//Nicole//

I think I found my true passion; photography.

Although I love very much the peacefulness of art and painting activity, what I love about photography is the interaction with people. To direct and give suggestion so that they will look natural and pretty on the picture. And above all to finally see the beautiful transformation of their pictures from my camera. To me, it is a another way of art and painting. My understanding of light has improved in photography and now with a camera in my hand I can paint  beautiful picture with light; it can be a natural light or artificial light. 

It takes a lot of practice to be able to see these lights through the camera lens and it takes years to master them.  One must take so many and if not thousands or ten thousands of pictures under different light conditions to be able to finally capture it's beauty. 

Once you are able to see and understand the light the sky is the limit, and you will enjoy photography even more. But there is another element you need to master as well - photo editing soft ware like Photoshop Lightroom or Photoshop CS. Beside mastering on how to use the application of these soft wares on to your pictures, you must understand the relationship of your raw picture to the warm and cool tone color in these soft wares. Again, this skill takes a lot of practice. I still have not mastered the use of Photoshop Lightroom but know enough to use the tools to edit all of my images.

The other part that I love about photography is styling. I seem to enjoy styling a person for a photo session. It can be a senior photo session or it can be a newborn session. Ideally I wanted to shoot a maternity and style the happy mom to be so she will look beautiful and radiant in front of the back drop I made. I love the process of choosing the right outfit and props that goes with it. Not only that, to get the right color of the outfit and it's props are equally important. I think I have a good eye to able to see the overall look first hand before it turned into  pictures.  The skin tone of a person also play an important role on how the over all look of the picture itself.  So even though I am 'the photographer' I always involve and must give a suggestion to my client to choose the right outfit and props. The other thing that come in handy in my photography venture is that I love doing a "DIY". I can sew - so I created or I will create more outfit like maternity sheer skirt as a prop along with other prop that she can wear a well. Although this is a craft I created or I will create - I do not want it to look 'crafty' on the final picture. My goal is that I wanted my client and their pictures to look like a fine art photography.

On below pictures, I found the dress through an internet search (here) and I created the flower crown for Nicole to wear.

I am not going to talk about that into detail but this is my first in door studio portrait photo shoot with my painted back drop. Although the back drop is not perfect, I know it will be better for the next shoot. Because I already know how to improve and what to fix.

Related topic on how I created this back drop is here.

Thank you so much for stopping by!