alice lane

i've been shooting this lovely little home decor store over the past couple of weeks. it's gorgeous in there! go check it out, seriously.

i want to live here

this one is my favorite.

the solaris collection

so i'm taking a location photography this semester, which is basically architectural photography. our first assignment was to shoot a residence, and i jumped on the opportunity to go shoot these awesome modern homes in daybreak (the second house will come in my next post). they are solar powered and surprisingly affordable. plus they're in daybreak which is pretty awesome.

cyanotypes

i've started working on some cyanotype photograms. theyre alot of fun to do.
the images are made by painting a light sensitive emulsion of potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate onto a watercolor paper, and exposing it to uv light with the object directly on top of the paper.
if any of you out there have objects (coral, dried plants, seashells...things like that) that you'd be willing to let me use for some cyanotypes, you would make me very happy. leave a comment or shoot me an email!

copycat ad

real version*

my version*

*i figured i probably should clarify which is which because mine looks so freaking awesome

hot chocolate

this week's still life

here are the prized possessions i photographed on tuesday.

jessie's boots are morgan freeman approved*
trevor's typewriter is just awesome
and the bible that cate's sister lucy is holding belonged to brigham young



*wondering about morgan freeman? as the story goes, jessie had just gotten the boots and was wearing them in portland when morgan freeman walked past and said imagine this in his voice:
"those are some real nice boots."

mmm, toast

a shirt

prized possessions

i've been thinking for a while about doing a series of photographs featuring people's most valuable possessions. i know that it's by no means a new concept, but my anthropological/ethnographic penchant seems to express itself in a kind of need to catalogue people. i just thought it would be really interesting to learn about which physical objects are most meaningful to people and why.

i shot these for a mini-theme in my digital class, but i think it may be an ongoing project.

i started by asking my boss, brad slade, and my co-photo-assistant braden duncan, what their most prized possessions were.
the criteria is this: it has to be a physical object, and it has to be truly important to you, like one of the things you would get if your house were burning.

after much consideration, braden decided that his prized posession(s) were his journals, which he's kept religiously for who knows how long (if only i were that disciplined, my posterity might actually have something to read in 100 years).

brad chose his rolleiflex camera, which he has been using to photograph his beautiful kids since they were babies.

as for me, it's hard to say what i would chose. after rescuing my hard drives with all my photos and my file with old letters and important documents and whatnot, i would probably run back into a burning house for either:

-the silver gilded hand mirror that my mom gave me, which she got from the antique shop that the grandmother of her good friend owned. the grandmother of the good friend was named marika, and is my middle namesake.

-a teacup that my godmother gave me. the story is that when she first moved to montreal from the iowa farm where she grew up, she made a friend. that friend gave her this teacup and saucer, which surprised my godmother because she thought that teacups always had to stay in matching sets. her friend taught her to embrace variety and maybe even discord, and i know that meant alot to her. she gave me the teacup over forty years later, the day her friend died.
my godmother is brilliant.

-the little cloissonne bird that my grandfather bought in india for his dad when he was young. he got it back when his dad died, and gave it to me. it's beautiful. i'll photograph it sometime.




what is your most valued object?

mmm...chocolate

this is what i did for the black on black assignment in my still life class.
this isn't a final version, so hit me with some feedback.

new kicks

i photographed these shoes for my first still life assignment and then decided to keep them (for funsies).
anyway, the assignment was white on white. if nothing else i definitely did a pretty good job at that.

sunshine finalized

here is the final image from the sunshine shoot

scatter sunshine...

guess what i did today! yup, that's it. scattered sunshine. all over the studio.

our first assignment in my advanced digital class was to choose an image as our inspiration and to create our own version of it. i don't want to post copies of my "inspiration" photos because i feel like my own images fell far short of rivaling their quality. i will tell you that one of them was the june anthropologie cover, and the other was a cig harvey photograph from the archaeology of distraction portfolio. and they both involved clouds. my idea was to use the clouds, but bring in a little sunshine.

i suppose i'm happy with the results, but i'll admit i struggled with the light. i had planned on using the profoto 7-foot umbrella that we have in the studio where i work to flood the whole set evenly, and then add an accent to the model and to the sun. much to my distress, when i arrived at the studio this morning, the profoto kit was gone (someone must have taken it home for a weekend shoot). anyway, i had to use a much smaller umbrella and deal with clouds that were either blowing out or being darkened by other clouds shadows. anyway, these are some outtakes. you'll get to see the final image later, once i've tweaked it to my heart's content.

thanks to evelyn, our lovely model, and emily, who did the set design, makeup, and hair.

myth and moral

i just finished the next image from my mythology series. this one is my friend/coworker braden's wife as demeter--the goddess of fertility and the harvest.

megan's mock bridals

i shot these for a bridal assignment in my portrait class, and had originally planned on doing something similar to andreas laszlo konrath's my generation series, except with a bride instead of skaters and hooligans. sweet,right?

but then when megan and houston told me about the style they're going for on their engagement photos, i was so enamored with the idea that i decided to use it for the bridal assignment. even though megan doesn't have her dress yet, she graciously agreed to be my model. i went to d.i. and and found this incredible wedding dress for $10: massive amounts of lace, puffy sleeves, and a huge train. i doubt i could have bought the fabric for that dress for $10.

the theme was kind of a de-saturated sepia-ish high fashion-y look with modern/victorian influences.

personal work and assignments

from my myth and moral series, still a work in progress

percephone

medusa

portraits