There is something special about sharing a piece of art that you have spent your love and many many hours on. It is even more special when what you have decided to share also happens to feature someone you love very much as the subject of the piece. 

"Let Your Light So Shine", my piece for the Young Woman value Good Works:

When I first set out on this adventure of creating pieces depicting each of the Young Women Values, I planned out my images over a period of many many months. I decided on the various settings. How many I wanted to be taken indoors, how many outdoors. What props I would use and the symbolism they would carry. And while I knew I wanted to have a diverse group of girls, I also knew that one of those girls had to be my youngest sister Chloë.

Chloë has played a very important role in my journey from being JUST a "photographer" to becoming who I am at today: an artist. She has been my muse from the beginning, and I think throughout all these years I may have convinced her, if only slightly, that she actually enjoys modeling. 

Now, as I have mentioned in previous posts, one of the most important aspects of this Young Women Values series is incorporating the subjects' cultures into my pieces. But how do you incorporate the culture of an incredible little girl who has lived in eight different houses in four countries, all before she even turned twelve?

As I thought about it and puzzled over it, I decided there was a place my family has always called home, where we could always return to after every adventure: Grandma and Grandpa's house. Or as we all like to call it, Paradise. With the location decided, the day quickly came where I could finally take a photo I had been waiting almost two years to take. We grabbed some miscellaneous lamps from around the house, extensions cords, and all the necessary camera equipment, and made our way to the big hill at the end of Grandpa's runway. My cousin's wife Kenna, of Billi Billi Productions, ran around my sister holding up lights here, and flicking skirts there.

Now, the scripture for Good Works is:

 14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

 15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

 16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

I had envisioned a girl looking almost as if she were this candle on a hillside, shining for everyone around her to see. Chloë has grown into a compassionate young woman and has always been able to be kind and create friendships with anyone she encounters, so I knew she would be the perfect representative for this value. More literally symbolic, she is wearing a yellow dress, the color for Good Works, and, combined with her blonde hair, I knew she would stand out just as a candle would against the darkening sky behind her.

There's not much more symbolism to this, as I wanted to keep it simple and let the beautiful sky and subject speak for themselves.

I love you miss Chloë. You will always be my favorite person to shoot, not just because of the sweetness you bring to each photo we create together, but also, and more importantly, because of the friendship and love that has grown between us during our shoots. You will always be my little baby sister, and I am grateful for that everyday! Keep shining. :)

** I'd like to thank Robert Cornelius and Stephen Sitton for providing me with some very valuable second opinions and critiques on this piece. You can see their work here and here. I'd also like to thank Kenna with Billi Billi Photography, who ran around flinging skirts and holding lighting equipment like a pro. You can see her work here. I'd be stuck with a significantly less beautiful piece if it weren't for everyone who helped out, so thank you times a million all of you!** 

Meet my friend Kari. She was one of the first people I became friends with out here in Boston, and I'm incredibly grateful I met her (and her wonderful roommates)! The first time we hung out, the conversation, as it is wont to do when I am involved, of course turned to photography. It's times like these that I realize I am probably a little overly passionate about the subject, springing the topic on any and all who will show even the slightest ounce of interest. Really, it's as if I am the equivalent of the Star Wars geek of the photography world.

I thought the stars had finally aligned when she said she'd be interested in modeling for me, so I took advantage of the quickly passing Autumn foliage within a week or so of her offering.

Now, about four months ago I decided it was time for me to upgrade my equipment and invested in a new body and a new lens. This was (and I am slightly ashamed to admit that it took me this long) the first time I really got to break in my new camera with some more conceptual work, but I am thoroughly and completely in love with my new set up! Four months in the works, but this was a great shoot to really break back into the fine art world with. What I love most about my new setup?Most of what is in this photo, with the exception of the magical sparkles and the cane/staff, was shot in camera, in one single shot! No compositing of limbs, hair, or fabric necessary!

I thought it would be fun to share a short gif I made of each step of taking this image from square one to the magical scene of Summer turning to Autumn.

As you can see, other than some select color and lighting adjustments, not much was changed! 

As Leonardo Da Vinci stated: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

A few days ago I posted the final version of this piece on instagram and my facebook page, and so I wanted to show you guys how I went about putting this piece together. As this is another image in my Value series, I asked another girl from church if she would be willing to model for me. Coincidentally, she knew the location of a "crossroads", which was what I had been wanting for this photo, and so after taking some portraits at the Spofforth Castle ruins (which was close by) just for fun, we made our way over to this walking path near her house. She probably thought I was crazy when I said the location was perfect, despite the green, metal car barriers and the quite un-picteresque sign:

It probably didn't help that I asked her to turn away from the camera for this photo, haha. But she did fabulously and I got exactly what I had wanted, so it all worked out I think. :)

Anyway, as for the process, I actually had to do an expansion for this one, as I was working with my 35mm (which in my opinion has quite a narrow angle of view, although not as bad as the 50mm) and as it was, I was backed up against a thorn bush just to get the above image. So with the focus set, I snapped a few of her, and then of her surroundings so that I could get the path going off into the distance in both directions.

I ultimately ended up using five photos for the expansion, her being in the center, and then four around her to get what you see below:

So then the next thing to do was to get rid of the barriers:

And the ugly sign. Behind me was actually a cool wooden sign, but it was only pointing in one direction, and obviously was in the wrong place for my photo. So I took a photo of it, duplicated the one side so I could switch it over to the other, and then pasted it into this image. Much more picturesque, in my opinion:

Then for the details: her hair had fallen down a bit in the back, and so I erased a bit of it so that it looked more like it was up in a loose bun instead of falling out. Imagine that? Her hair falling out after climbing through fields and over ruins... huh...

Of course, the color for Choice and Accountability is orange, and so I changed the color of her dress to sort of tie it back into the Value itself:

But that orange looked terrible with her skin and was sort of an eye sore, so I muted the color down a bit. Just a suggestion of orange:

Then I started playing around with the two different directions of the path. Since Choice and Accountability is all about choosing between right and wrong and being accountable for those choices, I wanted to show one path as being dark and dreary, and one as bright and well... cheery! So I experimented with different things, like using the burn tool to make it darker, bringing the exposure down, adding filters. The first one I tried was to use the dodge tool and lower the exposure a bit, but I wasn't entirely happy with it. As you can see, it's just too dark and you loose all the detail. It also means that there's more of a line between the light and the dark, and I didn't want that. I wanted it to be a really gradual thing. In life we don't just all of a sudden become bad, or good. It's a process we go through of making one choice after another. So less dark, more gradual, which isn't what I was getting in the image below:

So then I thought, well darkness and evil is generally associated with the color green, so I tried a green filter, but I didn't really like that either:

Getting a bit frustrated, I took out the filter and what I had done with the burn tool and just masked in a layer with a lower exposure in that area. Better, but still not perfect.

Also, after some editing, I felt like her dress was getting lost in it all, and so I brought up the saturation a bit more so she stood out a little bit better. I also masked in a layer of higher exposure on the other path as a bit of a contrast to its darker counterpart. Getting closer, but not quite there!

Here's me messing around with the brighter side, trying to make it look a bit more inviting without the grass in the distance looking neon (as it did in the photo above):

Now, this whole time I still felt like my model wasn't jumping out at the audience and grabbing their attention, which really prevented me from being able to focus on anything else. Once again I tried making it redder, greener, making her brighter, anything to get her to stand out. After several hours of despairing and trying to work on other parts of the image without success, I realized I hadn't been thinking as the artist my grandmother taught me to be; in other words, thinking in terms of my paint palette! When I realized this the solution immediately came to me and solved my problem! If the model was in an orange dress, and I wanted her to stand out, I needed to make the background contrast with her in some way. So on the color wheel standing opposite orange is purple. Feeling kind of dumb because it had taken me so long to think of that, I masked in a purple filter on the background. Once I did so I thanked my amazing grandma (Thank you grandma for teaching me everything there is to know about painting! You're amazing!), and appreciated the much improved photograph. With that issue finally out of the way, I could focus once again on the two branches of the path and making them contrast as much as possible, while still looking believable (in a fairy tale sort of way, if that makes any sense, haha). I still wasn't feeling like the two branches looked like they were conveying the feeling I wanted them to give off.

Now I am a lover of color. It is hard for me to convert any of my images into black and white because I love the color so much (not that I don't appreciate black and white images! I love them! Just generally not on my images). So I thought, what would a dreary world with no hope look like to me, and figured it probably would be colorless and cold. So I gave a layer of semi-desaturation a go and immediately loved it:

But the "bright, happy side" still wasn't working for me. So I tried making it bluer, making it more yellow, taking the contrast down, and once again everything I tried wasn't working.

So as my last dich effort, I decided to paint over the area with yellow on a super low opacity so that it was almost like a haze. And voila! The piece was done!

I will admit that I had my doubts about how much I would like this piece at first. But I wanted to have a photo for each of the eight values, and so I worked on it anyway. Even though this took me several days of trying this and that, walking away from it, coming back to it, etc., I love the end result! In all seriousness, the more I look at it, the more I love it. And I think that's how it should be.

I wanted to write a blog post about my process in creating the piece "Virtue," as I always like to explain how I went from the beginning to the end product. When I had first started taking a more fine art approach to my photography, my mom suggested I take photographs representing the eight Young Women Values. I began to look at all the scriptures and characteristics of each value to determine how exactly I wanted to take the pictures, and after a few months things had worked them out to a point where I felt like I was ready to start the first photo.

As I mentioned, each value has its own scriptures and color that represent the value. Virtue is gold, and so I spent the week leading up to the shoot trying to find some dress or skirt that would work for what I had envisioned. It wasn't until the day before we took the photos that my mom and I went to a charity shop in town and found exactly what I was looking for. Hanging in the window (and underneath everything set up in the display) was a gold saree. I thought it wouldn't work at first because it was part of the display and so probably wasn't for sale. I went and looked around the rest of the shop but didn't find anything that would have worked. Finally my mom and I decided to just ask if it were possible to purchase it, and luckily enough the agreed to sell it to me!

One of the scriptures that goes with the value is Doctrine and Covenants 121:46 which states: "the Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion." So I thought she ought to have a scepter and a dove as she looked out over a beautiful panorama. I therefore decided (with my moms urging) to take the photos at Brimham Rocks, which is this beautiful area just twenty or so minutes away with a lot of odd rock formations that afford beautiful views over the surrounding area. I had her hold a cricket stick so I could make that into a scepter later and had my sister McKenna throw the skirt in the air a bit just to give it some movement.

I ended up using two different photos of her: one for the skirt (the first photo above) and one for the head and front arm (the second one above), combining it to make the above image. Also, while the saree had been gold in the shop light, the day turned out to be cloudy and so the skirt appeared more blue than gold. I fixed that so that it shone more gold, and also made her shirt appear as if it matched a bit better with the skirt by tinting it a bit more gold (second image below).

As it was windy that day and her skirt was being thrown back, her white keds (I hadn't told her what to wear previously and I wasn't about to tell her to kick off the shoes and go barefoot in the middle of November) kept peeking out from the bottom. So the next thing I did was edit the skirt so that it would cover her shoes.

I also played around a bit with setting the dove (the Holy Ghost) on her shoulder, but it never looked right to me. I think that's because her hair is thrown over her shoulder and is underneath the dove, so ultimately I threw out the dove resting on her shoulder idea and went with something else. I also added in the scepter (seen below), which was taken from a photo I took while in Vienna two years ago (I love when things like that happen).

Ultimately I ended up having the dove flying in front of her, which I think looked much better. The last step was to stitch the panorama together and, as lovely as my beautiful sister is, I didn't need her in the photo, so I took her out.

It's always fun to finally have a concept that's been mulling around in your mind finally become a real creation and piece of art. I have high hopes for the rest of this series!

Twice a year Northwest Arkansas has the Craft Fairs, which attracts a lot of crafters, as well as visitors, to the area. The crafters bring their wares (I feel so Medieval when I say that. Wares... haha) and sell them at the fair for the weekend. I LOVE the Craft Fairs! I'm pretty sure we went to close to every one when I was growing up. Since we've moved away, though, we haven't had the chance to go in what I'm pretty sure was five years. But last weekend we were actually here to enjoy them!

These birds were in one of the vendors stall, and I figured these would be much easier to photograph than an actual bird (they tend to fly away when you get close... who knew?)

Last week during our Austrian History class we went to the National Library. Can I just say, I was a fan of libraries before this, but now my level of appreciation and love have reached all new levels. Observe:

In a completely serious manner, with no kidding involved, my mouth literally dropped open upon entering this... this... chamber, and did not shut for about another ten minutes. It. Was. Amazing. When you read stories and fairy tales that involve large libraries in beautiful castles, this is what you imagine, no? That's the way it was for me.

And check out this fresco! In a library!

If I could have a library like this in my house, I would be the happiest girl. Ever.

... but it might need to be about 50% yarn, 50% books. What? People keep yarn in libraries all the time!

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

- Andre Gide