Behind The Frame Part vii: Four favorite personal photos from 2023

Feb 12

The start of a new year for me is always filled with an excitement…kind of like back to school. I love to sit down with a new planner and journal, and to think about what I want out of the year ahead. One thing that I also do at the end of each year is make a calendar for each of my girls with photos from the year before. This is a great way for me to ensure I have photos edited from the year, and to take a reflective look back at my personal photography from the year as well.

Four Favorite Personal Images From 2023

So, in this post I’m going to share some behind the frame thoughts and information about four personal images from 2023.

Reflections On Purple Hair

Those of you out there with tweens, and even younger kids know that there is a lot of interest in their hair, and dying their hair as well. We let our daughter get ‘purple tips’ as her 10th birthday gift, and she was so excited. So, I brought my camera along to document the process as well as her freshly done hair with purple tips! This image is actually taken just outside of the hair salon where they have beautiful big windows, and the light was just right. So, I took a portrait that included her reflection as well as a bit of the city scene blurred out in the background from my narrow depth of field. To get the reflection i stood close to the glass window, and just moved until I liked the way the reflection looked, and where she was framed within the image. During post processing I will often use an adjustment brush in Adobe Lightroom on the reflection to add some clarity and contrast to help the reflection pop. It was also important in this image to ensure that the lines were all as straight and level as possible.

Young Girl Stands In Front Of Hair Salon Storefront Window With Purple Dyed Hair Tips And A Light Pink Sweatshirt And Leggins

Exploring Paris

This last year I was traveling and spent a few days in Paris with my mom but without my children. While exploring I decided to photograph my mom just as I would photograph my own kids when we travel, and it was such fun. And frankly, so was much more obligatory than my kids are sometimes! Ha!

Anyhow, for this image, I really liked the way the different windows lined up, showing the typical Parisian style and color of many of the buildings. I also wanted to highlight the scale of my mother compared to the architecture, and liked the color combination of the contrasting orange’s in my mother’s clothes to the blue shutters. I asked her to look at her phone as if trying to navigate our walk and took the photo with her centered at the bottom of the frame to accentuate the scale.

Lady Stands In Front Of White Washed Building With Blue Shutters And Iron Fencing

Hawaiian Sunset

As a reader of my blog, or someone who has followed my photography on social media you probably imagine that I have tons of photos of my kids. This is true and also not true as the years go by. With each year that they get older it’s actually a bit more challenging to photograph them. But, vacations are the perfect time for me to photograph my girls in unique and interesting locations when we are all exploring, relaxed and having fun.

This image was taken at sunset on the Big Island of Hawaii, and what I loved about it was that my older daughter was just enjoying the sunset, the waves tickling her toes, and the warm Hawaiian breeze. I liked how the light was highlighting her face as well as the stripes in her dress, and that she was holding it to keep it out of the waves. I stooped down low to have her head/face between the palm trees to decrease those potentially distracting elements, while snapping the photo when the wave just hit her feet. I can feel the warmth of the sunset on her each time I look at this image.

Young Girl Stands On Hawaiian Beach During Sunset Looking Out At The Water

Corpus Christie Cousins

Over the Thanksgiving holiday break we were lucky to visit with my sister and her two daughters who are very close with my two girls. I asked if we could do a ‘driving art tour’ of the city to explore the vibrant wall art installations around Corpus Christie…while I was secretly looking for some opportunities to photograph the kids in the colorful city as well. This was a fun image to take because the girls were really having a good time exploring, and the art behind them shows many different artists and colors, kind of like their colorful personalities. I did need to get down lower to take this photo, and then straighten the image significantly to ensure the log and art work was all level. There was actually a few cars on the side that I needed to clone out to create the final image, but I love how fun and colorful it is while capturing their age and love for eachother.