SMU student Spencer Hogan works at his office computer in Dallas, Texas. (Ella McDonald)

I loved working though this project. Shooting in low light is fun for me because it creates a different kind of mood that you don’t get in the middle of the day. The light sources in this photograph came from a desktop computer and a disco ball light, which you can see hints of in the background. It was actually hard to choose just one photo for this project. 

Spencer is one of my friends and coworkers in this office. We work together for the SMU Football creative team and our office almost always look like this - dark and disco-y. I knew this setting would be perfect for this assignment. I love how the computer light can be seen reflecting off of his glasses. I feel like you wouldn’t get that from a well-lit, day time photo.  

Right now Spencer is working on creating a graphic that will be posted on the SMU Football Instagram. I decided to tweak the white balance a little bit in Lightroom to give the photo a more uniform, all blue look. Even though I loved editing images, I tried not to edit it too much and the white balance and contrast were the only things I really played around with. 

In high school I loved creating presets on VSCO, Lightroom, and Tezza, all of which I still use today for various media platforms. For work, we mainly use presets on Lightroom. For my own social media accounts, I use a mix of the presets I’ve created on VSCO and Tezza, which are two photo-editing apps. I almost never let a picture leave my camera roll unedited. This class, though, is teaching me how to take a beautiful picture without all of the post-production edits. 

Like I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I normally take most of my photos during the daytime and afternoon, so I loved working with this kind of low light. My very first successful creative photoshoot in high school was shot with just a disco light and mirror in my childhood bedroom. Lights off. It was a mainly blue photo portrait of my best friend at the time, and it is still one of my favorite pictures. Maybe that is was inspired me to lean into the blue lights around me in the office to shoot this photo. Here I am, four years later, coming back to my roots.