The Muse Makes Lemonade
Finding your muse, getting creative, producing important work - it's a struggle and often here's no rhyme or reason to when it happens or doesn't, but there's one thing that's for certain - the act of creativity never happens by just sitting and thinking about it. You need to be working at it in Ryder for the Joyce's to truly flow.
For a number of years I have had the honor of working with a fabulous model, Karina Lagstrom, who regularly graces my studios, most often to perform as a subject for my lighting and portrait workshops. However, I do occasionally have the joy of photographing her myself and it's usually during these personal shoots that the muse kicks in and pushes me in a truly unexpected direction.
Karina, it seems, has boundless energy; she can pose in front of the lights for several hours at a time, but she often has a pressing need to release the tension at regular intervals, and she does this by leaping around for a few seconds and throwing her head almost violently from side to side and up and down. It's a sudden break in the routine which has little to do with the theme of the shoot but It's a remarkable sight to see her long hair flying everywhere whenever she does this.
I used to dismiss it as Karina, just being Karina and I just sat back and let it happen. My shutter finger would occasionally be unable to stay still during these bouts and would take the odd photograph, but as they were not that relevant to the shoot, they would be later ignored or deleted during post-processing. That is, until a snowy day in early December when I was hunkered down with my iPad trolling through several Lightroom Mobile collections of past shoots. I began to notice these "hair" images and suddenly, there it was! The muse had kicked in and I saw a potential for making a themed series out of these otherwise discarded hair shots.
Thus was born the "windswept" series which has developed into a totally unexpected departure from my usual style of image making. The images in "windswept" have a strong graphic element that moves them out of the traditional mold and presents them more in the style of a storybook image of a person on a windswept moor.
The post-processing was done very roughly using apps on an iPad. To begin with the image was transferred from Lightroom Mobile directly into Snapseed where the detail slider were used to give s more graphic look to the image. Nest the image was cropped and saved and then opened in the DistreesedFX app.
The distreesedFX app is simple yet powerful and offers a myriad of presets from which to create a combination to modify your image. Essentially you pick two elements, (a style and a separate texture) and adjust the levels of each to achieve a unique look.
After much experimenting I settled on two combinations that gave me an interesting result.
1- Storybook coupled with Absentia texture
2. Jupiter coupled with Pith texture
I had to play with the sliders to get the combined look I was envisioning but you can see from the results that the simple two minute processing effort produced some interesting results.
If there is a moral to this story it's that the muse can take over at the most unexpected moment, but it's usually when you are already in the process of doing something, rarely when you are siting and waiting. She can certainly make lemonade from your lemons.
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