Inspiration & Free Photoshop Curves: Julia Trotti

Lately I've been admiring the photography of 19 year old Sydney sider Julia Trotti. Not only is she an amazing young photographer, already shooting fashion lookbooks, musicians and weddings...she is also willing to help out photographers like myself. I really love her blog, it has so many helpful articles for people to help them reach the best of their capabilities. She has an incredible versatility within her photos, she doesn't stick to one type of style, she can go from doing a shoot at the beach to a shoot at a cemetary, and do both so perfectly. She really is an incredible photographer, and I'm so glad that this personal project process has allowed me to see so many young photographers like myself.

In a few posts back, I spoke about Nirrimi and photoshop curves, I was absolutely in love with the colour tones of Nirrimi's photos, and when I came across Julia's blog, I felt as if her colours were very similar so it made me wonder if she had used 'curves' aswell, and having looked through her blog, it turns out she does, and unlike Nirrimi, she gives them out for free! I was very excited to have seen this, so I downloaded every single one of her curves which she had on her blog. In order to use the curves, you need the latest version of Photoshop, so that was the next thing I downloaded.
I'm extremely excited to try out some of her curves on my photos! The only thing is that I wish I had found out about these curves before I edited practically all my photos, this means I'm going to have to re-edit most of them if I like the way they look with these curves better than the ways I've already edited them. 

an example of one of Julia's curves

Shoot #6: Adriana

Above are some raw files from my photoshoot today.
Today was my last shoot before I finish creating my book and send it to get printed. I did my shoot with Adriana, and the location was bond university. I was really happy that we used Bond University as the location because I felt like I had been using too many nature areas, and I wanted something more 'industrial' so I'm glad this wasn't completely a nature shoot. I was surprised as to how many good places there were within Bond to take photos. Adriana brought along a whole suitcase of clothes, which was good and bad, good because it meant we had a lot of clothing to work with, bad because we had to carry it around with us to each place we were shooting. It also meant that everytime we wanted a outfit change we had to walk all the way back to the bathrooms carrying the suitcase around with us. Firstly we started of by using a patch of flowers and I styled Adriana in a cream dress, because I wanted these pictures to be really elegant and pretty, and I thought the dress represented that perfectly. Next I got her to wear jeans, heels and a fur vest, and we went to take photos on some steps, but unfortunately it was already getting pretty dark because we were shooting in the afternoon, so the lighting wasn't that great, so those photos didn't turn out very well. So we decided to try and see if the light was better anywhere else, we found some other stairs and took some photos there, but then I decided that all the good lighting was gone and it was best to call it day. Having barely gotten anything done, we decided we'd come back again the next day, which is what we did. We came back the next day at an earlier time to ensure we wouldn't lose any light. We started of by taking some pictures infront of a plain wall, I styled Adriana in a mint coloured sheer top, denim shorts and red lipstick, I loved the way all the colours worked together. Next we went towards some stairs, and I styled Adriana in a long blue maxi skirt, white top, necklace and kept the red lipstick on, I loved the vibrancy of the blue skirt and red lipstick, with the lake in the background, it worked as a beautiful backdrop, combining nature. Adriana's next outfit change was a sheer black skirt, white top and fur scarf, we took some photos infront of a small bridge with that outfit on, and then we made our way to a massive stair case where we took more on the stairs and then some infront of some pillars. I loved the way these pictures turned out, it was a really long and tiring two days however, and this was definitely the most time consuming and long photoshoot I've ever done, but I'm really happy with it, and I think it's the perfect last photoshoot for my personal project!

Blurb

With the consideration of the book title and covers coming into mind lately, I've decided to look into where I am going to be ordering my book from. I spent some time looking online, I came across what seems to be a really reliable and good website known as www.blurb.com. This website enables you to download a special program which gives you the ability to design the book yourself, which is ensuring to me that it will turn out exactly how I want it to. The website gives you hundreds of options on how you want your book to look, so I downloaded the program and designed a few pages to get me used to the program, even thought I haven't finished all my photoshoots, atleast this will give me a bit of a headstart.

Title of my Book and Front and Back Cover!

Recently I've been thinking about what I am going to call my book, I feel like this is a really important decision to my final product, as the title will be the first thing that people will see and look at. I don't want to call it something plain and boring like 'Sarushka's Photo's' I wan't it to have a catchy title, and a title similar to what you'd find on a real coffee table book. After having spent ages thinking about it, I have come up with the idea to call my book 'INSIGHT'', I have chosen this as the name for my book because I believe that that's exactly what this book is, it's an insight into what I love, an insight into my love for fashion and photography, and pretty much my world, I thought it was catchy, looked professional, and I really liked the sound of it. Having said that, I had to now decide what I wanted to make the cover page look like. This to me, was harder than choosing the actual name of the book. Initially I had to choose whether I wanted a picture on the front cover of the book or not, after contemplating it for AGES, I decided that it's best not to have a picture on the front, because either people or going to hate what they see or love what they see, its a 50/50 chance of having someone bother to even look at it, whereas if I make the cover plain and simple, people are intrigued about what it's about which leads them to want to look at it. I drew up 3 feasible designs for the front cover in paint, and then chose the one which I liked the best.
Here are the three designs:

I ended up choosing the middle design because I felt like the first design was too simple, whereas the last design was too complex, I liked the simplicity of the middle design, I thought its appearance will be effective in getting people's attention, but not giving too much out about the book just yet.

I didn't want people to look at my book though and have absolutely no idea what it was going to be about, so I decided to include a picture on the back of the book, I didn't want the picture to show anybodies face, and I wanted to stay in the black and white theme, so I ended up choosing a picture from my photoshoot with phoebe and brooke, and I used a picture of phoebe with her almost bareless back facing the camera, I really love this photo and think it suited being on the back of the book perfectly.

Editing for Shoot #5

Today I spent editing the pictures from my shoot with Brooke and Phoebe at Pizzey Park. I loved editing these pictures just because the lighting was so perfect in the photos and I just love the way they turned out.
I followed the same process as I do when I edit all my pictures:

1. Sort and organize through the photos I like the best and am going to edit, and put them into a seperate folder
2. Sort the photos into seperate albums depending on the outfit
3. Edit a few pictures from each outfit album and see how I like it edited the best
   -Includes adjusting exposure, colours etc
   -Applying effects
   -Changing colours of things
   -Clearing imperfections on skin
   -Applying lipstick colours etc if necessary
4. Edit the photos from each outfit nearly exactly the same, so they have the same colour tones, effects etc
   
   

Shoot #5: Brooke and Phoebe at Pizzey Park

Yesterday I did my 5th photoshoot for my personal project at Pizzey Park, this has to be one of my favourite shoots I've done yet, I just thought the location and styling was really perfect and worked so well together. I wanted to do the shoot in the afternoon because that's when the light shines through the trees and creates a beautiful setting, usually I hate taking photos in the afternoon because the lighting is terrible, but this time I really wanted the sign to be at level with the trees so it could beam through, and I'm glad I did do it in the afternoon because it really turned out amazing! We started off when the sun wasn't really setting as yet, just so we could get some normal shots without the sun in the way. For this shoot, I wanted really nice, long, dressy outfits because I think it suited the surrounding. I styled Brooke in a long white maxi dress and phoebe in a cream bodice and leopard printed maxi skirt, with this outfit, I got Phoebe to use a black lace mask as a prop for some of the pictures, and I loved the way that looked in the photos, it really added that extra touch. The next outfit change was a contrast between black and white, Phoebe wore a crochet white backless dress/top with a cream skirt and Brooke wore a black bodysuit and long black maxi skirt, I loved the contrast between the two colours. I thought however it was missing something, so I decided to make Phoebe wear red lipstick for that extra pop of colour, and I love the way black, white and red go together. I took pictures of both Phoebe and Brooke together, and then some individual shots. The difficulty of this shoot was that all the trees looked the same, so it was hard to try and make the pictures look different, but I played around with angles and lighting to change it around a little bit. At this point the sun was making its way into the trees, and the lighting was perfect! So we did another outfit change, Brooke was in a black pleated skirt, white top and fur vest and floppy hat, and phoebe wore a pink top, cream skirt and oversized knit jumper. I took photo's in heaps of different angles, to work with the sun as best as possible, and I loved the outcome, these could possibly be my favourite out of all the photos I've taken, just because the way the sun came through the trees worked so perfectly. I loved this shoot, I wish we could've stayed longer and had one more outfit change, but we we're running out of time, so we had to leave.
I'm really excited to edit these pictures!

Here's some of the unedited pictures from the shoot aswell as a screenshot: