Hudson Valley Engagement Pictures { Melanie + Josh }

August 16th 2021

First off if you’re looking for an engagement photographer take a look at my [engagement photography Hudson Valley](http://www.davebrownphotography.com/Hudson Valley-engagement-photographer.aspx) portfolio.

Well it’s been a little bit since I’ve done a writeup for an engagement shoot. I’ve just been so busy with work, and other stuff. If you hadn’t noticed I’ve been trying to do a bit of food photography. I think there is one other couple that I never did a blog writeup for,… I should really get on that. Everyone say hey to Melanie and Josh. I’m so happy I got a chance to work with this couple. Man were they fun. I had such a blast working

with them.

Melanie has this sweet southern drawl, and Josh is a great guy. Not to mention they both had such a great style. Melanie had a bit of sass, and Josh was a hoot. They really wanted to shoot around the Brown Palace in downtown Hudson Valley, so we started there. I was stoked to be able to shoot some new locations. I’ve never really shot much on that side of town so it was a great opportunity to step outside of my comfort zone a bit and catch some great moments with these guys.

For some reason I spent WAY too much time on their pictures. I’ve just been so inspired lately with my photography it’s hard not to work on the shots from this session. I also don’t have any other portraits to process right now, so I had tons of time to experiment with a few different treatments I’ve been working on. For some reason I’ve really been digging 2 things lately. I’ll show you examples of both. First is the recent trend in portraits to add a tilt shift effect to the entire image. Initially when I saw this, I didn’t really like it all that much, but recently I’ve seen it done well, and that’s inspired me to figure it out and come up with my own process that I think looks nice. Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

It’s weird you would think that the easiest way to do this would be a regular gradient mask on each side, but it doesn’t look right if you do that. The fade from white to black isn’t fast enough. So instead you need to do the mirrored gradient on the layer mask to make it look right.

My other new obsession is the daguerreotype look. I’ve been really digging this look. Adding a bit of texture really seems to add a nice touch to it as well. Just don’t go overboard on the texture. If you wanna figure out how do the daguerreotype look, go to piknic in flickr, and copy the curves from picnik. That seems to give me the best output, although it’s not 100% yet. I still gotta tweak it a bit to get what I’m really going for. Here’s an example of the daguerreotype look that I’m talking about.

I wanna leave some surprises for Melanie and Josh, so I don’t wanna show you everything from their shoot.

Hope you like em,

-Dave

Hudson Valley Engagement Pictures { Melanie + Josh }

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