Tip 6. Photography and Photoshop — What tips do you have for taking photos? Camera and lens recommendations? Do you use any products to edit photos or create product collages? Any sites you could recommend for photography or Photoshop help?

Welcome to the area that has been one of the biggest and one of the most fun learning experiences for us, photography! Erica took photography classes in the past and had a little bit of knowledge going in, but for the most part, we just Googled and experimented until we found what worked for us! So, let’s make a long story short, here is what we do to get a really great photo!

Location
We found very early on that an interesting background was key to a great photo! No, all of our photos aren’t taken in a really cool spot, since sometimes time is an issue, but for the most part, we will travel to a cool spot, just for a photo! We’re lucky to be fairly central to several great photo locations, we’ve traveled to the city for great urban pics in front of a gorgeous mural, bright wall or historic building and we have traveled to the beach or the river for a fun dockside photo or two! We’re learning more and more to have fun with our photo sessions, so this summer you will see us using our need for photos as an excuse to visit places and experience different events in our city.

Our Equipment

We each have a Canon Rebel series camera, a T3i and a T5i. We have a couple of lenses that we use, but our favorite for portrait style photos is the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM Lens . Although we have toyed around with manual mode in the past, we mostly hold out for great natural lighting and use the pre-sets on our cameras.

Editing

We use Photoshop to edit our photos and we are still learning a little bit more about that each day. For each photo we use a different combination of tools but most commonly we use:

Lighting Correction:

We use a combination of exposure, curves and levels to achieve the lighting we want for a particular picture.

Blemish Correction:

Once we have the lighting we want, we use a combination of the spot correction tool and the mixer brush to blend in blemishes, wrinkles in our clothes and a few fine lines here or there!

Finishing Touches:

We toy around with other techniques, such as adding layers and using different brushes to bring out eyes/lips/etc. Then we finish off a photo with a slight edge burn and possibly adjust the vibrance and saturation to bring out the colors.

We also often utilize Action sets to make life easy!! Some of our favorites have come from the Pioneer Woman and Peaches In A Pod edit their photos!