CANNON BEACH PHOTO SHOOT | BEFORE & AFTER EDITS

Photography is a form of visual art. Have you ever wondered what a portrait artist means when they talk about retouching or editing a photograph? Maybe you didn’t realize that a professional portrait requires edits and retouching. A professional portrait artist must know how to capture a person or people using the camera, the scenery, proper lighting and proper posing. The photographer must also have the skill and artistry to finish the portrait to make it beautiful. In the days before digital photography, portrait artists created their work with a photographic capture, dark room editing and printing and then some retouching on the surface of the print. In this digital age, photographers spend many hours using photo editing software fine tuning an image to create a piece of art from the captured images. Professional portraits are an art form!

We recently spent a weekend in Cannon Beach for a relaxing getaway from the office. Of course, we couldn’t leave without cameras, so we did a little impromptu photo shoot on the beach at sunset. We wanted to share our before & after shots to give our readers an idea of what comes out of the camera and the finished portrait.

The reality of this evening was there wasn’t much of a sunset, the clouds were closing in for a stormy night and the sun was disappearing and reappearing every 5 minutes. The light changing affected the color of the sky, water, sand, and dress. The wind was heavy and the ocean was cold. If we hadn’t said so, would you be able to tell? Probably not.

Portrait art is incredibly time consuming and each image is created and perfected with a tremendous amount of love and care. We believe in capturing families at all life stages to create art pieces that will become family legacy and tell stories to be passed to future generations.