My favorite kind of retouching is anything that is a challenge or has unique needs. Working with moody light or compositing mulitple images are some of my favorite projects

Composites are truly my favorite projects to work on. They demand a special eye for lighting and perspective. At Amazon and SandBox, I had the opportunity to put furniture and home accents of many shapes and sizes into completely different environments from where they where shot. With time in mind, making something from nothing was sometimes a challenge and always my biggest thrills.

What I love most about still life, is lighting. Weather the source is many different artificial lights to just the window, it's all about the lighting. Sometimes that lighting needs to persuaded in such a way to match it's partners who may have been shot differently, or to simply embellish the important parts and mute those areas less important. There can be many minute lighting manipulations to make a still life feel exactly the way it was intended to. I love identifying those nuances and making sure no-one else does.

I also love design thru photography with the shapes and lines of still life and product photography. Making each line perfect and all shapes complimentary to each other with creative cropping, compositing, warping and liquifying. 

Every face is a beautiful canvas but sometimes photography and lighting can be cruel. I love to bring that beauty back. Having witnessed years and years of lighting scenarios, I am able to easily identify and correct the challenges that can arise. 

I started retouching fashion at the Gap in 2005. since then, I have had many great opportunities to work on different brands and with many different kinds of merchants. For fashion, the clothes should look natural but clean, unless otherwise directed. I always try to keep in mind that when retouching fashion, The clothes are the right size to fit correctly on a person who is proportionally tall, but thinner than someone of "average" height. Clothing doesn't usually come that size, so the pinning and the retouching do the rest. 

I have most recently focused on this aspect of my career. I have built all types, from simple WordPress sites to complete commerce sites in SquareSpace to maintaining very complex php/sql statistical server sites with DreamWeaver. More importantly, I know the back-end languages of these sites and am teaching myself more on a daily basis.

More recently, I was a Digital Tech at The Gap. I had been with the company for 10 years as a full time employee and for a year and a half before that as a Retoucher. I have been primarily with Banana Republic but revolve with all of the brands in the Gap umbrella. I love the problem solving aspect of this position. I also love the lighting aspect, and the science of color. I act as a liaison between the retouchers and the creative teams.

My beginnings are in design. I started "Desktop Publishing" in my Parent's print shop when I was 15 years old. I especially love iconic and logo design. To see more of my graphic design from earlier years visit my graphic design portfolio

Although this category is more for my hobbies than my work, I wouldn't mind doing it a lot more often. Playing around in photoshop and illustrator to create fun and beautiful pieces is what I do to relax and find my center through creativity. 

My oldest history and very beginnings are in graphic design. I started as soon as I could legally work in my parents' print shop. I continued into pre-press from there due to my technical knowledge and desire to learn beyond the world of design.