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How To Finesse Free Blog Photos: Coffee Shop Edition

D'mani DeVoe
Mar 21, 2017
3 min read

Hey babies!

I'm back and I'm better...I'm also late with this post but better late than never, right?

Well with no further 'ado I'm just going to get right into it!

In my latest outfit posts I gave you a peak into my journey as I'm teaching myself photography alongside blogger homegirl, Patricia Darrabie of Darrabie.com. Well, I'm back with some more tips, so you too can save those coins your tossing at a photographer every week and still create quality content.

First must...LOCATION!

Location is always key. No, you don't have to do a full blown photo shoot in front of the Grand Canyon, but go somewhere with good lighting and if you're trying to tell a story, go somewhere that fits your story. If you're aiming for your outfit to stand out choose a location that compliments your outfit. For instance, I'm either doing editorial or lifestyle shoots. My editorial shoots are usually an ethereal or care free(ish) black girl magic aesthetic, so I'm drawn to locations with lots of plants. As far as lifestyle; I'm a blogger/creative who loves to explore the city, so I often take pics in coffee shops because that's usually where I am with my laptop, or in trendy Urban spaces that aren't over crowded.

For this particular shoot, I chose a coffee shop called Urban Garden Cafe, their coffee and bagels are soooooo good by the way and they're really nice. Anywho, it's right up the street from me; it's cozy, has great lighting, cool decor...AND PLANTS! I'm obsessed with plants y'all.

The decor matched my outfit and overall aesthetic which made it the perfect place for Patricia and I to get our cameras and turn their shop into our studio, after asking permission of course.

So we shot these photos on manual mode and learned a new photography trick to perfect lighting on Patricia's Canon (Still have to figure out how to get this right on my Nikon). When you look on the display screen, on the bottom there's this "balancing equalizer thingy majigher", also known as a light meter (lol just googled it). Once the needle is centered and is on '0' on the light meter, the lighting should be perfect. This keeps you from having to constantly change your settings because while daylight is the best lighting for great photos, it's also the trickiest due to moving clouds and all that other natural stuff.

After getting these shots inside, we found a mural outside of the shop to get photos in front of and played with depth of field. The 55mm lens blurs objects in front of your subject when turned to the left and objects behind your subject when twisted to the right. So, to blur the background we adjusted the lens a little and I later edited my photos to get the background a bit blurrier using an iPhone app called Tadaa (which I will go into detail about in a later post, pinky promise).

Okay, so in addition to depth of field, lighting and location, white balance is also a detail that can add that special touch to a photo.

I personally like my photos to be super bright and I hate the tungsten (yellowy) filter; so I use an app called snapseed and I change the temperature under the white balance option to be a little cooler until all of the white objects or spaces in my photo are a bright white; not, grey, not blue, not yellow but white. This makes photos look more spacey, airy and just clean and crisp (to me). I hope you've enjoyed these photos and tips. Stay tuned for a more in depth tutorial on how to use your phone to edit quality photos! And peep the outfit deets below: