Last weekend I went to Houston for the Reddit meetup. It was great! Lots of people, delicious food (bacon-wrapped hotdogs, oh my goodness). While I was there I snapped a quick portrait of my boyfriend's sister. Well, it was more like we both felt awkward in a large social gathering, despite it being with other Redditors, so we ran off into a corner and were taking faux-artsy pictures of the trees.

Here's the photo SOOC (straight out of camera). The day was pretty cloudy and extremely humid. Not the best quality photo of course, but my goodness this girl is photogenic.

When I got home to review my photos, I lingered on this one. It really wasn't the best picture, but I loved her cute smile and thought it was worth salvaging anyway. The main reason I was initially put off by the photo was because of the boring, snapshot quality. There isn't much you can do about that once you're removed from the scene, so I made it a bit more intimate by cropping very close. That day I'd been looking at vintage wedding photos, and liked the purpley shadow with orange glow that a lot of the photographers are using now. So I tried to emulate it a little with this photo.


Here's the result. I was kind of disappointed in how it turned out. Her hair looks kind of cool with that purplish tint - I feel it's something she would do on her own - but the photo just looks cold in a very unpleasant way and didn't do her smile any favors. Also, in trying to add that orange glow, I realized this simply wasn't the best photo to choose for that effect. Or perhaps I simply need more practice. Either way, I realized I needed to go through a different method to really bring out this photo.


Here's my second edit. I like this a lot better! It has that washed out quality of a vintage photo but looks infinitely warmer. Her eyes pop a little better here too, and though I do miss the purple quality of the hair, I think it shines a little better here. My overall edit here was to remove the blue-gray cast of the photo, burn a little bit of purple (in the end, I don't think this step made too much of a difference) and add a soft light layer of beige.

I'm posting this up because I still feel like I could have performed a better edit on this photo, and hope that one day I'll look back on this and see exactly what I could have done. Right now this is a punctuation mark, a reminder. I feel that as we all learn photoshop and photography techniques, we tend to overdo it on our first go-arounds. Perhaps this is overdone. We'll see!



Hi! I'm a photographer based in Austin that's pretty new to the industry and art form. I love learning more about the process but it can sometimes be frustrating discovering the right sorts of information you need - stuff that can be easily taken for granted but not taught to somebody that hasn't been classically trained. Here I want to document my own journey as I learn more, and pass that knowledge on to you. This is a collaborative sport!

Hopefully this will be a compendium of not just photography in all its forms but also a sort of diary of the things I'm interested in. I have a terrible habit sometimes of picking things up and not sticking through, even though I do love them, so this blog will be way to motivate me to continue. I've started blogs before and dropped them, of course (oh, the irony) but this is something I'm pretty passionate about, and I'm determined to see this one through. It's nice to have a companion to life, even if it's recordings of your past thoughts.

That's the wonderful thing about forgetting, or being forgetful - reading back on your own writing is like a hello from a world that is both unfamiliar yet completely intimate. In writing, I hope to forget. Forget and learn.


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