Dulce Photography Blog

I looked at the calendar this morning and realized there are only two days left in August. Only TWO DAYS. Where did this year go?! IT’S ALMOST OVER!!!

Ok, sorry for being so dramatic. Clearly it’s not that over. But it’s far enough into the year that I decided to take a look at my 2011 goals and see how I was doing. A big one that stuck out to me was “Better Define My Style.” And as I look back over all that’s happened this year, I’m really happy to say I think I’ve got that one pretty covered. I finally developed two simple actions in Lightroom that I run over all my images. I named them Sweet Sauce (for colored photos) and Oreo (for black and white photos). Thought those names went along nicely with Dulce. Haha. Anyways, my absolute main goal is to keep my editing consistent and natural, and I think these actions have helped me do just that.

It definitely hasn’t always been that way, though… Oh yeah. It’s about to get extremely real up in here. Since I started two years ago, my editing went through a few different stages to get to the place it is now. And with the risk of being totally vulnerable (like, feeling as though I’m standing on a stage in my underwear vulnerable), I thought I’d share, in case anyone out there is struggling with defining their style.

Stage one: I like to think of this as the Over Eager and Over Processed Stage. Haha. I was just starting out, and Photoshop and Lightroom were new and exciting tools. Let’s just say I went a little overboard in my editing. I pushed the blacks in my pictures a ton, and I would mess with the contrast so much that the colors were super bright. Very unrealistic. And my black and white photos were so contrasted that there were hardly any grays. They were almost pure black and white. Yikessss. Fortunately this stage didn’t last super long!

These two photos are from my very first two weddings. I will be forever grateful to Cindy and Bill and Marie and Charles for trusting me and allowing me to get my feet wet!! But I gotta say you guys, I’m sorry for the harsh editing!

Stage two: This one could probably be called the Experimental Stage. Once I realized there was more to editing than just pushing the contrast and blacks, I started to play. I felt like there were so many options, so many different emotions I could draw from the way I edited. I sometimes added tints to my photos, sometimes textures, trying to get a vintage look, and I would also add a sepia tone to my black and whites. (Not to say that sepia or vintage edits are a bad thing! There are some amazing photographers who I admire a lot that do these kind of edits. I don’t mean to discourage anyone from it if that’s what you love. I just didn’t do them very well… Ha.) I look back at those photos and they seem really dated. In a bad way. In a hammer pants and moon boots kind of way. This stage lasted a little longer, but I figured out pretty quickly that I wasn’t happy with them.

This is my brother and sister in-law. I love these photos of them, just not how I edited them! Lol.

At the time I thought the vintagey coloring of this photo from Kara and Zach’s wedding was so awesome because it matched the theme of the old ice cream parlor. Now, maybe not so much ; ) 

Stage three: I’d title this stage the Close But No Cigar Stage. I realized that I wanted a more natural look to my images, and started heading in the right direction. But my black and whites were still a little too contrasty for my taste now. And I would add too many small tweaks to a picture. It was taking me almost an hour to edit around 25 pictures. That is WAY TOO LONG. I would open every image in photoshop and make small adjustments in multiple layers. In the Levels, in the Channel Mixer, in the Hue and Saturation, sometimes even in Selective Color, etc. Even though the changes I was making were very small and didn’t necessarily take away from the natural feel of the photograph, I was doing far too many extraneous edits and wasting my time.

Beautiful Sarah! I’m happy with how these look, but I remember it taking so long to get them this way…

I lurrrve this couple. Joe and Jess are awesome! But looking back I’d soften the contrast on this photo a bit. 

Stage four: Oreos and Sweet Sauce. I finally figured out that the best and most important thing I could do for my photography was take a great image straight out of the camera. Sweet Sauce only makes very subtle changes to my photographs, and gives them a little bit of Dulce flair. At least I’d like to think so : ) But even then, sometimes I decide to take it off, because I reached my aspiration of creating a photo that is exactly genuine to the way I saw it when I took it. That’s the best feeling : ) And while Oreo obviously makes a bigger change to my images (going from color to b&w), I strive for a very organic feeling in my black and whites. Almost film-like, if I may be so bold. When everything is said and done, though, my aim is to have a consistent body of work and photos won’t seem totally dated 10, 20, even 30 years down the road. I’m still working on it, don’t get me wrong. But I think I’ve discovered a pretty good thing, and I’m going to stick with it!

So I guess the point of this post was to simply say, if you’re at a point where you feel overwhelmed by all the options and directions you can take your photography, hang in there! I definitely went through it, and I think everyone who is starting out does. Am I saying that my way is the right way? Absolutely not. This is just my take on my own photography, and how I got where I am. But if you’re struggling, just give it time and do your thing! Figure out what is YOU, and how to portray it in your photographs, and you’ll rock it : )

Aaaaand now I feel the need to go eat some oreos….