Creative Edit: Bolero Chic

Creative Edit: Bolero Chic- This week it’s pink hydrangeas, a black bolero, art deco buildings and snow flakes (what!?) for my weekly creative edit post! Well, we had quite the memorable shoot on Monday when we headed into town to take some photos for the blog. My vision for the post was buying flowers on a warm spring day (it was the first official day of spring)…which was apparently far from what mother nature had envisioned for us! While we were walking to this spot downtown, the sun was shining and it looked like we would have beautiful light for the shoot. As we set up the camera, we noticed that a cloud began to hover over the city and a light dusting of snow began to fall. It wasn’t long before I was covered in hundreds of beautiful little snow flakes. The snow only fell for a few minutes so we decided to go with it and try to capture this rare moment in time before it all melted away…As I write this post this morning, I’m actually starting to realize that this might have been a blessing. Maybe it was mother nature’s way of sprinkling a little fairy dust on us for good luck! We used my Canon 5D camera and alternated between 50mm and 24-105mm lenses. We used various apertures ranging from f / 2.8 to 5.6 to achieve the look. When I took it into Lightroom I used my “Sugar & Spice 4” preset as the base and layered over a finishing “Matte” preset to give the photos a silky smooth look. I also used my “Teeth-Whiten 1” Makeup Bush to ensure that my teeth were pearly white (Did I mention that I love coffee?) and my “Skin-Smooth 1” to even out my skin tone. Oh the magic of portrait photography! As I always say, the trick to editing beautiful images is subtly! Nothing should be fussy or overdone. Your goal is to seamlessly blend reality with fantasy and make your audience experience the beauty that your subject matter exudes. Well, cheers to snow flakes and spring flowers! All of the presets and brushes that I mentioned above are available in The Complete Collection. Stay tuned because later in the week I’ll be posting a video where I show you how I edited these shots in Lightroom in real time…