With weddings, I am there to document an important day in someone’s life, to capture all the emotions and details of the day. Yes, my years of experience and my vision will influence how the images look and feel, but they are pretty much the representation of what happened in front of me.
With a portrait, I sometimes find it challenging that what comes out of the camera doesn’t really represent how I feel and how I see the end result. A portrait is about a person and not so much about recording how someone looks. For centuries, a painter was able to express him/herself though his or hers brush. As a photographer, that was not possible until the digital era (technically it was only possible with a huge production which was out of reach for the majority of photographers). Today, there are many programs out there that allows a photographer to express his vision (and I’m not talking about some Instagram filter or Photoshop action).
My older son is a boy scout and I wanted to immortalize this moment in his life with a beautiful portrait of him. And while the portrait was beautiful, I wasn’t really happy with the end result because it didn’t evoke the emotions I had when I’m looking at my son. Bellow is the portrait straight out of the camera.
And this is the portrait I created after spending about 2 hours enhancing it. I wish you could see the print because the digital version you are looking at, it doesn’t do it justice. I hope you enjoy it.
