Before and After

as a photographer, it's my job to make sure that your photos come out just the way you want. i'm supposed to make you look your best! when you are photographing sweet little precious babies, sometimes your settings aren't just quite right. it's not just making sure that it looks great through the view finder and getting the sweet little precious babies to smile, it's making sure that the lighting is right. it's making sure that your camera is set up correctly. with these little ones, it all happens so fast that sometimes you don't get it right in the camera. sometimes you have to do a little bit more work on that photo to get the look you want. and the great thing is that i can pop the image into lightroom and most of the time, i can make sure it looks just how i want it to look. 

take this photo of june.....she was being a bit of a pickle. i was testing out spots in our house that might be good for some photos and i wanted her to model for me. i should have asked georgia to do it since she's usually a good sport. but anyway, junie was my model and i didn't get this image just right out of the camera. failure!

cute photo, but it's too dark! oh no!!!! 

but don't worry, all is not lost! i was able to export the image into lightroom (for those of you who don't know what lightroom is, it's an editing program). after playing around with it a bit, i was able to transform it into this....

yea! june's not in the dark anymore!

see the difference? i wanted june's face to be bright. in the first one, the background is exposed correctly, but her face is not. on the edited photo, i was able to adjust the exposure so that her face brightened up. and now the background is super bright and you can't tell the detail, but that is ok. i don't really care about the background, i care about her face. 

here they are again, side by side so you can really tell the difference in the photos.....

i've heard it said to me often when someone really likes a photo of mine, "man, what kind of camera do you have? i need to get one of those." and while having a good camera does help, it's not the only reason my photos turn out well.....there is posing, lighting, knowing how to use my camera, and editing the photos afterwards to correct mistakes and do some touch ups. 

so i learned a bit of a lesson when taking these photos of june....make sure that i'm exposing my camera for the face and not the background.....i can't always trust my camera when it says that it's exposed properly....sometimes, i need to use my own judgement to get it right out of the camera!