October 20th, 2018: Desert Botanical Gardens

In October 2018, my boyfriend's mom had given him two tickets to the Desert Botanical Gardens. Immediately I thought of all the gorgeous shots I could take that would have the perfect background, so I was eager to go. Unfortunately for my boyfriend, my eagerness meant he would be stopping every three minutes to pose.

He was mostly willing to participate.

Something that was fun about this shoot was I realized that I could use the pamphlet they gave us as a makeshift reflector. I had never used any reflector at all prior to this shoot so it was pretty cool to see the results it produced, such as in the image above.

I'm really proud of this shoot because it was the first time where I actively remembered to change my subject's pose, the composition, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and white balance as the scenery changed, especially if photos were not coming out the way I wanted them to. Usually I just keep forgetting about the settings; instead I just snap photos and pray that I can fix them in post. This time I was actually aware of what all I could control and made sure to get the right look in-camera.