Aqua Blue

When the sky is radiantly blue with a few whispers of clouds, it is important to capitalize on the outfit of a friend who loves to model for your camera.

Taking in the full power of the aqua blue that’s protected by the white jacket, the gray tones uplift the earth tones. It’s all one can do to describe the look and essence of her suit.

While the purist will quickly note that the name of this blue is not really aqua… but more like pacific ocean blue… I’m just the photographer guy who found an opportunity to capture the color and allow it to speak for itself.

All about the eyes

At this particular stage of my photography, learning how to do close ups of faces and translating the emotions was very important to me. It wasn’t always easy to set up a look, but doing a journalism style to what should have been stock portraits made this way more fun.

The eyes of my friend can speak volumes while hiding even more. A deeply thoughtful caring woman, she masks the complexities of her thoughts behind her smiling eyes. It’s when you catch her in action that you can start to appreciate just how amazing a person she is.

Fortune would have it such that her patience allowed me to try many different takes on the closeup theme. Watching her laugh at my humor, or the lack thereof, made the work of this set fly by without much care. This was fun, not work.

Photo Element Play

Photo Element was the software I relied on to make a lot of quick modifications. I spent a lot of time learning how to play with many of the features. Looking back, it was clear that I afforded myself a lot of liberties with the editing features. Some photos got too saturated, others got faded too much. Others had a great gradient concept pushed a bit too far.

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Experimenting with hues and temperatures was fun. Trying to bring out different shade of warmth in her smile without taking away form the radiance it holds… part of the editorial learning process.

The Blog Post

There are several posts that were made about my friend. She has played the role of muse in a lot of my photo efforts. Now, she’s in a different chapter of her life. Much like me, we’re both facing parental blessings that takes precedence over creating art. It would be nice to get back to doing photography, just for the sake of having fun, but life has other plans. So, writing about these wonderful moments will have to do.

1. Having Blues over Blue - Sharing a few lessons from mistakes I made in my early photo days. It's good to learn from the past. This is a rare case of showing the "bad" before sharing the "good" when feeling blue about photography... like... missing the days of shooting for leisure
2. Case Study Blue - In poetry, roses are red and violets are blue... in photography it's all about the right hue Taking inspiration from an old photo session to write a story.... with a few lessons.
3. Aqua Blue Session - Taking the best of the Aqua Blue photo session and sharing them as a gallery

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A list of blog and project posts

For your reading pleasure, here is a look over the span of time as a write… the various posts that I’ve done about my friend who’s photos is the topic of today’s musings.

Editorial Note: This post was originally shared on May 31, 2018. As part of the blog audit, it was moved from the project section to the blog. All links updated. Some of the images appear to be the same as an older post… but they’re not… these are the better ones from the photo session… 🙂

the plan is to have these links updated any time a new post is written about this lovely friend of the blog

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