It's almost the end of the year, and I'm on at Week 28! Seems as though much more photos are going to spill over into 2014 than I anticipated. However, given how crazy this year was with my finishing law school, taking the bar exam and moving half-way across the U.S, 28 weeks of photography is quite an accomplishment, right? 

         For this week's photo, I wanted to showcase something that I've personally experience within the last week. Hence, the theme for this week is "Equanimity." I chose this particular theme because ever since July, I've been in so much self doubt that I hardly seemed to find any sort of tranquility since taking the bar exam. Sad right? It's amazing what one exam can do to a person's psyche! Nevertheless, I thought capturing a moment of my mental calm and composure would be a great fit for an unusual theme such as this. That is, unless I took a photo of one of my cats sleeping of course. Lol. 

        I traveled up north to a reservation on Friday as I wanted an Autumn-like feel for my background. After scouting around for a fallen tree branch, I got dressed into this lovely white maxi dress. I added a black corset for some contrast and then open my little Geisha parasol. Thereafter, I began the shoot...

        After I got home, I loaded the photos and immediately began deleting all the ones I didn't like. Eventually, I chose this to be the center piece for this week's blog.

        This photo is highly edited as the original was a bit over exposed. When I did manage to offset the exposure, I had to compensate for color, contrast and sharpness. Thereafter, I ran the shot through Lightroom for a bit more processing with saturation. Finally, I processed it through Google+ Editor to add a somewhat "retro" feel almost.

       Here's a snapshot of the varying stages of the editing process.

        This was probably one of the only photos I spent more than 4 hours trying to figure out a color scheme and how to offset the exposure without making the overall shot too dark. I should add that it was also extremely difficult to shoot since the sunlight was in and out of the forest like every 10 seconds. So settings that worked for the 1st second definitely didn't work by the 5th second. Sighs***

       Nevertheless, I do love the overall product. However, I still think a few tweaks could be made here and there... but my brain is all out of ideas!

       Oh, and I didn't upload a themed photo for Fifty-two Frames since the submission wasn't working. Hence, I figured I'd do my own theme for my blog this week :)

       Hope you liked! Comments & Criticisms are most welcome!

Photo Specs: