Embraced by the Light

“When darkness comes, let us not condemn the dark, but light a lamp to illuminate.”

I like to keep props to a minimum when it comes to my style of photography. I tend to use the environment at hand whether it\’s natural or manmade and work within that framework. But here lately, I’ve been broadening out with my creativity and using unique objects to shoot through or place around the subject. One of my favorite go to\’s is flowers. Flowers add a brilliant color and vibrance to photos sometimes not achieved with simple editing. Other times, I\’ll use a mirror, handheld or full length.

This time around I decided to give fairy lights a try after seeing a couple of Youtube videos wherein placing the lights in front of the lens would create amazing orbs. So I ordered a 2 sets of fairy lights from eBay which also happened to be remote controlled. Despite having 9 settings, I opted to keep the lights static as I did not want to have to play chase or try to time when the all the lights would be on.

I wasn’t quite sure how much natural light to allow for as I did not want to end up with grainy photos having to adjust my ISO for the lower light levels. I decided to slightly close the blinds a bit for shadows and so as to make sure the fairy lights would allow for enough light on the model\’s face. Then I set up a backlight to have enough illumination from having my photos underexposed.

After taking several shots of Jaslyn, it was straight to the editing process. One thing I did not account for was how much of a challenge it would be editing these photos. I honestly struggled with the white balance, tone curve and skin tones among other things. I took a step back, went for a walk, grabbed a drink, slept off said drink (JK). I did step back and realized I had boxed myself in with my edits.

I threw caution to the wind and began to get creative with my edits. I edited some to be warm, some to be cool, some to be vibrant, and wherever else I decided to go. In the end, Jaslyn was embraced by the light