Happy Friday!! I know it’s been a bit since I’ve popped in with a few answers to your “ask anything” posts.  It’s been a busy few months with wedding season in full swing!

So now that I’m playing catch-up, here are a few questions I was asked about photography specifically! They’re a bit on the technical side, but I’m going to do my best to break them down here!

“I love how your photos are the perfect balance between light and airy and vibrant! Whenever I try to edit to get light and airy photos they tend to look flat and dull. How do you achieve such beautiful brightness??”

Wowwee this is a loaded question ;) haha! So as far as finding a balancing point between light and airy, but maintaining vibrancy, I think that the first thing you need to pay attention to is your lighting.  This is huge in maintaining vibrancy from the get go.  If you’re shooting in flat/dark light, it makes it way trickier to achieve the look you’re going for.

Secondly, as far as editing goes, a few things to pay attention to: contrast, vibrancy, and the slider that controls your blacks! These dictate the look you’re going for significantly.  Everyone’s specifics is different, so I encourage you to play around with the sliders just a bit!  A lot of times what I see when people try to edit for the “light and airy” look, they focus on the way their shadows look rather than their blacks!

Hi Lauren! I wanted to ask you how you achieve super crisp images. Ugh, I am having the hardest time with that and it is getting under my skin like crazy! I have tried adjusting my aperture, using larger focus points, quicker shutter speed, but my photos still have a soft fuzz on them. I primarily shoot with a 50mm. When I get up close the images are sharp, but when I step back, they always have that fuzz, and it is something I have to change! Not sure if you have any advice to give me on that? THANK YOU!

First things first, I’ve totally experienced this before! I think it could be one of a few things going on here…

1) there could be something that’s a little off with your lens or camera specifically. Sometimes after a lot of use calibration is necessary so that you can maintain sharp images! However, this seems a little less likely since your images are sharp when you are shooting close-up.

On a similar note, a lot of people make the mistake of upping their aperture the further away a subject is from them.  When you do that and you have a busy background, you’re not creating enough separation and your camera doesn’t know where to focus.

When I’m shooting wide open, I am making sure that my line of focus is ever-so-slightly in front of my subjects! Sometimes the fuzz you’re describing actually comes from being out of focus and having the focal point behind the subject.  This is super easy to have happen when there is a lot going on in the background. 

A few quick fixes: make sure your aperture isn’t too high. Next fix: adjust your focal point to be slight ahead of your subject. Three: if you can, creating a little bit of separation from your subject and a busy background helps!

You can see I implemented these tricks in this image below:

Yay! Friends, these were some great questions and I am excited to dig into some more “Ask Lauren” questions soon! Until then, if you have a question be sure to ask anything here!