Have I ever mentioned how much I love family farms for pictures? Especially family farms that have been around for some years and you have a collection of old barns, old equipment, and everything that comes along with it. As a photographer I LOVE rust, I love rotting wood, there’s something about it that makes for some amazing pictures. On top of that, Renee’s family farm had ponds that were in fantastic locations as far as the sunset was concerned and a nice creek that made for some really great picture locations. Renee’s shoot took me to Carlinville, IL. It was a little bit of a drive but definitely worth it. I’m all about getting out and seeing new locations. It keeps me fresh, and it provides so many opportunities for unique pictures, because there won’t be very many people if any others at all who have pictures at Renee’s location. 🙂 And that’s what I’m all about, anything I can do to make the session unique; whether it’s a distance away, the edits, etc. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of edits to pictures to produce the exact look I want. Over the past year this has been some of the changes I have been making to my workflow as well as trying to provide something that’s different that what everyone else is doing. I kind of look at my job as a photographer like a director of a movie. A director will film a movie with a certain vision in mind, now they can only do so much as they film for legal reasons, for the safety of the crew, and well, let’s face it, flying a ship to another planet probably doesn’t make much financial sense for a movie production 😉 It never seems to fail either, on days I have shoots, the sky is clear and just a light blue and the sunset glow isn’t very colorful, and then days I do not have shoots, we have an amazing partly cloudy sky, red/orange sunset, etc. So I got to thinking, how can I work around this issue? I’m not going to reschedule a shoot simply because the sky is clear, that would be crazy. So I started taking a collection of pictures of the sky when I didn’t have shoots, when the sky was perfect, and I thought when I have a shoot where I do not have much for a sky, I’ll simply plug the sky in that I want, thus providing the exact look I want for the picture. Because even if we have a partly cloudy sky, sometimes it’s not exactly the look I want for the picture.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to do this kind of editing on every picture, otherwise I would be spending months editing just a handful of pictures. haha But this new method not only keeps the flow of the shoot going – forget spending minutes on minutes setting up flashes, reflectors and whatnot – but it allows me to produce work that is creative and artistic. Because essentially what I envision for my pictures is for them to be hanging on walls like they are pieces of artwork. Not just a portrait. Like I said, I don’t do this on all my pictures, I call these my signature edits because it’s kind of my own thing that I do to make the session a little more unique. These edits take time to fine tune, but in the end they provide the senior, the couple, the family with a piece of work that they will cherish for many years. It’ll also produce a picture that they’ll not only love but they won’t help but look at it for some time; this is ultimately my goal with every shoot, and with my signature edits, hopefully that becomes a possibility with everyone I have the pleasure of working with.
