This session has been in the works for about a month or so after my friend, Courtney, sent me some photos of an adult cake smash that had gone viral and she asked we could do a shoot to celebrate her 30th birthday this month. I said, “absolutely” right away as we had never done one and I thought it would be a blast. And oh, boy was it ever! I have not laughed that much in a quite awhile, both during the shoot and when deciding what photos to post.

Hope you enjoy the craziness that ensued as much as we did today!

Oh, and she really did end up throwing cake on me at the end! I guess I deserved it with how much I was laughing. Ha Such a fun, fun day!

Starting today is the beginning of the Ag Days fun in Spring Valley, so I thought I would share some of the photos we took a week and a half ago for the Brave Community Theatre.

The Ag Days production of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” will take place tonight, Wednesday, Aug. 14, through Saturday, Aug. 17, at 7:30 p.m., with a free performance given by Brave Kidz Theatre at 6:30 p.m. each night. Tickets are available at the door, Sunshine Foods, and Chateau de Chic. Tickets purchased in advance or at the door with an Ag Days button receive a $1 discount.

The poster I put together…

Sticking with the poster idea of showing the transformation of Maria into Snow White, I thought I would show a Before & After. The “Before” shot is straight-out-of-camera (SOOC), and the “After” is the final, edited version with some minor tweaks in Lightroom and Photoshop.  Editing is a large part of the art of photography, but it’s also  important to get as much done right in-camera, so that there is much less to do in post-processing. Clearly, the better the image is captured in-camera, the less work it needs. But every photo does need at least a little work, even the ones that were captured well. RAW images rarely look good SOOC…so every image I make is carefully and individually edited.

In this particular image, I did my standard editing and also cloned more grass in, added a bird and added a little sunburst to the edge. 

The truth is, the photo session is really only the start of the entire process. Quite a bit of work is done at home on the computer editing,  making careful adjustments to lighting, contrast, color, converting to black and white and also touching up any skin imperfections to make your portraits beautiful. Some photos only need a few minor adjustments while others need quite a bit of work to reach the final artistic vision I had in mind.  Editing is a technical skill that helps make all your photos look their absolute best!  I hope you enjoyed this quick peek into part of my editing….