I run a full time portrait studio focusing on families, children, high school seniors since 2011. And although I absolutely love my clients, I also crave to grow as a professional photographer and participate in print competitions.
One of the things I did early on was join Professional Photographers of America. I am so grateful I did. From there, I created amazing, long lasting friendships. It’s important to find a group of people that life you up and also push you to be better. I also found mentors that invested their time to make me a better business person and photographer.
Because of this, and my art degree, I haven’t perfected a specific style of work. I love all different styles. A mentor once told me, don’t just shoot one particular types of lighting. Shoot all the types of lighting. From this advice, I want to try to hone not just one particular style, but let the style of the piece speak to me. For this image, I was inspired by a link of vintage Halloween costumes that popped up on my Facebook feed. Click on this for the link to the article.
I showed the article to another photographer, who said to me, “that’s so cool, I am going to do that for print competition”. And that lit a fire under me that I was going to do it first. So I immediately set out to research how I was going to make my idea happen. When I have an idea, I research backgrounds that I may work so I can do everything in camera. I research styling and costumes and then put together a story board for my models and myself.
Originally, I was thinking that I would have everything shot in camera and edit the image. But it really didn’t pop. It was just two kids with masks on their face in front of a background. Anytime I work on something I feel is going to be an art piece, I ask myself, “how is this going to make the viewer feel?” And imagined the viewer’s face if these two kids showed up on the viewer’s front porch, how would they feel? That’s when I realized, that the image really needed to be a composite.
I took the original image, printed it out and started making notes on it of what needed to be done. I photographed our corn field (I am married to a Kansas farmer) and pieces of old decking to create the elements used for the image. And then I storyboarded the images I collected to figure out how they were going to come together.
To put the pieces together, I drew upon what I have learned from amazing mentors I have met along the way, like Woody Walters, Sandra Pierce, Richard Sturdevant and John Gladman. Thereis so much value in finding people that believe in you and challenge you. For them, I am grateful. But I also don’t want to copy them. If anything, I want to go out into the world and create something for myself and my viewer.
Capture
- Sony A1
- Sony 70-200mm G Master OSS II
- F/7.1
- 1/160
- ISO 400
When working in studio, I always use my camera stand. The main lighting set up that I found is successful for me, is my Larson 4×6 soft box and two strip lights as kickers at a 45 degree angle behind the subject.
Post-capture processing – Photoshop
I needed to create a front porch, so I set out to photograph decks and different pieces of wood to create the front porch. We just happen to be Kansas farmers and I went out to one of our corn fields to grab a corn field and sky.
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