Beautiful girl.

This is by far one of my absolute favorite photos that I have taken. Olivia just radiates light and joy, the sunset was incredible, and I have always been a sucker for images with water in them. I wanted to walk you through a step-by-step process of how I took this photo.

First, I addressed my camera settings. Posing and location don't mean anything without proper settings on your camera. It was still fairly light out. We were in the prime of golden hour (the last hour before sunset when the lighting is "golden" and most beautiful). I set my shutter speed at 1/500, my f-stop at 2.0, and my ISO at 100. If you don't know what these mean, shutter speed is how quickly the image is captured. F-stop is depth of field. The lower your f-stop, the more blurry the foreground and background will be. And ISO is the sensitivity. Simply put, the higher the ISO, the grainier the photo. All three of these elements work together to create the exposure on the image. Ideally you want bright light, but not harsh. Insert golden hour. There is incredible lighting, but generally not direct lighting. And the lighting, to me, is what just MAKES this photo. We have many from this session that were beautiful simply because Olivia is beautiful, but when you combine that with the golden sunset, the beauty becomes unmatched.

Step two was to begin posing Olivia. If you are a photographer, I HIGHLY recommend taking Amy & Jordan's posing class. It was worth. Every. Single. Penny. They are so in depth and intentional in training their students to pose well without having to memorize a bunch of different poses. For this pose in particular, I had Olivia turn 90 degrees from me and turn her head back towards me to look at the camera. After that, I adjusted her arms and tweaked anything that seemed out of place or awkward. The pose itself is not overly complicated by any means, but creates such flattering lines and silhouettes.

From here, it's easy to make some adjustments and capture similar but different photos, such as having her look in a different direction, moving her arms, tilting her head, etc. Variety is the spice of life, and also of photography.