you can rotate one row but then you gotta spin another row to get the colors to line back up. I am not going to ramble about fstop increments but I am going to write a little about how I work through a shoot. All of these images were taken on the same shoot at the Wort Worth Botanical Gardens in Texas. A lovely Sunday afternoon over the coarse of a two hour block of time.

When making decisions about how to start an image I ask myself a few questions.

1. How much ambient light do I want in my image?
2. What focal length do I want?
3. How much depth of field do I want?
4. What type of light? Hard or soft?
5. What compliments the persons look?

I typically look for colors and shapes first to put my subject in, then I start down the rabbit hole of how do I want the image to look. I take a test shot then start working towards what I visualized in my head. I love rich colors and I do not love spending a ton of time editing in photoshop so I learned off camera flash (OCF). I found that if I just added a pop of light or in some cases a ton of light I could spent way less time editing images. I do try to start off with natural light and a wide open aperture for the oh so dreamy bokeh look, but I quickly revert back to dark images with harsh lighting and saturated color. The ol trusty speed light usually 1/2 power and a aperture of f16 :} the sweet spot for everything in focus and harsh light with saturated color right out of the camera. My happy place.

Recognize the red tree in the background? I started here on the rock then it was like a moth to a flame, all I could think about was how to fill the image with the red leaves and have nothing else visible. Like I said earlier a rabbit hole of thought.  The What if question comes up a lot.

SEE, I do use natural light sometimes. 2.0 BOKEH. I also use my title shift lens sometimes, its not super easy to focus because I am spoiled with auto focus typically. The tilt shift is also not a very good portrait lens if you plan on extreme tilt or shift or both. It worked here for eliminating some unwanted fence in the backgound so I kept a few.

I can not tell you how many times during this shot I said she looked just like my daughter. No, this is not my kiddo even though she looks like she could be.