Some time ago the wonderful images of Elena Shumilova went viral. Suddenly there were dogs, rabbits and cute children everywhere. And I have to say – these images are extraordinary – we instantly begin to dream and to fell fuzzy. Something is going on with us while looking at these images. In some way, her work is magical.

After a while threads started popping up in forums, asking about the secrets and post production in Elena’s work.

The stuff I usually do is definitely different from soft warm portraiture, also I am not the photographer on the team – my job in the process has to do more with the technical planning of shots, lighting and retouching.

As a father of a two-year-old girl, owner of a DSLR and with a girlfriend who’s blogging, I had to expand my principles. So I started analyzing Elenas images and wrote some key elements in her images down. I did not want to copy her compositions,  or wanted to recreate her image ideas – which is technically not possible, because I don’t have a big dog, or rabbit around.

The idea was “applying some of her key elements on a normal family trip”.

Last weekend the family went out, the light was quite pleasing, I had my D800 and a 85mm f1.8 lens with me and so I was following my own “ basic shumilova-rules”:[Read More…]