Before I started my photography journey I had no idea about the roller coaster that is the creative process.

I find with client work I’m generally inspired as I’m in different homes with different light and I can always find new angles and framing options.

But my own house? My own kids? A totally different scenario! I feel like I have explored every single corner of my house and know how the light falls through every window at every different hour of the day.

But, that’s not an excuse!

In order to stay at my very best and to continue to make work that’s inspiring, it’s important that I challenge myself and try new photography techniques.

I recently created a few new self-portraits that involved quite a bit of work in Photoshop and I thought it’d be fun to show you how the process evolved.

This is the first image straight of out camera – meaning it has zero editing done to it. The room was dark aside from the one window you see here – I’d flipped the black-out blind up to get the amount of light I wanted.

I then edited the image in Lightroom so that it had the tones and feel that I knew I wanted in the final image.

I ended up with this.

Normally, this is where I’d stop, but I had an idea my head for this portrait, which involved removing the window.

I pulled the photo into Photoshop and removed the window and the closet on the left side of the frame.

And then I downloaded a leaf photo from Pexels, which is a site that has many free stock photos.

And then, in Photoshop I overlayed the leaf photo multiple times until I was able to achieve the look and opacity I wanted.

Then, just for fun, I decided maybe a green tank top would work better. 🙂

And then decided that nope, I liked the red. 😂

And so, here’s the final composite self-portrait, which turned out pretty close to how I’d imagined when I set out to make this.

P.S. Want to see more like this? Check out the other blog posts I’ve written for photographers and follow along at Unscripted mentoring where there are tons more blog posts plus an exclusive membership group where Jenny and I mentor up-and-coming photogs.