52 Week Photo Challenge – Week 10: Portrait

52 Week Photo Challenge – Week 10: Portrait – Environmental

I realize I’m not doing well at keeping up with the 52 week photo challenge and am jumping around a lot. I’m trying my best, but life happens. I finally got the environmental portrait done, which is from a commercial shoot I did last week. I had the pleasure of photographing my long type reiki therapist, Maricela who owns Your Life Energy. I think Maricela is a beautiful person inside and out, and it was a pleasure to work with her and capture her gentile and loving spirit. If you are in the Arlington, VA area, I highly recommend Your Life Energy for reiki, massage therapy, and yoga.

For this image I used a Canon 70D with my 18-200mm lens with a 400 ISO, and speed light mounted on a light stand with a shoot through umbrella set to right of the subject. Since this was an environmental portrait, I placed Maricela in front of a table in her treatment room that had the essential oils, crystals and lotions used during different treatments. For this photo, my lens was set to 20mm, and I used an F5 aperture with a 1/80s shutter. Because this was a commercial shoot, I will not be showing the original image. The original image was wider, a slightly darker, and had a bit of an orange cast. I pulled the photo into Lightroom to edit. I adjusted the white balance off the white picture frame, and then brightened the image by increasing the exposure. I also used a medium contrast and adjusted the sharpness, luminance, corrected for lens aberration, and then cropped the image. Theses edits resulted in the final bright and cheerful image below.

Final Image

Comments

Cobwebs Everywhere

On October 7 th , I did a studio spooky session with Coralinx Cosplay . The central theme of this shoot was a pretty goth girl who had a fondness for spiders and decorating with cobwebs, making it a perfect Halloween session. Note: Cobwebs are defined as abandoned or old spiderwebs that have collected dust. Many cobwebs are the result of comb-footed spider (i.e., black widows) that make irregularly shaped webs. Spiderwebs are active structures built to catch prey. (Source: Western Exterminator Company) For these sessions, I used: Photography Equipment Other Equipment Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Westcott FJ400 2 Phottix Strobes 2 strip boxes 2 rectangular soft boxes 2 c-stands 3 light stands Backdrop stand Black seamless 2 Westcott silicon gels Tether cable Laptop Laptop holder Sandbags A-clamps Spyder Color checker Fake cobwebs Table ...

2025 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2026

This year was a bit interesting especially since during the day, I’m a government employee, which resulted in a lot of stress and a 42-day furlough. I didn’t attend as many cosplay events with the D.C Cosplay group, now Costume and Camera, as I normally would have, due to schedule conflicts. However, I traveled up to Poughkeepsie, New York for two photo events, one of which I was a featured photographer. I attended two conventions, one of which didn’t turn out as expected and the other just confirmed my decision to take a break from it. Though happily I did a lot of studio work this year, which I enjoyed. But on the other hand, I lost my dear “studio supervisor”, my dog Teddy. He liked to great clients and then “supervise” while lying/sleeping in his bed. I also started to work on the business side of my photography work, by investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) site to manage bookings, schedules, and payments. No more trying to juggle...

Attempted Camping

This past weekend, my husband and I tried to spend the weekend at Post Card Cabins in Shenandoah for our anniversary. I say tried, because I got sick halfway through our trip, and we had to go home early. But the first part was nice. Post Card Cabins are owned by Marriott and located about 2 hours from D.C. in the Shenandoah region of Virginia, off I-81. There is also another set of cabins located off I-15, but we stayed at the ones off I-81. The property features several of these, in what I call a cabin development, which are spaced a decent distance apart, creating the illusion of privacy. The cabins are essentially tiny homes featuring a large picture window at one end, a small bathroom, a mini-fridge, a compact kitchenette with plates, silverware, a pot, and a pan, and a queen bed. They also come with two Adirondack chairs, a picnic table, a fire pit with wood, and a s'mores kit minus the sticks. ...

The Munchkin's Notebook

Search This Blog