Back in 96! one of my best friends @benjaminbeech introduced me to the world of photography. We would spend most of our time cruising around on skateboards, armed with our Pentax k1000 in hand we would document everything that teenagers would do. Even years later digital photography was still in its early stages and wasn’t a scratch on the quality of film.
Weeks, months, years were spent hermitting in dark rooms dodging and burning our favourite 16x20 prints. Always experimenting with different paper and film stocks, trying to achieve a look and feel that expressed our creativity. Film will always have that something special about it, from the moment you press that shutter button, not knowing quite what you’ve captured to when your image starts to appear on that beautiful silver halide paper. I do miss this in some respects but Digital photography does have so many advantages over using film and being able to recreate the look and feel of old films using film emulators like VSCO to create new ones is just awesome.
For the past few months I’ve been working on a new preset, and this isn’t something that I would just jump into lightly. This preset needs to have gorgeous skin tones across all lighting conditions but at the same time be beautiful and timeless.
Over past 6 years I have used VSCO presets and tweaked them until I was happy with the results. There are of course thousands of people out there trying to sell you their photography presets but most of it is just rubbish so please do not waste your money or time. With a bit of time and tweaking you can create something yourself equally as good and better. Sadly VSCO have now discontinued there desktop presets and gone down the mobile only route but there are other companies out there like RNI . I personally have only used their free demo versions which I must say were quite impressive and definitely worth checking out.
There is no preset that will make your images instantly better… Trust me I’ve learnt this the hard way, in the beginning I also fell for the whole marketing spiel and bought countless worthless presets to only find out you can create something equally as good and better by just having a more in depth understanding of Lightroom.
Anyway enough of the waffle, here are some examples of my new wedding preset which you will now see being used throughout my photography.
I hope you like it, let me know your thoughts below.
