Oishi for Coco Magazine

It's been at least a year since my last blog post. But with a one year old....well, we'll see. :) For this particular blog I wanted to share with you my newest editorial entitled, 'Oishi' that was submitted to Coco Magazine. It was a different shoot for myself, with a lot of moving parts. There was a lot more photoshopping than I normally do for shoots, so it was a challenge, but turned out to be fun.

Model: Marissa Nguyen @chopstick_and_stilettos
Makeup: Haley Triforo @trifiro_art
Styling/Concept: Janelle LaFond, @jmistyling

Behind the scenes of my latest shoot

Just recently did a magazine shoot with stylist Tamy Lugo (vstylist.com), model Darryl S and MUA Sherry Restifo. Here are some of the behind the scenes shots I took from our shoot.

As always I like to take black and white shots after the shoot. It gives me something to preview, especially in the case of fashion shoots I'm submitting, it can take weeks for anything to come out. :) Here are my favs from the black and whites. I decided to leave some in color because I absolutely loved the contrast of her hair and skin color.

Adding color to your image

Recently I've received emails and messages on facebook regarding my editing style, and general questions about the things that I do photography wise. Well, I don't mind helping anyone and in fact really love sharing information with people. I'm self-taught and everything I learned came from research and asking questions of other photogs, so I'm never stingy with information. In the spirit of that I've decided to start blogging about different techniques I've learned and how I've applied them. I think of it as paying it forward. Mind you I'm not a consistent blogger, but this year I'll strive to change that.  I'm not a super technical person, so don't look for technical tips. I can tell you generally about F stops and shutter speeds, but since I don't retain information well, don't ask me why their relationship to each other is important. or why I used a certain shutter speed and F stop. LOL. My experience with photography is very tactile, so a lot of things I do are based on feeling. But, feel free to ask me anything regarding my method, and I'll certainly try to answer or direct you to where I got the answer. :) So, for my first, hopefully helpful, blog post regarding method I will explain my shoot 'Brawler' and how easy it is to change the color of an image with a gradient adjustment layer. Not only easy but quick, because let's face it, I ain't got the patience for a lengthy tutorial. Note: There are multiple ways to do anything in Photoshop, I'm only sharing the way I do things.

So last year make-up artist Andie Sleeman and I got together with model Annelise Adams to do an edgy beauty shoot. I wanted to show a street fighter, a brawler, a beautiful woman who was not afraid to fight. I wanted to show her beauty through the bruises. It was published in Ellements Magazine. You can see the entire editorial here.

 So here is the image I started with. This is with no edits. I used a monolight with a filter to get that red light in the corner of the image. The image isn't 'exposed' technically correctly, but was exposed for the lighting that I wanted.



















The first thing I did was crop and rotate the image to bring the focus closer in on her face.

I've read a ton of tutorials and Photoshop tips that tell you the best or easier way to edit is by using adjustment layers. They allow you to see all the changes on your image without actually touching your image layer. You can erase and adjust them at your leisure which is awesome. So if you adjusted the brightness and it looks crazy, you can go back and change it. I use these a lot because they allow you to stack changes on your image separately and independent of each other.

Anywho, for this particular shoot, I wanted to make the image a little more dramatic. I thought the color would add a harder edge to these image. So I added a gradient layer.
You can find it in either of the places I circled.

You can choose any of the colors in your gradients, depending on what look you want.                                                              

 Once you have your color, then adjust the layer mode to what best fits the look you want. In this particular one I chose screen and turned the opacity down to keep the color from overpowering the image. Again, all personal choices. Depends on how you want your image to look.

Note: Changing the layer mode is a good way to change the look of your gradient while keeping the same colors. 

 As you can see, the color changed drastically. In my opinion immediately it changed the mood of the image.

 So, after the color is changed. This is the best time to do any skin edits that you're going to do. I usually edit skin after I've chosen the color my image will be. Sometimes when you're cloning and healing the perfect matches that you accomplished with the skin one color will show up differently when you make universal color changes to the picture.

Once the color was done I fixed up the skin, made other adjustments and here is the finished image.  (I didn't go over all the other edits done to the image as this was on how easy your image could be changed with a simple gradient adjustment layer.)

Sol Mate

I'm excited to finally be able to share another of my favorite editorials this year with you. It features Roarie Yum again, (who I am currently obsessed with) and make-up was done by MUA: Elayna Bachman. It was featured in Andivero's second issue which came out this month. You can check it out here: www.andivero.com. I called it Sol Mate, our vision was a woman who worshiped the sun much to her detriment. We wanted to do these really gnarly tan lines to show how long she would bathe in the sun. Elayna's idea for the tan line pattern was something very geometric, very clean. We also envisioned color blocking with the lipstick and nail color, so we played around with the same shape of the tan lines on the nails as well. Elayna mapped out the lines on Roarie's skin and proceeded to tan her within an inch of her life. LOL The results were so gorgeous. The lines you see on Roarie's skin is her actual skin color in comparison to the tan Elayna did on her. I put the pics that made it into the magazine on my facebook page, www.facebook.com/AdrienneAndersenPhoto , here are some of the pics that didn't make the issue.

Jack and Jill

I'm really happy that I can finally post the pics from my shoot with Dolly Donshey. She and Darcy Rouh styled our androgynous shoot that we called Jack and Jill. The idea came from MUA Chantel Hyden, who had a vision of doing half of the models face as a woman and the other half as a man. We all wanted the images androgynous, and a perfect blend of men and women's fashion. I love how Roarie still looks femine and gorgeous in what would be termed men's fashion. Here are my favorite images from our shoot. Also check out the interview in EnVie's March issue here: En Vie