Last Sunday, I traveled to Boston and had a great shoot with an old high school friend and Berklee College of Music sophomore, Alexus Lee. We had brunch at this noisy little bookstore/cafe on Newbury Street and sat next to a guy with tentacle tattoos. It was warm and we chatted for a while about her upcoming debut EP and the direction she wanted to take her music career. We discovered how to take the screens off her window to get to the fourth floor fire escape so I put on my big girl pants and climbed onto the rusty thing like it was no big deal. I dearly missed my sense of adventure.
It was wonderful and refreshing to keep up with her and produce something we both felt confident in. That's the great thing about working with other artists: the chemistry is usually very noticeable. The mix of medias, between music and photo, created a reaction that I've never quite experienced before. We were both spent by the end of the day. I got home, full and satiated, and collapsed on my bed.
I'm hoping this is the start to something new.
So the Canon FD manual lens adapter came in yesterday and I love it. I've been fiddling around with the various manual lenses I've accumulated over the past few years. Most of them I bartered for at estate sales, others were given to me by older family members with a past hobby in photography. I'm all about shooting film but since I've been lacking in funds, it's hard for me to will myself to spend the money on getting the film processed and scanned, (though maybe I'll take a trip to Saint Anselm for free scanning...). Anyway, I'm so glad I get to put these nifty things to good use. I feel like it's really going to expand my photography. I have a few commissioned shoots coming up soon and I'm excited to see the ways in which I can experiment.
With all the heat, thunderstorms are really the one good thing that comes out of them. I decided to take a lesson from Miss Alexis Mire and place a towel over my camera (so I could pretend I was shooting large format) to get some nice rainy shots outside. I managed to snap a few shots, along with a few videos with the 28mm f/2 lens, without getting struck by lightening. Expect the video soon!
For the past three days, I've been promising myself that I'd get up and out to do some shooting. I've been down, exhausted and discouraged with my work lately but it felt nice to spend the time alone to do something productive. The legs on what would be my third tripod broke and my wireless remote is not so responsive with my 7D so I had very limited options for what i wanted to do today.
Self portraits have always been a safe place for me, though they're not very easy. It's a complicated relationship to explain seeing as I'm actually quite shy when being photographed by someone else. Call it exercises in identity, call it what you will, but the reflexive sense of familiarity and control both in front and behind the camera give me the same rush of endorphins, the same euphoric feeling as 30 minutes of level 10-ing on the cross trainer downstairs. Whatever it is, self portraits hold a certain protected place in my practice and in my art.
I liked the way the sun was shining on a lilac bush behind my house so I decided to see what I could do with it.
While editing these, I was listening to a playlist I created made up of CocoRosie songs. This song in particular, titled "Animals," exactly matched my mood during and after this shoot. Listen to it to see what I mean.
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| I was startled to recognize how much I look like my mother in this one. |
