Having a consistent look to your images is the one thing most photographers struggle with, but it’s the best thing to help you in establishing a recognizable brand and attracting your ideal client. Let’s take a look at five things that have helped me establish my signature photography style over the last few years, in order of their importance to me and my brand.
Do you have an emotional connection to the landscape or subject in front of you? I've found that I'm most focused and successful when I'm passionate about the subject. For me, it's landscape; for you, it could be portraits, botanicals, abstracts, or long-exposure architecture.
After the shoot is done, after the files are stored and backed up, and the catalog and previews are rendered, it’s finally time to process all those files. Put your headphones on and get ready to cull. Lightroom has made life easier with its intuitive hotkeys, ease of cycling between images, and syncing adjustments.
Whether you’re like me and try to stay within a niche or you’re a photographer who dabbles across the world, staying true to your brand can be difficult when you cross genres. Whether you’re shooting portraits, weddings, headshots, products or seniors, here are some ways to keep consistency throughout your photos.
We’ve all been there, scrolling aimlessly on our phone, floating in a sea of emojis and LOLs. We may not even realize we’re doing it, but suddenly 10 minutes (or two hours) pass, and we’ve watched 10 two-minute episodes of something called “Parkour Cats From Outer Space” and found ourselves ordering some swag from their website. What is going on here? How does one begin to make an impact in this sea of endless distraction? This is an ever-evolving science, but there are some methods to the madness of keeping people’s attention.
Those who long for Lightroom like myself but have been looking for a better all-in-one solution need to add ON1 Photo RAW 2018 to their arsenal. Why should you switch this close to wedding season? My answer always comes down to time: the time it takes to finish shooting a job, time to fully process edits, time the client wants their images, time I get with my family, time to sleep. I want to keep my processing time at a minimum without my clients seeing a drop in quality.
Of all the editing tools at our disposal, not all of them make sense for every task. Lightroom is not the end-all/be-all program—even though I use it for almost everything. It’s important to try out other programs, especially when you want to push the envelope and unleash your creativity. To bring out structure and details in an image, I have always relied on plugins like Macphun Intensify (recently renamed Skylum Intensify). With the release of Skylum’s Luminar, I can now edit with all the tools I need in one place. Once I have finished selecting my best shot of the shoot, I am ready to launch Luminar and get working. Let’s get set up and familiar with Luminar to get a better feel for how we can attack this image.
After shooting a wedding or any eight-hour-plus event, I dread spending countless hours working in Lightroom. Lightroom can be a huge time suck: waiting for my memory cards to ingest, waiting for each Raw to load for culling, waiting for adjustments to render in the Develop module. Are you struggling with the same post-shoot stress? If so, this article will forever free up these worries and let you get to work—at the pace of your computer’s speed, of course.
Whether you are shooting for grayscale or converting images due to horrible mixed lighting, you need a good workflow for black-and-white editing. Capture One Pro 10 has made it simple to do a large majority of your black-and-white editing without the need to edit in another software or plugin. This article show you how to use the presets, styles and tools of Capture One to make your black-and-white editing not only easier, but prettier.
