Okay, let’s do this!

So the awesome Brooke Shaden started a challenge – to create every single day for 15 days straight. I’ve started so many projects this year and stopped halfway through (sometimes not even getting that far), but I decided to do this because I know that doing it with other people is going to hold me accountable. There’s over 500 other people doing this and Brooke created a Facebook group for all of us to share our work and be inspired by other people and ask for help when we need it. Brooke always manages to create a community where everyone feels welcome, I love it.

So today’s theme was rebirth. Of course, I ran into challenges and made mistakes and learned a lesson. A small one, but still. This is the image I created:

Now, although this is definitely not a portfolio piece, I’m kinda happy with how it turned out. My initial idea was to combine dead flowers with fresh flowers, to kinda imply that with death comes new life. I wanted to create half a dress out of a dead/dried flower, and the other half with fresh flowers.
That part was relatively easy, the difficult part was the lighting. I shot this indoors, because there’s no way I can shoot outdoors right now. On average it’s 38 degrees outside (That’s about 100.4 F), and it goes all the way up to 46 (115F). It’s not that I can’t shoot outside, it’s that I know I’m gonna hate the process. And I don’t want that to happen.
So I shot this with an umbrella and some LED lights and a reflector just to fill in the shadows. I was trying to get something.. kinda flat.
Then I had this idea that I’d have a “swirl” of dead flowers around my subject, but it didn’t work. I feel like I may have strayed from the original idea a bit.. especially with the background. I wasn’t planning on compositing that background into the image, but of all the ones I’ve tried, I liked this one the most.

My takeaway from today’s shoot is:
– Plan which background I’m going to use so I can match the light on my subject as best as I can.
– Don’t merge layers without saving the original files first (I composited the flowers onto my subject and merged the layers planning to save it as a different file, but I ended up saving it on the original, boo.)
– Put a little more thought into the visualization of the idea. I feel like if I’d planned this better I would’ve been able to create the image I saw in my head.

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