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Let Your Light So Shine
Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2016 |
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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.
In December of 2008, I got my first ever DSLR (a trusty little Nikon D60 that I literally used until the shutter broke several years later. Apparently that can happen...). While visiting family shortly after receiving my new camera, Chloë was the first person I took out for a "portrait session". Of course, these photos are lacking in MANY areas, but I still love them. They still show the entire reason why I love photography: the preservation of memories and life and love.
Each summer I would go home and take Chloë out for a photoshoot. Some years she loved coming out with me, sometimes I had to force her into it, but as the years went by, our work and time spent together became more and more magical. I would paint her entire face red and yellow or tell her to go walk barefoot in the mud in a wedding dress. While the photos may not have always turned out, the memories attached to them were always worth the effort.
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:
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!**
Labels: Arkansas, Art, Church, Conceptual Work, Photography, Religious Art, Teen Faith
Posted on Tuesday, October 13, 2015 |
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Guys! I finished Faith and I am SOOOO happy with how it turned out!
A HUGE thank you to three people:
Belle, my beautiful model, who was so fun to work with, probably because she humored me by walking around barefoot in a poofy dress in the woods... in Arkansas... in the middle of summer. It's a more unpleasant endeavor than you would think, given not only the seriously humid heat, but also the creepy crawly things that are known to make their home there in the warmer months.
Also, Belle's mom, Lisa, for taking time away from her other kids to drive Belle out to our location. I very much appreciate your willingness to work this into your schedule!
Finally, a tremendously huge thank you is in order for Robert Cornelius of Robert Cornelius Photography! This picture would not by quite so magical without his help (and his mad Photoshop wizardry). If you don't know who Robert is, you should check out his blog!
Anyway, without further ado, I give you Faith:
41 But if ye will nourish the word, yea, nourish the tree as it beginneth to grow, by your faith with great diligence, and with patience, looking forward to the fruit thereof, it shall take root; and behold it shall be a tree springing up unto everlasting life.
42 And because of your diligence and your faith and your patience with the word in nourishing it, that it may take root in you, behold, by and by ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is most precious, which is sweet above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea, and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst.
43 Then, my brethren, ye shall reap the rewards of your faith, and your diligence, and patience, and long-suffering, waiting for the tree to bring forth fruit unto you.
Alma 32: 41-43
Now, because I love to see behind the scenes photos and before and afters, here is the before:  Originally I did a HUGE expansion and had all these big trees interspersed throughout the image. However, Belle ended up getting lost in the image because she was so small compared to the trees. So I took the trees from the expansion, widened them a bit, and moved them in closer to her before applying a more intimate crop.  Then I lightened her up, because #highlightingthesubject.  And tried messing with color balance.  I then realized the background was far too light and therefore distracting, so I darkened the greenery behind her. At this point, I became stuck. I knew this photo needed something, I just couldn't figure out what that was exactly. So I sat on it like this for a few weeks. I would try something, not like it, walk away, come back a few days later and try something else, with similar success. Then one day I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and noticed a new post from Robert Cornelius, whom I've been following for the last year or so on social media. Per usual, his latest piece was A-MAZ-ING. So I commented on the post and sort of jokingly, but also seriously..... however that works... that if he ever hosted a workshop, I was SO there. To which he responded that he didn't have any workshops planned, but he did offer 1-on-1 skype sessions... Um. Yes. So much yes.  So I took him up on his offer and for an hour we talked through what I was hoping to get out of the image and how we could go about doing that. He recommended that I darken the background even further, and adjust the color balance to give it a bit more whimsy.  Then he really worked his magic, by... working some magic. In the form of sparkle trails! I'm so excited about this! I had tried adding a few sparkles here and there earlier on in the process, and always ended up deleting them over and over again. What I had been able to muster up looked completely fake, which was more than frustrating, because I think I had known all along that that's what I really wanted in this image. But Robert totally made the coolest sparkle trails EVER and helped bring the focal point of the image not just to Belle, but more specifically to the plant in her hand, which was awesome! And the best part of all is he showed me how to do it!  So even though this photo took me several months to finish (which, hey, go easy on me. There was a cross country move within that time frame) and I felt on numerous occasions that I would just have to scrap the whole thing, this ended up being one of my favorite pieces to date! So thank you Belle, thank you Lisa, and thank you Robert! I seriously could NOT have done it without you guys! Labels: Arkansas, Church, Conceptual Work, Religious Art Choice and Accountability
Posted on Wednesday, December 11, 2013 |
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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.
Labels: Art, Behind the Scenes, Church, England, Photography, United Kingdom Virtue
Posted on Thursday, November 21, 2013 |
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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.
And here is the final product (click to see it bigger. You know you want to!):
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!
Labels: Art, Behind the Scenes, Church, Conceptual Work, Photography, United Kingdom Blending In
Posted on Tuesday, May 14, 2013 |
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I have now been in Prague for one week and so far things have been going really well. Here's a quick list of my accomplishments so far:
1) I successfully navigated the Prague public transport system by myself, as of Sunday.
2) I also managed to find my way to church. The fact that I made it semi- on time is an accomplishment in and of itself. On the weekends the buses don't run as regularly, so my options for getting there were to leave the house at about 7:20 and catch the 7:35 bus and get to 9:00 church really early, or catch the 8:25 bus and run the chance of being late. My desire to be early to everything was warring pretty strongly with my hatred for mornings... in the end my hatred for mornings won out, but I was only five minutes late, so they hadn't even said the opening prayer yet.
3) I have been mistaken several times for a local, even when wandering around the super tourist-y areas. I feel like this is a success... even though it's probably not that hard. It's not like I'm in India where it's obvious I'm not from there. I'm white. I have brown hair and blue eyes. Czech's are white. BUT, it's not obvious that I'm from the States when you look at what I'm wearing, unlike most American tourists, so I consider it an accomplishment. I was asked on three separate occasions something in Czech, so I guess I looked pretty legit... although when I opened my mouth and said "English?" it became pretty obvious. I wish I knew Czech. This language is REALLY hard, and I say that having taken some Russian, which is supposedly one of the more difficult languages? Russian I could understand a bit of it when I was taking the class (granted, it was stuff like "How are you?" "I like to eat ice cream and read books."), but this is a whole other story. I ask Anna, the oldest, how to say something and when she tells me, it literally sounds like gibberish. I try to say it and I can't do it. Very frustrating. But I still want to try to learn at least a little bit.
4) I found several websites with cheap/budget airline tickets. A whole new world has been opened to me. Especially since I'm only supposed to be here 90 days, and I wasn't planning on leaving until about 120.... I'll just have to take some trips outside of Europe.... where to, where to? Any recommendations?
That's all I can think of right now, but I think that's a pretty good little list for my first week. On Saturday we went into the city for the day. We ate lunch at a restaurant that was on this little island between the locks/sluice gates and the Vltava. The river is on several different levels, so they have to have periodic locks/sluice gates throughout the city for the boats. Here's the view from the restaurant. That's the national theater in the background, and behind the island towards the left of the photo is the Karl's Bridge. You can't see it in the picture. But it's there.
 
We also went to see the Tutankhamen exhibit that is in Prague right now. Everything is an exact replica of what they found in the tomb (I guess transporting several thousand year old mummies around the world isn't very feasible... go figure...).  
 
Everything is going well here in Prague. I hope everyone is doing well in their respective endeavors. Peace an' blessin's, peace an' blessin's.
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About
Arkansas native.
Currently based in Boston. Travelling soul. "Unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Contact
madeline.s.stoker@gmail.com
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