Hello! Welcome to my website! I am your resident Orange County Luxury Fine Art Portrait Photographer, and I am so excited you are here looking through my work!
My family and I moved to Yorba Linda from Arcadia in 2016, and at that time, we decided to move to this area because of how beautiful this part of North OC was. I knew I wanted to do photography here, but I will admit I was unprepared for how much I fell in love with this area. Orange County is so beautiful, and I have developed a very deep passion for offering outdoor portraiture here as a main focus for my photography work.
Getting to the point of this whole post, I wanted to explain what a Fine Art Luxury Portrait Photographer actually is. I will start by saying it isn’t defined by any recognized authority or organization (at least–not that I know of). There is no governing body that regulates the use of these words when it comes to a photography business. Therefore, any photographer can basically use these words to describe themselves and their work. However, generally, the photographers who tend to use these words to define their services are usually trying to signal to their clients that they are offering in their work that has a little more value than the average photography business.
What Is Fine Art Exactly?
Fine Art in the portrait photography world is typically based on more careful styling, posing, and editing. Usually, these elements in Fine Art Photography will be elevated in some way that result in more polished, stylized, emotional and/or thoughtful images.
With editing in particular, it typically refers to a more detailed and time-consuming process where the photos are hand-edited very carefully in Photoshop using a tablet and a stylus. It is as if the photos were digitally painted on to enhance details, the saturation of colors, highlights or shading, etc.
Fine Art editors can even go so far as directly adding certain elements that are missing in the photograph. A very skilled fine art editor can realistically DRAW objects directly onto the photo. I have done this type of editing in my work before by drawing an eye that had lost a lot of detail from some glasses with the blue coating that my client was wearing, or by adding strands of hair to a subject. It is obviously not an easy approach to editing, and it takes years of learning and a very strong background in drawing, art, and Photoshop to execute these kinds of edits properly.
What is luxury photography?
When it comes to photography services, the term luxury usually means the photographer is also going to provide extra, more “high-end” services compared to other people in the industry. Usually this will mean more catering to the individual needs of a client (versus a “one-size-fits-all” approach) and offering high-end wardrobe options for clients to choose from.
In addition to the more tailored services, a lot of luxury photographers (myself included) typically use more high-end equipment when it comes to their gear. While many people in the industry will maintain that the gear does not matter when it comes to taking a good photo, and while I do wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment in that I have seen highly skilled photographers take amazing photos with just their cell phones, while hobbyists I have seen with great gear can take some very average-looking photos, there is no denying that the best gear in the hands of a highly skilled and experienced photographer results in some incredible photos. An experienced photographer will know how to get the most out of their more high-end gear, and an inexperienced photographer will not understand lighting or the technical aspects of their gear well enough to be able to compensate for that knowledge with really expensive equipment.
The best camera in the world will not make a person the best photographer in the world. Nothing can replace a strong foundation in a photographer’s understanding of the exposure triangle, lighting, depth-of-field, styling, posing, etc.
