Dancing Lessons from God

Let Your Light So Shine

Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2016 | 0 Comments

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:

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!**

Labels: Arkansas, Art, Church, Conceptual Work, Photography, Religious Art, Teen

Josh

Posted on Wednesday, July 15, 2015 | 0 Comments

Josh is a long time friend of my brothers, so I've seen this kid grow from a little munchkin to the handsome young man you see below. I was more than happy to take Josh's senior pictures when he asked, especially since him and my brother decided to do theirs together. Usually my brother is such a stinker when it comes to photos and we spend 90% of the time waiting for him to stop being a pill so I can get one or two decent pictures. Josh brings out the best in Rob, though, making him laugh and, wait for it, actually smile in photos. Josh has a talent for making people happy, that's for sure. Without further ado:

It was great working with you Josh. Thanks for keeping Rob reigned in!

Labels: Arkansas, Family Photographer, Photography, Seniors, Teen, USA

Integrity

Posted on Monday, June 29, 2015 | 0 Comments

I am so happy to finally be sharing this image with you! It has been a long time in the making, what with the amount of planning I put into this, and the added chaos of prepping to move cross country right in the middle of my trying to bring this all together. But as of last night, this piece is officially done!

Integrity is another image in my Value series (just like Virtue). For those of you who don't know about, or are not members of my church, we have a program for girls aged 12-18 (kind of like Boy and Girl Scouts), called the Young Women Program. In this program the young women learn how to be a better version of themselves by learning important skills that coordinate with 8 values: Faith, Divine Nature, Individual Worth, Knowledge, Choice & Accountability, Good Works, Integrity, and Virtue. Each of these values has a set of scriptures that are meant to help interpret what it is these traits are, as well as a coordinating color. Integrity is purple, and one of the associated scriptures is Job 27: 3-6, which reads:

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.

Now in my last post, I gave a bit of a behind the scenes with my explanation of how I made the shepherd's crook. There is so much more to this image, however, than a simple crook I am having Kacey hold on to. So I wanted to dive into that a little bit for anyone who is interested to know:

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.

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.

Lastly, I wish there was some really cool biblical or philosophical reason as to why I chose to make the fog green, like the apple Adam and Eve ate was a green apple, or Lucifer wears green clothing. For disclaimer purposes, these are not true! I don't even have a clue what kind of fruit Adam and Eve ate, let alone the color, and if Lucifer had a body, perhaps he would wear lots of different colors! Really, green is just generally recognized as bad: the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, for example, has green skin, and people are green with envy, right? So I went with it. From an artistic side, I felt like it also added the contrast I needed between the warm tones of Kacey's skin and the path she is walking down and the coldness of the fog creeping in. I wanted it to be clear where the subject was and what I wanted to be considered "good" and what would be considered "evil".

So there you have it. Hopefully now this piece has a little bit more meaning and significance to you!

Labels: Arkansas, Conceptual Work, Photography, Religious Art, Teen

How to Make a Shepherd's Crook

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Behind the Scenes

I had the idea for Integrity floating around in my head for several months before I was able to go out and photograph what I was visualizing. Part of the reason it took so long to get this image translated from my head to reality was because of the shepherd’s crook, believe it or not! It was such an integral part of the story I wanted to create, and no matter where I looked, I could not find anything resembling a shepherd’s crook that was also within my price range (which is free, or pretty close to it).

So… my quandary.

I figured it was time to get crafty, since I had already gone that route for the dress I would be using in the image. For the dress, I had found a king size lilac duvet cover made out of this velvet-y material at the local thrift shop. While excellent dress material, I shudder to think what it looked like as an actual duvet cover. I like to tell myself that I saved some poor bedroom from an awful lilac tinted fate.
So it turns out that googling “How to Make a Shepherd’s Crook” doesn’t turn up much (although, since this is now the title of this blog post, fellow crook makers will now rejoice when they stumble upon my blog after googling for just such a phrase), but I did find a tutorial on how to make a Gandalf inspired staff, found HERE. With that inspiration up my sleeve, I ventured to the nearest thrift shop and tracked down a candy cane Christmas decoration, then stopped at Walmart and grabbed some brown paper bags, masking tape, and a wooden dowel. Right now, you're probably thinking "What in the world? I'm not following you Madeline....". Just bear with me.

Once I got home, I stuck the candy cane Christmas decoration on the end of the wooden dowel, and, satisfied with the height, glued and taped the two together like so:

(Why yes! That is Hermione in the background. Nothing like a little magic while working up your magic. Ok… obviously humor is not one of my gifts.)

Once that was done, I proceeded to tear up the brown paper bags and use the masking tape to tape it around the dowel and candy cane. Like so:

Cue brown paint:

Now the original tutorial I was following just stopped there, but to me it didn’t quite look like wood (maybe if you were using it for a Halloween costume and needed something in a pinch, but I'm a perfectionist, and I wanted better), so I introduced some hot glue into this business. To me the paper bags seemed too much like…. well, crumpled paper, and less like wood that had been smoothed and shaped over the course of many years of use. So I used the hot glue to fill in and smooth out most of the crevices and crumply bits so that in the end it was more like that smoothed wood texture I was going for.

I then painted over the hot glue again:

So that's how I made the staff itself. However, I wanted to take it up a notch, by incorporating some of the culture of the model I would be using in the image. Kacey is half Japanese, and while I didn’t want the image to scream THIS IS A JAPANESE GIRL, I did definitely want to see aspects of that.

I wanted to include the Japanese Cherry Blossom in some way, because what could be more quintessentially Japanese? And this is where I put in my plug for Amazon. Can I just say how awesome it is that I can pay less than $4 for silk cherry blossoms and have them shipped to me in less than two days? Technology these days, folks. So literally two days later I was able to dress up my crook just a little bit more and finally I was all set to take THIS picture:

Isn’t Kacey beautiful? I love working with this age group. So easy to direct and they’re still willing to experiment.

So there you are. A tutorial and behind the scenes all rolled up into one lovely (and admittedly quite long) blog post.

I hope you enjoyed!

Until next time.

Labels: Arkansas, Conceptual Work, Photography, Teen

Belle

Posted on Thursday, April 16, 2015 | 0 Comments

Belle was such a fun girl and I can't wait to work with her again! She is the definition of bubbly and I loved it! From our discussions during our quick little shoot she also seems like a really creative and spunky girl. One of her favorite things to do is to go to thrift stores and find clothes, so right off the start I knew we were going to get along. If you know me, you know I LOVE to talk creativity. Mention the words "art", or "photography", or "design" and you will have my full attention, so it wasn't hard for us to carry on a conversation for pretty much the entire time we were shooting.

I loved chatting with you Belle and I fully expect very bright things in your future!

Also, can we talk about how gorgeous she is? Just take a look for yourself!

Labels: Arkansas, Photography, Teen

Imanni

Posted on Wednesday, April 15, 2015 | 0 Comments

The same day I took Kacey out for some photos I turned around a few hours later and met up with Imanni, who was such a sweet girl. And I'm pretty sure she has her life more planned out than I do, and I'm two years out of university (seriously, who's been pushing the fast forward button? Can we take it easy?!).

Being a pretty introverted on the social scale, it always surprises me a little bit how much I enjoy talking to my clients/models. I love finding out what they like to do, where they envision themselves in five years, who they are.

When I asked Imanni if she'd ever had a photo shoot before, she informed me her aunt had taken her out once before. For only ever having her photos professionally done once, she was a natural and totally at ease in front of the camera. I love when I get a model like that! It certainly makes my job very easy and lets me focus on getting creative. Love that!

Labels: Arkansas, Photography, Teen

Kacey

Posted on Monday, March 2, 2015 | 0 Comments

I took Kacey out a few weeks ago on a little practice shoot and had a lot of fun. She's a sweet girl (as you can tell through her adorable smile in these photos), so I'm pretty excited to work with her in the future. I'm on the homestretch as far as getting props ready and my concept completely thought out to the point where I can actually execute this particular piece I have in mind. I have been anticipating the translation of all my sketches/imaginations/journal entries into a tangible piece of art for a LONG time now (about a year and a half, to be semi-exact), so this should be really fun.

In the beginning, I think Kacey was a little nervous (most people are when they first get in front of a camera), but as a photographer you just have to find a way to make your subject feel more comfortable. For me it's always talking, which to anyone in my family or close group of friends sounds like complete and utter lunacy, coming from my mouth... or fingers, as I type this. But it's true! It makes my job much more interesting when I can really get to know the person on the other side of the camera from me.

What do they do in their free time? Where do they go to school? What's their favorite subject to study? I find that once I really talk to whoever I'm photographing, rather than just commanding them to sit here, and tilt their head there, each and every individual session becomes a memorable experience, whether they are thirty minutes long, or two hours.

The picture above is one of my favorites from the session. I was setting up my lighting and getting everything in order, so I just told Kacey to keep her jacket on and relax while I fidgeted with my camera. I find a certain charm when you can snag a photo of someone completely at ease. It's their true self, which, as you can see above, is just sort of... well, cute, in my opinion (insert adorable smiley face emoji here, if desired).