Stephanie Wallace Photography

It seems that many people seem to think that photography is really easy, just buy a nice expensive camera and you can take good pictures right?  Wrong.  Yes, having nice equipment is helpful, but it certainly isn’t everything. You have to learn about properly composing a shot and proper exposure. I shoot in full manual mode. I choose the shutter speed and aperture (f stop) for every shot.  No, I don’t always nail it, it takes a lot of practice.  I shoot RAW files, rather than jpg, which gives me more flexibility when it comes to post processing.

When I don’t get the shot perfect straight out of camera (SOOC), I edit it using Adobe Lightroom and/or Adobe Photoshop.  Here are a few before and after examples:

In this first shot above, I really wanted the back lit yellow leaves and the pond behind her.  Of course, when the light is behind the subject, the face will be in shadow, sometimes the subject may even end up looking like a silhouette. I wanted to see her face. I was by myself, shooting without an assistant, so I attempted to hold a reflector under my elbows while also holding the camera to take the shot. It didn’t work out quite as I planned.  I wanted to use a reflector because I felt it would give a warmer, softer tone, than just using fill flash.  So I corrected this in Lightroom by using the fill light slider.

The above photo came out looking pinkish. I don’t remember what I had my camera white balance set to, but it obviously wasn’t the right choice. The white balance controls the color tones in the photo.  This was taken in pretty low light, the sun was setting, which probably added to the pink tone. I made a white balance adjustment in Lightroom.  When you shoot in RAW format you have many more choices for adjusting the white balance. I prefer to make a custom white balance adjustment when I can, by using the white balance selector. It’s a tool that looks like an eye dropper. I grab the tool and then find a spot in the photo that is a neutral light grey color. That usually corrects the color of the overall photo.

Right after I took the above photo, I noticed the hot spot (sun) on her hair. I had her move, but I ended up liking this pose and angle better. I used the clone tool in Photoshop to clone pixels of her hair to cover up the bright spot.  It wasn’t easy,and it took a lot of time.  I know there is still a spot on her shoulder, but I didn’t find that as distracting, so I left it. I also made a slight s-curve adjustment to help the image pop.

The sky was gorgeous on this day and I NEEDED to get it in the background. The sun was behind me to my right, which did cause her to squint a little. I just made some simple adjustments in Lightroom to make the photo pop. I decreased the luminance of the blue to bring out the blue in the sky. I used the recovery and fill light sliders to  help even out the light on her face and lighten up the shadows in the trees behind her. I slightly increased the clarity, vibrance and saturation and burned the edges just a bit.

Sometimes I want to provide a color and a black and white version of the same photo. In the above example, I warmed up the color a bit in Lightroom, then I exported to Photoshop and touched up under her eyes and a few spots on her skin.  I also used an action to make a black and white version of the same photo.

So as you see, a lot of time goes into making your portraits look their very best. I might spend an hour with you taking the portraits, but I spend a few more hours beyond that touching them up.