Autumn Day Portraits

As a photographer, I have yet to establish my own post processing style.  Other than my brief introduction to photoshop in a high school arts class, I had always used my computer's basic photo editing program to play with my pictures.  For the longest time I used Picasa, a program that, even in its simplicity, fulfilled my post-processing needs.  It wasn't until last year that I actually gained access to a proper editing program.

Enter Adobe Lightroom.

I have personally loved using Lightroom. It's not nearly as extensive as Photoshop, but as an editing newbie, I'm thankful; Photoshop would have overwhelmed me.  Also, using Lightroom really allowed me to better understand how light works in photos (white balance, exposure, color hue and saturation etc) as I began to play with all of Lightroom's features.

With this session, I really wanted to emphasize the seasonal feeling of the day, so I wanted to try and accomplish an autumnal look for my photos with my post-process.  I edited these without the use of a preset, focusing more on the Split-tone feature of Lightroom to accomplish the look I wanted.

To be honest, I think the pictures still might have too much of a reddish/purple tint to them. I don't really know what I'm doing, and these might be edited horrendously by a professional's opinion.  But, I haven't posted in a while, and I need to start posting more of my work to both keep myself accountable and to show my work to nagging family and friends. ;)

Now on to the photos.  I took these photos back on an autumn day in November while I was babysitting Peyton.  The colors of the leaves were just too perfect to pass up, so I decided a mini photo shoot was in order. Peyton is the perfect model, he has no inhibitions and acts completely like his precious, sweet self when I stick a camera in his face.

Let me know what you think.  Do you like this edited look? Are the pictures too red? Don't you think Peyton is just the cutest? :)

 Peyton is still learning to walk, so as an alternative he scoots on his butt, no matter the muddiness of the ground. :)