H Influencer Meet

This is the 5th meet I've been to now. The first meet had me excited and nervous, I spent the night before thinking about the different people I'd meet and shoot with. Since then, I've been deterred from going to them a bit. Don't get me wrong, I still think they're a great place to meet people and take photos, but I have been to too many too fast. 

A couple of weeks ago I went to the H influencer meet in the Marin Headlands in San Francisco. I didn't spend as much time shooting as I normally do, which has actually been less and less lately. 

The first photo of Jadon. The lighting on the beach started off strong and gave off a good amount of sun flare. It looks like he's balancing on the rock, although he's actually mid-air after jumping off. In order to keep the pink color theme, I removed some of the other colors and changed the hue to match the color. 

The lighting on the beach was nice while we were there(we moved on to a different location latest). I got a good amount of rim lighting on the photo I took. The most difficult part about editing these photos was balancing the brightness between her, which was in the shadows, and the background, which was close to being backlit. 

Only a 3 photo meet post, shows how much I was shooting. The lighting on the beach slowly went away because it was blocked off by the cliffs on one side. The group moved up to Battery Mendell, which was a location I was familiar with and have shot at before. I didn't really like the lighting at the fort just because it is positioned in a way that blocks off the golden hour light. I don't know what these plants are called but they're everywhere and they look great in the light. Adding foreground was definitely a must for at least a few photos, I feel like my photos have been lacking in that lately. 

Overall this was a good meet. There are a few reasons why I haven't been starting to shoot less at them. People just grabbing models when they're trying to shoot with others or the inability to get a good original photo. But I'll still go to them, only if I know some people at them. 

Last photo of the night. 

Locations:

Black Sand Beach

Battery Mendell

Marin Headlands

Models:

Arii

Jadon

Nessa

One Step at a Time

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that it doesn't happen overnight. I have had my Instagram page for about 5 years. I did not know what to expect when I made it, especially since in was nothing like how it was before. It used to be personal, photos of what I was doing on that day in that moment. 

My page content has changed multiple times. From what I can remember it went from personal to longboarding to art to landscapes to portraits. I've even abandoned it a few times to try to make other ones. Instagram pages are very niche orientated. The accounts with consistent and similar content are the ones that grow. Every time I chose to leave the account I have hurt my engagement. People don't like change.

One of the other things I've learned recently is that they also don't like you deleting your own content. At the end of last year, I chose to purge my page of all the "bad" photos I posted, which caused my engagement to drop. I started this year with only a fraction of what I had at the end of last year. 

I would consider my page now as much a portrait page as a landscape one. I want to grow it into a portrait page. 

I had two goals at the beginning of this year, which will branch out into a few more that I will talk about eventually. The first goal was to take more portraits. I think that I have been doing a pretty good job of it so far. The second was to meet more people. Lately, I have been doing ok at this. Going to meetups has really helped me meet others. Doing photoshoots has also helped me. One of the things that I wished I had continued with was the stranger's challenge. It was supposed to kill two birds with one stone by meeting others while taking portraits. 

All I can do is continue to do what I do and do it as best as I can. These two are the two photos with the highest engagement of my Instagram right now. Another one of my goals that stemed from the two was to have a portrait be the most liked photo on my instagram. And yesterday it happened with the photo of Taylor. 

Location

Skyline Boulevard Vista Point

Model

Taylor

The Tone Curve

Everyone has a different style of editing. Different color palettes, contrast preferences and tools. One of my favorite tools to use in Lightroom and Photoshop is the tone curve. It is a good all around tool to use to adjust color or lighting. 

Let's start with this image of Dani. It was shot on my shoot with her on the beach during golden hour. It is backlit, so a lot of the background was blown out and a haze covered her in the foreground. 

To start off, I did some adjustments using the basic tools. I made the photo warmer than when it was taken to bring out the summer feel. I did some other adjustments too to bring out the shadows and add a little bit of contrast. Just adding contrast adds a lot of color to a photo, so using the hue and saturations sliders I unsaturated a lot of the colors, along with some hue adjustments. 

Now onto what this post is about, tone curve. There are four curves to work on, when using RGB color mode. The first curve is RGB and controls the lighting on in the photo. Both axes range from your blacks to your whites. The x axis is the rage of your photo and adjusts the brightest and the darkest point on your photo. The graph portion is the different values on your photo. On this photo, you can see that there is almost no points on the photo that are black and some that are white and blown out. When photos are taken with the graph having points on the minimum areas, they cannot be brought back. The y axis controls the value of the points. In this one, you can see that I brought down the brightest point, so it is not white. Similarly, the darkest point was brought up, in order to not make it black. 

The most common curve I use in an 's' shape one, which adds contrast. This increases the amount of dark and light values and decreases the amount of midtones. 

The next 3 curves are the individual color curves. They work in the same way as the first curve, but with the amount of color. To saturate an image, you can just curve them in 's' shapes to add contrast. This requires more precision than it sounds because they all need to be moved the same amount. Increasing the blue too much would make the photo too cool, or too warm if not enough. One thing too remember is the complimentary colors of each of the tones, because those are the ones that will be brought out when adjusting them. The complimentary of blue is yellow, of red is greenish, and of green is violet. 

For this image I started by adding some color contrast. Then, I brought down the lower half of the blue curve to add a warmer tone to the image. I also removed just a small amount of reds in the highlights to bring back some of the green that I had added while adding contrast. It is easy to add unwanted colors when adjusting because moving the curve in any direction will change it to a different color. Its almost like working with the white balance but in a way that also adjust brightness.  

Here is the final image. 

Model

Dani