“A Guiding Light in the Dark” . . Ft. @jessicalanguyen . -- Behind the Shot/Edit: This one has been in the works for awhile lol. At the beginning of June, one of my best friends got married (congrats Christie!), and the centerpiece at the reception were these lanterns. I somehow ended up with a lantern and realized it could work with my shoot with Jessica the following day. We shot a bunch of pics with the lantern at the beach. The only problem was that the lantern’s tiny LED light is nowhere near strong enough to show on camera, especially because the photo was shot during the day. It is not easy to create realistic light in post-edit hahaha. I was done with the retouch and levitationg parts of the edits pretty fast. But I went through so many iterations for the lantern over the course of the next few weeks. I googled a lot of lantern images and tried to find Youtube videos to help me out. This also coincided with me getting into a heavy photoshoot schedule, and I struggled with keeping up even with normal, non-composite editing. So I put aside all my composite editing work for the last couple months as I tried to keep up getting edits done for my endless shoots. I streamlined my process and finally got to a point where I felt like I could catch my breath last week. So I finally re-opened this file and made some adjustments. There’s still a lot of progress I want to make in my composite work. I also want to find time to do more of these and more conceptual pieces in the future on top of “regular” portraits. And the greatest takeaway from this is that I will always try to use a real light source in my shots from now on haha. Hope y’all like this one!