I often have people ask me how I achieved a certain shot. Now I will be honest – some shots take a lot more work in the editing than others! But I thought I would do a little before and after of an easier one to show you what I did for a shot. I’ll try and do this a little more often. It’s fun! 
For the first, shot, a picture of Jane and Brian whose GORGEOUS couples session I shot Saturday evening out at Colt State Park. The technical details:
6:05 pm, D700 with my Tamron 90mm lens
ISO 100, f/3.2, 1/500
Behind them was open air fields with the bay and sky. I wanted that gorgeous golden sunlight that was surrounding them. In terms of composition I positioned myself so that they were in the bottom corner of my frame and the sun was in the top right corner. I wanted a lot of what is called negative space in the shot (part of the frame that doesn’t really have any detail) to give it the feeling of peeking in on a moment between the two of them. I shot more into the sun because again, I wanted that flarey-goldeny-glow. It wasn’t directly behind them, but it was to the side and behind them. I didn’t want any details behind them other than the tree to give the shot some quiet intimacy. Their positioning was all them. All I did was tell Brian to sit on the wall
It’s just about waiting for the right moments that you see.
On the left is the SOOC (straight out of the camera) version, on the right, the finished version. What I did is below the photo. Honestly, when I opened the file, I didn’t want to touch it at all because I loved it. I loved the haze, the everything. But I decided it needed just a little bit of “finishing” to it.
In my RAW window, I brought down exposure -.10, recovered a little bit of detail and brought down the brightness by about 15. I could have adjusted the white balance there but I chose to save it for photoshop.
Then I brought it into photoshop. I ran my normal workflow action which uses levels to bring up midtones and bring down shadows, then a screen layer at 30% to brighten it up a little along with a slight defog to give it a little more clarity. It also runs a vignette around the edge of the photo. Once that was done, I used a color balance layer to add some warmth to it. I added yellow, a little bit of red and a smidge of magenta. Did a very slight s-curve, ran an unsharp mask and done! Less than two minutes of editing from start to finish.
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