"I'm a libra, what sign are you?" - Dwan, King Kong 1976
This year for my annual creative birthday photo shoot I was feeling pretty uninspired and couldn't nail down a particular theme for my pictures. I had a few ideas swimming around but honestly I wasn't very excited about putting anything together. SO I decided to lean into my indecisive nature and do a whole libra weighing the scales themed photoshoot to celebrate another year around the sun. And to be honest - it actually might be my new favorite birthday shoot!
The best part is anyone can do it and adjust it to their zodiac/astrology sign... It can be as creative as you want it to be. For me, I knew scales were essential and of course some floating in the clouds was the way to go as an air sign. But where do I even start? So I ordered a gold dress, celestial crown, and some hanging brass planters to complete the goddess inspired look. Next, was putting it all together and shooting the pictures. Originally I found the most perfect garden in the clouds but a week of rain quickly torpedoed that idea so we pivoted to shooting against the green screen which actually turned out to be pretty great. We hung our trusty green screen, set up an additional light to help even out the overcast, rainy day and got to work. The shoot itself was actually pretty quick because we really only needed a few shots and it was kind of a controlled environment.
Next was the tricky, most time consuming part: editing. But after a few editing platform fails I realized Canva was the way to go for nearly perfectly removing the green screen background from the image
as well as creating new backgrounds from their graphic library for my "Libra Goddess" floating in the clouds inspiration. It was also super easy to layer in clouds to give the whole image dimension.
After I was happy with my work on Canva, I exported and imported the images to Lightroom, added my favorite preset to give it an ethereal vibe and did a little tweaking. I initially wanted to use Adobe generative fill to do the whole project but I had issues getting it to load and initially abandoned my efforts on my phone and desktop. I might revisit the idea in the future when I have the headspace to deal with it.
In the end, I'm pretty happy with the results from the shoot and hope you feel a bit inspired to have a zodiac themed shoot for your birthday!
A little blurb about how I started doing creative birthday shoots 5 years ago as a way to do something creative for each birthday and somehow it's become an annual tradition to inspire the year ahead. Also it kind of helps soften the blow of the existential crisis that comes with each birthday as we get older. This one was a bit of a toughie because 38 is embarking on the last couple years of your 40's and trying to check all the boxes before stepping into a new decade. But there is something magical about documenting each new year with a little something special like a photoshoot - it just makes it more fun and less serious maybe?
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