Gallery • 9 Photos

Staff Photo by Ashley Masingale

Brandon Woelfel is an Instagram famous photographer known for his whimsical pictures. In his photography, Woelfel often incorporates a shallow depth of field, cotton-candy tinted editing, and unique props like fairy lights, glasses, bubbles, and neon signs.

I took the challenge to imitate his work, and I learned a lot about my gear and editing in the process. Below, I’ll share some of the photos I captured both before and after editing.

I use Lightroom to edit my photos, and for this shoot, I used a Nikon D7100 camera body with a 50mm lens. You can find out about the camera gear Woelfel uses here. I tried to get as close as I could to what he uses.

With this photo, I made a point to include bokeh in the foreground. To achieve this, I had my model hold up lights near her face and string them towards the lens.

This photo was shot at f/1.8, the widest aperture my lens allowed. In the editing process, I brought up the exposure, made the temperature cooler, and made the tint pinker.

I used the signature Woelfel glasses and fairy lights to take this shot. All I did was put some fairy lights into a jar to get the reflection of the lights in the model’s glasses.

I also shot this at f/1.8 and edited it in the same way by bringing up the exposure, cooling the temperature, and adding a pink tint. In all of the photos, I also did some minor cropping to frame my subject.

For this photo, I had my model pose while another person blew bubbles into the frame. I had to change the temperature in post because of how warm the photo turned out. Again, I made sure to have a shallow depth of field to get the background and foreground blur.

This photo didn’t turn out as Woelfel-like as the others I took because of the time of day. Woelfel usually takes his photos during blue hour, but this was taken during the middle of the day. I did my best in post-production to give it the Woelfel look, but I definitely learned that lighting plays a crucial role in photography style.