My Personal Photography and Instagram

I love Photography

Growing up in Upstate New York, I took the landscape for granted. It wasn’t until I moved out of state and came back that I realized how beautiful it was. I started becoming more serious about photography in 2017 taking mostly landscape photos of New York. Most of my photos have been taken on a phone with bad quality. I edit each photo to give them the ‘professional camera’ look. Below I have a few examples of before and after photos and I explain how I edited them. You can view more of my edited images on my Instagram account.

Photo Edits

I decided to edit this image and add a little bit of fun into it, the original was pretty bland. My plan was to sell it in my Etsy store. This was edited in Photoshop and Lightroom. First, I used the image adjustments to edit the highlights, shadows and added HDR toning. I then selected the tower and bushes in the front and created a new layer. I darkened them a little bit. For the background layer, I used the smoothing brush to create a more abstract 'painting' effect. For the colors on the background, I first created a rainbow gradient group with blue, red and yellow. I applied the gradient group as a layer on top of the background, changed the blend mode to soft light and decreased the opacity. I had the final image printed on an 11x17 canvas and it looks great! This is my most popular photo in my Etsy store.
This old victorian abandoned home was in my town (and since has been demolished!) I noticed it every time I drove by, so I would try to take a photo of it each time. It took several tries to get this shot but I was very disappointed with the blue sky. I love dramatic photos so I decided to change this into a 'night time' photo with a more dramatic sky. This was edited in Photoshop. Using image adjustments, I highlighted the details by adjusting the HDR, highlights, shadows and contrast. That gave me the base and really brought out the sun and shadows on the house and the grass. Using the burn tool, I darkened the sky. Using the dodge tool, I lightened parts of the grass and house. Finally, I added a purple/gray color layer on top of the entire image and decreased the opacity of the layer. This gave it the eerie and spooky mood I was looking for. I shared this image on my Instagram account and it is one of my most featured images (by other Instagram accounts.)

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