Experimenting with Rachelle

I’m exper­i­ment­ing a bit with this photo of Rachelle. It’s quite a bit darker than most of my por­traits and I’m hon­estly not sure if I like the pro­cess­ing tech­nique or not.Some­times I just have to live with an image for a day or two before I make up my mind. In this case, I decided to share the exper­i­ment as an exam­ple. When I view it full size on my 27″ iMac, I’m fairly happy with it. When I view it at a much lower res­o­lu­tion, it seems to dark that my sub­ject nearly melts into the background.

For me. that’s part of the process of grow­ing. I have to try dif­fer­ent things and dis­cover if they work for me or not. Even when I’ve found post pro­cess­ing tech­niques that didn’t work, it isn’t a com­plete waste of time. That’s because it forces me to think about why the image didn’t work (or if I’m lucky, why it did work). Lit­tle by lit­tle, I carve out my own list of ele­ments that I want to see in every shot. I develop these steps to my own style — even if I’m chang­ing to a new style.

I took this shot at the Cuba Libre restau­rant in Pointe Orlando, a col­lec­tion of shops and restau­rants near the con­ven­tion cen­ter. The envi­ron­ment is dark, but col­or­ful inside. It’s a great place for por­traits and I’d love to go back there some­day for another shoot. The thing that con­cerned me with this photo is that the col­ors of the envi­ron­ment could be a dis­trac­tion from my sub­ject. In one ver­sion of this photo, I’m really pump­ing up the col­ors of the back­ground. In this one, I’m pulling them way back.

Much of my own style has always been about color, and I truly love it. Doing the same thing so often makes me won­der, from time to time, if I’m miss­ing out on other pos­si­bil­i­ties. I’ve found some great pho­tos with muted, desat­u­rated col­ors. Oth­ers look great with dark images that have splashes of light.

That’s why I’m exper­i­ment­ing with Rachelle. It’s one thing for me to like some­thing I found in another person’s photo, but some­thing else entirely to put my own spin on it. Some­times it works, some­times not. At least it’s always edu­ca­tional. Even if I fail, I learn.

Rachelle