I truly, and whole-heartedly believe that knowledge is meant to be shared. I’m fascinated by so many things in life, and one of the things I enjoy the most is listening to people talk about their passions.
My sister is a med student and she loves it. Often, she’d talk to me about what she’s studying and while most of the time I don’t really understand it (I was never good at science), I love the passion in her eyes when she talks about it. She would tell you everything she knows if you asked, if you wanted to listen.
One of my best friends is a lover of words. She reads fiction and poetry like her life depends on it. It makes me so happy to hear her talk about it and I’ve discovered some amazing poets and writers through her.
When people talk to me about their passions, I get this strong urge to learn more about it. When my friend talks to me about anything computer-related, I wish I never gave up on wanting to be a computer engineer. And sometimes, when I watch live performances of bands that really enjoy what they’re doing and make music straight from their hearts, I wish I could be a rockstar.
Passion can be contagious. Passion is meant to be shared.

I don’t claim to know much. But everything I know, I will share with you and the whole world. I’ve recently been told that I shouldn’t post before/after pictures, animations of my editing process, or speed-edit videos. I was told that “it should remain a mystery”.
A few months ago during my exhibition, someone told me that I shouldn’t tell people how I come up with ideas, or how I find my locations, or where they are. She said that if I did that, people will try to do the same thing I’m doing.
That baffled me. It makes no sense to me. If someone wants to know something I know, I’ll happily share. If I can get someone to use photography to heal or express themselves, I’ll gladly tell them everything I know. If they want to do what I’m doing, then that means there’s more creativity and art in the world, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. That’s an amazing thing. Art can save lives.

And since we’re on the topic of sharing, I wanted to show you this image I’ve been working on. The other day, my family and I decided to barbeque. While we were preparing everything, my mom asked me to burn newspapers and put them on top of the coal so it would burn faster. Right after the fire would burn out, the newspaper had this amazing texture and light. I instantly ran back in and grabbed my camera and took LOTS of pictures of that. It was beautiful.

It got me thinking about one of the first images I created, Gardens of Insanity, and how I used only 3 pictures for the background and kept duplicating it to make the background. I decided to try something like that with this one. I didn’t have a solid idea in mind, no specific story, I just wanted to experiment and see what I come up with.

 

Title is from Lorde’s Yellow Flicker Beat.
Like I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been trying to experiment with different editing techniques and doing things randomly and just seeing what happens. For this one, after I composited the fire/newspapers in, I merged those layers and gave the merged layer a radial blur. It took away so much texture so instead, I kept those layers but duplicated them, merged them into one, then added the blur to that and lowered the opacity. I loved how that looked.
While I know that this isn’t one of the best images I’ve made, it certainly was SO much fun to create!

Since this whole blog post is about sharing, I invite you all to ask me absolutely anything, and I will answer truthfully ❤

2014-2017 Thoughts amani alshaali fine art photographer fine art photography hope insecurities inspiration knowledge passion photography photoshop photoshop edit sharing thoughts