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Alan Moore says "each new thing you do, try to make it a little smarter, a little more sophisticated than the thing you did before, eventually people will notice, and you will start to move beyond what everyone else is doing." If you focus on something you love to do for purely its own sake, and because you want to get better and better and better, he says, "you'll probably do alright." So at the end of January I feel I have a pretty good portfolio of female models. It went from "pretty girl", bland fashion stuff towards the beginning of December to where I am heading, doing quasi-mystical stuff with more graphics and thinking of feminine nature more as Goddesses or classical muses-- currently I feel I'm halfway there. A month from now I want to be doing stuff on the level of Alphonse Mucha, a tall order for sure, but the current feeling is there isn't anything I can't do if I don't try hard enough.
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Anyways, I have an ultimatum hanging over my head that January and the shoots I have lined up on next week's Nebraska trip are to be the end of my TF work, of course that is pretty doubtful, at least as far as working again with the models who I have already worked with. I had 5 shoots this week and everything pushed at one boundary of concept or technique or both. The first model was to have a projected background on the side of a building. There was too much ambient light to do project anything other than some wavy lines on the model. Scratch that. There was a translucently paneled women's restroom that came in pretty handy!
The second shoot was to take place at a fancy farm kind of artist's retreat which was not open the day we chose to shoot. The model was extremely experienced at her niche which was mid-20th century period stuff, and she looked like she stepped right off the page of a storybook. Plan B involved sneaking onto a golf course which went well, we escaped with only a "nice costume" from a golfer to my model. I'm still in process with these images but the ultimate goal is to incorporate cartooning with the final work. I am going to collect the drawings from my art friends in Omaha as I haven't been satisfied with my own cartooning.
The fourth shoot was with my favorite model in a great location of a ruin. It was influenced by the U2 songs "Mysterious Ways" and "Lemon" and wasn't more than colors and fabrics. A lot of these images came out quite lush thanks to the mixed textures of fabric and rustic ruin.
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The fifth and final shoot of the week was at my house and involved graphic patterns either made in the computer or scanned from dresses and printed out on big paper. This one I spent a few weeks assembling and planning and as such it was probably the only shoot that came out exactly as intended.
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For years I photographed DD people in my group homes, urban kids, activists, indigenous peoples and a wider variety beyond attractive young ladies and it did not attract any of the kind of attention and gig offers I get now, which I guess goes to show how the average citizen prioritizes art. Probably why Ansel Adams had to do portrait work to pay the bills. I am really pleased with the design element of these shots and I think future shoots are going emphasize design in the way that classic Vogue photographers did worked.
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