How To Rock Instagram Like A Superstar: @katherinedorrington

Hello! Today I’m continuing my monthly series of getting the secrets of photographers I love and admire. Katherine is with us today, and she does the most beautiful things with flowers. Get to know her, and her photography tricks below. ?

Tell us a little about you.
Hi, I’m Katherine. I live in Perth, on the west coast of Australia. My day job involves organising a literary festival 3 days a week and the other days I spend looking after my sweet girls who are 2.5 and 5yrs.

How did you get into photography or photo-taking? When did it all begin for you?
I’ve always loved photography as an art form but I only actively started taking photos about 2 years ago. My husband bought us a ‘proper’ camera when we went on our honeymoon to New Zealand about 6 years ago, however despite it being ‘our’ camera he was the one really interested in learning how to use it and ended up taking most of the photos.

When I was on maternity leave with my second daughter I discovered this little app called Instagram. How revolutionary that discovery was! I started taking photos with my iPhone 4 for different challenges such as #fmsphotoaday & #7vignettes. Like many of us I soon became addicted to these small moments of creativity in my otherwise very routine day. I think it was both the day to day creativity coupled with such a wonderfully supportive community of friends that really saw me become interested in photography. I started to see the world around me very differently and it inspired me to pick up our proper camera and actually learn how to use it. Photography is one of those great hobbies that shows you rewards very early in your learning – i.e. learning a few composition tricks can make such a massive difference to your photo and give you confidence to learn more.

Over the last year I’ve taken a few online courses to learn more technical skills and I just practice as much as I can even if it is only 10 mins here and there when the girls are happily engrossed in an activity.

What do you love taking photos of most?
Anyone who follows me on Instagram will know that my favourite subject would have to be flowers. I can’t get enough of them. I think in another life I would be a florist. I love playing with flowers and putting together little vignettes or flat lays with them. Since I’ve learnt more about my camera and how it works I love taking good photos of my girls. My eldest is very patient with my constant requests for photographs and loves to arrange things for me to snap a pic of. We ended up buying her an instant camera for her birthday recently.

What are your favourite Apps for editing?
My number one go to App for editing is VSCO. I think I discovered it early on in my photography journey. I kept seeing #vsco on photos that I loved and soon found it referred to an editing App. The basic App comes with a number of free filters and the thing I love most about them is their moodiness and the ability to use a slider for the filter so you don’t have to go too heavy on a filter if you just want a slight enhancement to your pic. I’ve since bought all the filters they have released! My favourite filter is HB1 closely followed by A5.

Can you share a recent favourite photo of yours – and take us through how you edited it?
This is a photo I took recently with my iPhone 6 using the native camera with the grid function turned on so that I could centre the image. I painted some wooden boards white to use as a background as sometimes I like a slightly more textured background than just a plain white table. I had a heap of delphinium flowers that were at the end of their life and I loved the colours and tones so much that I couldn’t bear to thrown them away without having a little play. I’m also really drawn to circles within squares and I love to play with photos in photos so I included a small circle concrete dish with one of my photographs on top with the scattered petals in the background.

I then uploaded the photo to the VSCO app and used the HB1filter at full strength, I increased the contrast by one notch on the scale and sharpened the image by a few notches and voila! I’m really happy with how the photo turned out and it took me only a few minutes to style and edit.

Thanks for popping around for a chat Katherine. To see more of Katherine’s beautiful Instagram feed, follow her here.