My husband gifted me my first DSLR Camera almost a year ago and since then I've been obsessed with taking photos. My first goal was to be able to learn how to use my camera in the Manual setting. My second goal was to take a clean, well edited picture. My current goal is to create impacting, beautiful, creative photography. In other words to not just take a picture but to create art. And the more I get into it the more I realize photography is definitely its own art.

I've learned a couple of things so far and one of them is that composition can make or break a photograph. Composition includes background, lighting and photography content. It is incredible and almost magical that it's not until you are editing that you see which pictures worked, which didn't and which are truly beautiful and captivating. However there are certain things that you can try to make your pictures look more creative, like using lighting to create a certain look and feel, creating a simple background to make your object stand out, and using details to add emotion to a photograph.

For my first photograph the background is just cutouts from magazines and I used the light only from one side to create a shadow on the opposite side of my face. On the second picture I used the beautiful sunset lighting that was leaking through my window and in editing I used a black and white faded setting and converted the blacks of the shadows to an almost purple color.

The key of all of this is just experimenting. Ask your subject to try different facial expressions, try different angles, and try some new editing ideas. Also, go to any place where they sell magazines and study the pictures and composition of the photos and try replicating those. And the great thing about it is that no matter how close you try to get to the original picture it will look different and you can end up with a beautiful and unique photograph.