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