Woah, 2016 is here - a lot has happened since I lost wrote one of these blog posts. Lets talk a little.
Ludovica
I had a shoot with Ludovica at the end of October and I still haven't written about it - better late than never I guess? The idea was to take advantage of the beautiful autumn colours, the leaves that are falling from the trees - it's a beautiful sight and makes for some rather pleasing photography. We ended up having Ludovica lay on the ground surrounded by leaves. The corset she was wearing and our wannabe skirt, which was actually a big scarf, worked out really well for the outfit. Ludovica has this really awesome sophisticated vibe to her and it worked incredibly well on this shoot. Admittedly, my confidence did get the better of me on the shoot in one aspect of things. See, as the shot is taken top-down, I had to climb onto a ladder to take the shot. This meant that there was no real way of taking the photo without also having the ladder be in the shot. I was confident I could easily brush this out in photoshop after but to my great regret, it didn't turn out so easy. I ended up having to borrow a part of her arm and her legs from another photo - something I'm really not too happy with but as my confidence got the better of me I just had to roll with the punches.
“I get scared when I lay down in bed,
When all my thoughts run through my head,
That is the time when they aren’t confined,
When I am a slave of my own mind.”
I loved the poem that went along with the photo, it was written by a friend of mine, Julie Piper. The first time I read it I immediately related, I think most of us will. It worked perfectly for the shoot and it's really cool to collaborate with other creative, likeminded people on these projects to make them be something they could otherwise not be.
A sneaky little behind the scenes look into how the image was taken.
Taking photos of leaves...
Part of my curriculum at school this year is a course called "infography" (basically photography + the computer side too) and it has pushed me to take photos of things I normally wouldn't do. My style is quite precise and you wouldn't normally see me taking photos of leaves. The task was called "material studies" and this is what I came up with.
It's just so freaking silly yet somehow it's also artsy enough to be considered art. I'll leave it up to you to make some conclusions about it yourself.
Stealing the souls of my teachers
Although I did this project for infography, this was something I had wanted to do for a very long time already and it would have happened sooner or later even without the info course. I love the idea of storytelling through images, it's a wonderful medium where the viewer has so much freedom to fill in the gaps him/herself, you can just let your creativity run wild but at the same time there's an obvious story there that one can't look past. As a student, school is a place where I spend a lot of my time. I wanted to tell that story and I love the fact that my teachers were so incredibly awesome and let me take photos of them in class and actually share them with all of you wonderful people. I have been a very lucky person: even though I think there are some things drastically wrong with our current education system, my teachers keep me going, every single day, because I can see how passionately they do their job. The amount of energy they pour into teaching their classes is incredible and it is, without a shadow of a doubt, the single most important reason why I have motivation to do somewhat okay in school. They create an atmosphere where you want to do better, to learn more. My teachers are probably the biggest reasons why I pull my shit together for subjects that I have zero interest in. Education in today's society is flawed in many ways but at least in my school, the teachers, the people, the human connection is irreplaceable.
I'm fascinated by photo stories and that's another big reason why I wanted to make this project happen. Photographs are an extremely unique medium for telling stories, they are a fraction of a second, somewhere, sometime. There's nothing else like them, they are special. Photo stories are so interesting to look through, they leave room for one to be imaginative and fill in the gaps yet still capture the essence of the moment. Gotta love 'em.
And then 2016 happened.
No really, 2016 is here - I know, it's weird.