No matter how these came out I was always going to save these portraits a special place in my heart. On a quick trip back home to Maryland I got to take some homecoming portraits for the amazing person I get to call my girlfriend. This was, for the most part, my first dip into the water of portrait photography of any kind, and I definitely learned a good bit. Keeping a wide aperture to get a nice background blur was key, but finding the exact right focus distance became tricky with how dim the light was for most of these photos. Another big consideration, as with the U of U climbing team photos from September, was taking mostly vertical photos. Trinity was looking for instagram ready photos, and as such I was working in vertical to give myself the most margin for error. The other tricky component of this shoot was keeping the lights around us in check. A lot of these photos had to be taken with a lower overall level of exposure to be brought back up in Lightroom while the lights were brought down. Shooting at a higher exposure unfortunately exposed a much greater risk of motion blur from any instability of my hands as well as the potential to blow out the lights behind Trinity, losing a lot of the details I wanted to keep.
