Photoshoot

Alt-Boudoir

The creative part of my brain is significantly broken.

Not that I can’t be creative, but rather I can’t conceptualize what I want to do and then take the necessary steps to create my idea. Instead I treat every piece that I do as an improve performance. When I took music lessons I could never write an original piece but I could pick up any instrument and make it sound decent to a rhythm. I could never draw a coherent picture but I could doodle in my notebook in class all day long. The same thing goes for my photography, a lot of the time I just show up where I show up, get the camera out and just wing it until I’m happy with the images that I have captured. Lucky for me I have a lot of friends willing to work with my erratic style and do last minute shoots with no real solid concept behind them. That’s how this shoot with Tara came to be. It was on my most recent trip back to Albuquerque where we met at her place, we went through her wardrobe, picked out a few outfits and just shot for about 2 hours. As always, we had a ball just screwing around until we looked back at the photos and appreciated what we shot.

The thing I love about these photos was how we used natural light to really bring out some of Tara’s Natural features.

She is honestly one of the hardest working people I know and it shows. The thing both of us couldn’t get over in the photos were her abs. buy angling her just right in the window light we were able to accentuate that feature. It worked best when she was back lit by the window and the fill came from the rooms natural bounce light and some shadow raising in Lightroom.

What Tara typically brings to the table is a certain raw emotion to every photoshoot.

Sure she’s gorgeous, and her style with the tattoos and wild hair makes her look edgy, but the great thing about her is that she’s a genuine soul who just loves to be around other people as long as they are good people. She never looks fake, or “superior,” in her photos. She just looks like Tara, and that’s what makes shooting with her so enjoyable.

Exploring National Harbor

One of the places I have frequented now that I live on the East Coast is National Harbor. It’s just across the bridge from Alexandria and has a lot to do and see in the way of entertainment. I spend a couple of hours down there just looking around and taking photos. Being that it was the middle of the day on a Wednesday there weren’t a whole lot of people around but what was around was some unique opportunities to brush up on my photography skills when not shooting people.

FLZ Jacqui Daniels Makeup: Lightroom Timelapse

A year ago I did a shoot where I helped my friend Jacqui Daniels Get started on her makeup portfolio with a shoot where she introduced me to Feliz. The shoot was themed to be a very high fashion glam look. It featured a lot of gold and so for the edit I wanted that gold look to shine through so that became a main focus of the editing process. Balancing out colors is always a challenge but what I always find works best for portraiture is to lower the saturation by at least 30 and that counters anything drastic that you do with contrast or the white balance. Other than some basic retouching and softening on the skin all the photos really came together

To check out Jacqui’s makeup go to https://www.facebook.com/makeupbyjacquidaniels/?fref=ts

You can see more photos of Feliz on instagram at https://instagram.com/flzmrtnz

Emilie in the Snow

Virginia just got it’s first snow of the year just in time for me and Emilie to have settled in after moving out to Northern Virginia. We got about and inch and a half of snow and it’s a site that is so rare in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I am from. We manage to get out right as the snow was calming down but flakes were still falling. It added an element to the photos that is incredibly unique and the help create interest as out of focus element. Bellow is a time lapse of my editing process which you can see I only use a light amount of retouching and most of the focus is on getting the contrast and color right where I like it. For this shoot I ended up cheating a little bit on the magenta side simply because i felt like sit fit the mood better especially because it looked like the white balance I shot in was cheating toward the Green side.

The Versatility of Delina

 

In the words of a great american poet “today was a good day.” At least that’s how yesterday felt. Afternoon class was canceled, I huge load of pressure was taken off of me and I got an impromptu opportunity to shoot with Delina Ellise. It’s hard not to be pleased with how yesterday turned out. Recently Delina had a recent change to her hair style that has resulted in her being able to change her look at a moments notice. It also gave me a chance to play with things in my studio space such as the giant window that acts as a big soft light source which is amazing things for portraits.It’s also just really fun to have a shoot where you and the model are just messing around and hoping that it works out as opposed to trying really hard to make the images come out a certain way. Shoots always turn out best when they are fun and don’t feel like work.

New Mexico Snow Leads to Photo Op With Emilie

New Mexico got hit with one of the more ridiculous snow storms in recent history and me and my girlfriend Emilie took that opportunity to show off some of her new winter clothes that she got over the holidays. We went to a small trail near our home and just did quick shoot and the images came out so beautiful. It goes to show that you don’t have to make shoots super complicated. A model a location and a camera are the ingredients and with some creativity you can create some gorgeous images.

My Love Affair With Black and White Images. feat: Samantha Arellano

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I don’t always edit my images in black and white… but some times I just can’t help myself. I never go into a shoot automatically knowing what I’m going to do in post processing. But once I’m sitting down playing around in Lightroom, the decision comes down to feel. This is most defiantly the case of my most recent Cafe shoot with Samantha Arellano.

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When I make the decision to edit the images in black and white itnormally comes down to one question: is it working better than the color version? I have a particular style that involves having very detailed images with high levels of contrast. Some times this will results in vibrant colors but often they can also become very muddy. If I don’t feel like the image has good color I’ll switch it to black and white and a lot of the problems I was having will go away.

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Another reason I will switch to black and white is if I had to shoot at a high ISO. This wan’t so much the case in this photo shoot but often when I have to shoot in conditions where I need to be at something like 3200-6400 I’ll opt into black and white 99.99% percent of the time. This is mostly because when you shoot at the higher ISOs you start to introduce noise and the color detail begins to fall apart. When you’re in black and white that color detail is irrelevant and the noise begins to look more like film grain than it does digital artifacts.

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Another thing going to black and white helps with is removing distractions from the background. With on location shoots gaining control over a background is practically impossible. Busy color schemes, bright highlights and distracting elements all become less of an issue with black and white images, so it’s not hard for me to opt into a black and white photo.AJA_0066

Now black and white is clearly a style that is as old as photography itself and clearly can’t be considered original. A common thing I’ll hear from models after handing in images is that they’ll say “I love this photo, can get it in color.” It’s taken a while for me not to get offended by those kinds of statements but It’s a common thing for artist to hear people to ask for changes especially when they don’t understand reasoning behind your decisions.

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Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to have both a color and black and white version everyone is allowed to have different taste when it comes to photos. If the job requires me to stay in color and forsake black and white images I will do so, and make the color work as best I can. However, if I get the option I’m going to go with the one I think works best. Black and white just worked better on this rounds of photos.