photography

The Citrus Shore

Viviana's Kitchen

Is what I’m naming this cocktail – now if only I could come up with a great name for the podcast I still haven’t started.

Welcome back and get ready cause if you’ve got a love for gin like I do, I’ve got a simple, albeit quirky?, cocktail for ya. Grab your shaker and the following ingredients:

  • A few cubes of ice for shaking
  • Gin of choice (Detroit City Distillery always and forever baby!)
  • Elderflower syrup
  • Limeade (lime lemonade)
  • Orange juice

Directions

  1. Add ice to shaker.
  2. Pour gin to your preference.
  3. Add about 1 teaspoon of elderflower syrup, 1/2 cup limeade, and a splash of OJ.
  4. SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE IT! and serve. Enjoy!

Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram @vivianapodinaphotography & @lovelikeangels

Advertisements

A Walk Through Cranbrook

Floral & Nature

Today was the first day of the rest of my life. 

Without being too cryptic, I’ll say that I did things today that were cathartic and healing and I received messages and support that I needed to hear and I am grateful and thankful for the people in my life that continue to lift me up and make me feel valued. 

That said, I gifted myself an early Christmas gift last month for Black Friday and bought Adobe Creative Cloud and thankfully have Photoshop back! I’ve been tinkering around in it (and Lightroom) but today I spent some time at Cranbrook and came home with a handful of great shots.

While I was there, a lady named Loretta walked up to me and started asking me questions about what I was taking a picture of and showed me some of her photography as well. We ended up spending well over an hour walking the grounds and I learned a lot of fascinating things about the architecture of the surrounding buildings. 

We exchanged  all kinds of stories and life experiences and funny enough, before I left the house I had stuck a few of my business cards in my pocket thinking “you never know who you’ll meet”. She was so interested in my creative pursuits, I ended up giving her one of my cards. Loretta, if you’re reading this, you are an incredible lady and I adore your vivaciousness and thirst for knowledge. 

That said, here are a couple of the photos I took today. The second photo is the last one I took before Loretta took me on a whirlwind tour of the grounds. 

Fall Update

Miscellaneous

Hello! Hi. I’m still alive and well aware that it has definitely been a minute since my last post.

In that time span, I have (thankfully) transferred all my files and photos to an external hard drive, lost any functionality on my HP laptop, bought a MacBook Pro 2015 and then returned it, and just bought a MacBook Pro 2018 that has yet to have any media imported on it. PHEW.

I’m still getting using to Apple as a whole, particularly the keyboard as I’m currently typing this – I find their keyboards to be slightly too far to the right and I keep hitting the wrong keys. I’m also still aggravated that I can’t see the time in the bottom right corner and the close/minimize buttons are on the left side – like at this point it just feels spiteful to have them there. 

I also bought and downloaded Affinity Photo and will be testing out that software hopefully this weekend, when my dongles arrive and I can import media. 

Additionally, I allowed myself to splurge a little since I had a credit on my Prime card from the 2015 return, and finally bought a ring light, photo studio setup, and an extra backdrop. I have a selfie shoot planned for this weekend that will tie into all that and help me try out Affinity, so hopefully some new content coming your way here.

Speaking of selfies, I would check out my website every time I went into the Apple store huffing and puffing over whether I should indulge in the 2018, and I noticed that this year has been, first of all, sparse on posts, but secondly, full of photos of myself. Maybe I should analyze that deeper, but I’d like to try to get different models and extend my portrait portfolio beyond photos of myself. 

Eventually I’d like to pick up that 52 week photo challenge I started in the beginning of the year and dropped a couple months in. I can’t really call it procrastination anymore when it’s been roughly 8 months since the last time I even attempted it, right?

I’m currently about a week behind in Inktober sketches, so there’s there too, but I’m solidly planning on finishing that project.

That said, I should have new content coming soon!

Jungle Fever

Portraits

I realized when I posted these photos on my Instagram accounts that my photography Instagram (@vivianapodinaphotography) still says I’m participating (PROCRASTINATING) in the r/WeeklyPhotos 52 week challenge. However, I haven’t looked at that challenge since March. The year isn’t over yet and I’d really like to catch up and finish the challenge with everyone else, so in an effort to have no more “zero-days”, I’m going to challenge myself to finish this challenge.

That said, I didn’t go into these photos with the intent of them coming out how they did at all. I was simply happy with another great makeup look and wanted to capture it in photos.

I added freckles to my face with an eyebrow pencil, a makeup trend and trick that I feel adds more dimension to an overall look, but especially so in photography. One of my favorite photo aesthetics is that of Claire Luxton, who uses her Photoshop skills to hyper-intensify gorgeous details like freckles and gem-colored eyes to bring out her subjects. I used her photography as reference and inspiration while editing, and brought out my faux freckles in this series.

I watched a few of her videos on Youtube to see how she edits and I combined a couple new tricks from her style of editing with my own. I’m very pleased with how these photos turned out and I think I might have to do some Twitch streams again in the future of my photo-editing because this was honestly so much fun.

I use myself as my subject matter for portraits about 95% of the time, but I’d really like to expand that and test myself and my skills in bringing out other people’s personalities and stories through my photography.

DSC_1968copy.jpg

 

DSC_2023copy3.jpg

DSC_2029copy.jpg

Ginger Hair, Ginger Life

Portraits

I had a brief dance with blonde for two weeks this month but alas, decided it wasn’t for me.

So I’m back to ginger in full force and my makeup game was STRONG yesterday so OBVIOUSLY that means I whipped out the camera and took some new shots.

Luci stopped by and “guarded” me while I was shooting, so I got a couple shots in with him too.

I particularly enjoy the last picture in this set, but it just reminds me that I really need to invest in a backdrop. The garage door is a great white canvas most of the time. But sometimes I really just want a plain, untextured background. It’s on my to do list.

Enjoy :)

DSC_1297copy.jpg

DSC_1343copy.jpg

DSC_1377copy3.jpg

DSC_1418copy.jpg