Remember that post I wrote about Integrity a while back? And remember how I wrote another post about a different version of Integrity a few weeks later?

Well let's hope the old adage "third time's the charm" holds true, because I'm about to hit you with another rework of Integrity. This time,  though, I completely scrapped the original image and started over again with a different photograph from that day. 

Now this isn't to say that I was lying in my last post when I said my second version was "SO MUCH better" and "I loved it", because it really was SO MUCH better and I really did love it more than the first. Seriously, I still cringe when I see the green fog from my first edit. You probably couldn't find a grilled cheese sandwich that was cheesier than this:

Uh... that failed attempt at a light ray coming down. The fact that the fog isn't even green in the area surrounding here. It was just.... bad.

So I asked for second opinions and the photo evolved into the latest version of Integrity, seen here:

And being 100% honest, I really did love it at first! But as time went on I realized it just didn't fit me. It didn't fit the story and it didn't fit my style. I strive for elegance and an air of authenticity in my photos and I didn't feel like this image was indicative of that. Was it really cool? Yes. Was it all kinds of fun colors and cool smoke? Yes. But of all the traits I claim to have, flashy is (I hope), not one of them. I love to work in the subtleties and so I attempted to take a more subtle approach this time around.

As I was reworking attempt #2, though, I was having a hard time visualizing what exactly I wanted to change. All I could see was what I DIDN'T want the picture to look like, blatantly staring me right in the face. It's like when people take a bright light and shine it right in your eye. You can't see anything but that light. You have a hard time believing there is anything else out there except that light. I was stuck, staring at this bright.... purple.... flashy.... light.

So I went back to square one and began looking for another shot from that day that I could use. Amidst the thirty or so photos I had taken, I found this one:

And this one:

Well photoshop exists for a reason.... so I combined them. And then added a lot of fog. And rather than listing ALL the things I changed.... I think I'll just show you. Because... you know... "a picture is worth a thousand words" and I stand by that statement. Without further ado, attempt #3:

3 All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils; 4 My lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit. 5 God forbid that I should justify you: till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me. 6 My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live. Job 27: 3-6

In my original post about six months ago, I explained all the symbolism behind this image. Since I'm nice and don't want to have to make you go track the original post down in the archives, I thought I'd give another explanation (largely copied and pasted from the original post):

Since the color for Integrity is purple, I made the obvious choice of dressing Kacey in purple. The ornament in her hair, a kanzashi, and the cherry blossom flowers wrapped around her crook are all nods to her Japanese heritage.

The image is representing her staying true to her beliefs and her principles and following the words of our Heavenly Father no matter what may cross her path. To me, this is the definition of integrity.

The shepherd's crook, long recognized as a symbol of our Savior, represents Christ as the Shepherd. He guides us to safety and eternal life through his example. I wanted to have Kacey holding onto this staff as she walked down the path, just as we must hold to the words of our Savior throughout our lives, during easy and difficult times alike.

The light represents her goodness and the "light" of Christ we can bring into the sometimes dark and dreary world around us.

Finally, as you may have guessed, the forest in winter and the fog creeping in represents not only the evils of the world, but more importantly, the difficult times in our lives. It's so easy to think that it's "evilness" that pulls us away from our Heavenly Father. But like a gentle fog rolling in, it's the daily struggles and the sorrows that occur in our lives which obscure our path back to him.

So hopefully this is the final version I am sticking with. I've been staring at this photo for the past two weeks, making tiny adjustments here, and tiny adjustments there. When I finally opened it up last night, and again this morning, and couldn't think of anything I wanted to change, I decided it was time to share.

Hopefully this is the last time I will be posting about Integrity!

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!

I thought it might be interesting to include some behind the scenes photos and information of some of the more conceptual stuff I have been doing lately, if only for some sort of a personal account of the whole process. So I thought I'd start with my Zia shoot that I did back in March. I came up with the idea when I was in the shower one day, which is in and of itself an amazing thing because ideas never come to me in the shower. I know this is when a lot of people get their ideas, or at least that's what all those memes floating around the internet seem to be suggesting, but I usually get all my ideas as I'm trying (note the word trying) to fall asleep. But this one was special and came at a time when I could truly appreciate its awesomeness! And it inspired me to do a lot more photos like this, so let's hope it continues!

I had been looking through my favorite photographers' flickr accounts and just generally enjoying their work and being amazed at their creativity. After about a week or so of obsessing about how amazing they were, I started thinking to myself "I don't want to just take normal photos of families or people for the rest of forever." Don't get me wrong, I love taking photos of people and I have found that I enjoy photographing families and teenagers (just don't ask me to do a wedding...), but it doesn't stretch me at all. I want to be able to take my photographs to the extreme and try things I haven't tried before. So 'lo and behold, as I was showering one day, I was thinking of how I could be this creative. And all of a sudden an idea came to me that I had a lot of friends from a lot of different states (there's a lot of variety out at BYU, in the "domestic / all 50 states are represented" kind of way. We're still severely lacking in the other country/anything other than White/Caucasian area). Anyway, each state has it's own motto or something it's known for, so I thought wouldn't it be cool if I created a photo representing each state? So to test my new idea I decided to use my roommate, Bri, who is from New Mexico first.

New Mexico is known as the "Land of Enchantment" and uses the Zia, or sun, symbol often. It's actually a part of their state flag. I guess they must really like the sun. So I thought I needed something with reds and yellows like the sun, and maybe turquoise, because for some reason turquoise just seems magical to me. Then I began to experiment with my friend Cora on Bri's makeup and hair. These were just taken with my phone. I figured I didn't need super nice quality of makeup and hair styles taking up space on my hard drive.

 

Bri always jokes that she could make a photo album filled with embarrassing photos of myself. I think I've got enough of her to start my own photo album. I think I feel a contest coming on...

 

As for the costume, the three of us decided a trip to DI (Deseret Industries) was in order. We found a lace curtain, and about 10 yards of this coral/red fabric. Perfect. Then we found some cool props that I didn't necessarily use in this photo shoot, but that I hope to use in the future. We did use the horn at her waist (it was from a tacky Christmas wreath that I'm guessing was made in the 80s) in some photos, even though it didn't make it into the final photo I decided to go with.

Having figured that out at about Saturday night around midnight, we decided since she was a pseudo- sun goddess, we needed the actual photograph to be sunny, so we waited until the next day. After church on Sunday, we came back to my apartment and began to once again get Bri all dressed up. Then we headed up the canyon. I had envisioned going all the way to the top of Squaw Peak, which would have given us an awesome view of the sky with her standing on what would look like the edge of the world. BUT, the road was closed for another week because it's Utah and they do things like that there. Lame. So we tried taking some photos a little lower, but it just wasn't epic enough for me. See what I mean?:

And do you see how I believe I have my own fair share of embarrassing photos of Bri? But disregarding Bri's awesome modeling skills, the huge mound of dirt behind her, otherwise known as a mountain, did not lend itself to the whole sun goddess/Zia/Land of Enchantment idea. So then we went to the lake, because it's flat out there and there wouldn't be any mountains in the way, right? Right, but.... it was super windy! Blast! Literally.... It was so cold that we got out of the car for about two minutes and thought "I think we should move on." So finally, as a last resort, I convinced Cora and Bri to give me one last shot and try somewhere that they weren't necessarily thrilled to try out.

Y mount! Yeah! My thinking process: "big mountain, no mountains behind it blocking my view of the sky, the sun is setting NOW, and it's close. Maybe the sunset will look really nice. It'll do." Their thinking process: "The sun is setting, I'm freezing, and there's lots of people there. I look really weird to be walking around in public right now. No way."

I won. :)

And I'm glad I did because it ended up being perfect! With Cora throwing Bri's train in the air (super windy by the lake apparently does not mean its super windy on the mountain) I got the exact picture I wanted! Here's the original image of the photo I decided to use:

And after snapping a photo of the sky from my apartment parking lot for a new background a few days later, here it is with the the more dramatic background. The final image:

It's a little rough around the edges in some areas, but I think it's a good start to trying to do some more conceptual and fun pieces!