severed tie dyes

I'm mostly uploading this to say that I'm quitting my 30 day self portrait challenge. My internet got shut off (it took great efforts for me to upload this at work) and it won't be turned on for about two weeks. I hate not posting every day when I'm doing an every day project, so I'm calling it quits. Also I wasn't really having fun with it. At this point in my life, I want to focus on quality and not quantity, and that will be better done if I don't force shoots and allow myself to shoot other people.

On the upside, I'm going on a three day backpacking trip into the wilds of Alaska and will be visiting a ton of cool places. You can expect a couple photos from that.

It's time for me to quit making mediocre photographs.

That being said, I still want to work on the list I made for myself at the beginning of the challenge, so you'll still see a lot of fun behind the scenes stuff and before and afters and whatnot. In fact, I have two processing videos in the works!

As far as the internet thing goes, you don't have to worry about that either. I thankfully had a few outfits all ready to go (still have to write the posts though), so I can do all those internet type things at work (the only thing that's an issue is uploading from my laptop). So you'll still get your fun daily dose of Introvert's Introduction!

I hope you all have a fantastic day. :)

it's up in the air

8/30

I had this song stuck in my head while I was shooting this photo, which is weird because I have never heard any Lana Del Rey songs other than this one, and the only words I know are the chorus, but anyways, that what was playing over and over again. The background is the reflection of clouds on the back window of a car, and the foreground is an umbrella. I didn't really know what I was going to do for today's photo, but once I saw the clouds in the reflection, I thought it would make a nice backdrop!

This is also the second photo in the collaboration I'm doing with Heather and Kristi! Today's color is blue. I inadvertently was rocking the flickr colors of pink and blue, but I'm fine with that.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend! I for one am very glad it's Saturday, and I shall be the biggest couch potato in the world today (but hopefully I'll get some things on my to-do list.)

the benders of light

7/30

My friends Heather and Kristi are starting a photo series surrounding different colors. I had the pleasure of meeting Heather as she lives in the same state as me during college, and Kristi was one of my first flickr friends, so I am so excited we are finally doing this! Today is is yellow and I love seeing how we each interpret the color differently. We each have a unique style, so I'm excited to see what we come up with in the images that follow!

You can see Heather's photo here and Kristi's photo here!

all that power

6/30

day 5 is here!

Hope you're having a good day!

mourning shall come

4/30

Time was fading with the sun. Weeks and months passed without a stirring. Grass twitched between stone fingers that still pointed towards the sky, only now it was in desperation, as with a last dying breath they hoped to reach the sun.

Detail (which is actually only at 33% and a lot sharper on the high res version of this photo):



Thank you to my boyfriend Matt for giving me some critique on this. Considering this was my first miniature composite ever, I'd say I did pretty good.

Here's a behind the scenes instagram photo from the endeavor:



(The bench was what I sat on, the shovel was for digging a hole in the grass to put my hand in)

I think the hardest part with pulling this off was getting the angle of myself to match the height of my fingers, which I don't think I did 100% accurately. (Perhaps I shouldn't have tried something so hard as fingers to experiment with this type of photograph, hah.) But all in all, I'm pretty pleased with the result! It was a lot of fun to come up with, and I'm actually thinking of using other body parts as giant stone figures. We shall see.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Laurynne

3/30

The elves were grand in their time, building empires amongst trees in the riverlands of Rael, their palaces interwoven with stone and flowers so grandeur, there was no match. The throne room itself was a vast chamber with a blazing waterfall as a backdrop to the high queen's chair. From the shorelines of the Agail Sea to the Western side of Coppern Mountain their empire stretched. Yes, the elves were grand in their time. But there is a time for everything.


I probably could have done a better job of this, in regards to the textures and whatnot, but I left my tablet and pen at work, so I had to use my computer's trackpad. Don't know how I ever managed to use that thing before. But anyways, this is the start of a new photo series! I'm so excited about it too, and am trying to come up with ideas for this world. Also, I can't believe it's already Friday. This week has gone by way too fast!

crazy cat lady

2/30

(Mouse over for before and after!)

So I decided to do my one insane crazy weird photo at the beginning of this project so that I can get down to business for the rest of it. For such a ridiculous photo (which, by the way, I completely imitated from this photo, so I don't get any credit for the idea!), this actually took a lot of time and effort. First of all, there's not a black wall in my house, nor are there any black sheets. The closest I had was this green one, which I hung from the railing in my loft. Then I had to get the lighting right. I don't own any strobes or lightboxes, so I had to get kind of creative.



First I looked at just the natural lighting coming from my window. I closed my white curtains to act as a diffuser, which gave a nice light on my left side. But my right side was pretty dark, and since I wanted to mimic the studio feel of the original photo, this just wouldn't do.



To fill in the shadows, I tried my easiest option, my overhead light, but it made some pretty weird shadows on my backdrop. So then after getting my brothers' lamp (which was incredibly difficult to do because it was very heavy and surrounded by junk), I turned it on, adjusted the direction of the light to bounce off my wall, and viola! Studio lights.



Then I corrected the white balance, donned a crazy sweater, bribed my cat with some cheese, and magic was created.



This was the lighting setup. I'm super high tech over here.



If this hasn't convinced you of how absolutely insane I am, then I don't think anything will. But now I have a new, odd respect for horrible Christmas card photos, because I really had to pay attention to lighting and compositing ... even if I was compositing a disembodied cat head into the blackness of space.

I cry for the earth

1/30

Well I am doing Elsie and Emma's thirty day self portrait challenge because I'm insane.

I'm not going to stress about this project at all. If I miss a day, it's whatever. But I'm hoping to complete it fully and since it's only thirty days long, the number itself should push me to suck it up and make some art every day.

Some things I want to accomplish/focus on:

• lighting; because light is the most important thing and I want to really focus on using it to my advantage.
• concepts with depth; I'm kind of tired of the random hair flip or looking longingly into the distance photos (not that those are bad, it's just that everyone including me has overdone them). I want to make some images that make people look at them for more than a couple of seconds.
• full body shots; when I won my photography award, I received a letter with all the critiques from the judges, and one judge suggested I work on full body shots. And while I do full body shots for outfit posts, I rarely do them for creative shots, so I want to push myself in that way.
• behind-the-scenes/before and afters/more writing for each photo; because who doesn't love that? I love reading what photographers have to say about the inspiration for their pieces or how they created a photo, so I want to provide as much information as possible for each photo. I don't really have anything for this picture, but hopefully I will for the following days.

Here's a detail shot though:



I wasn't sure what I was going to photograph for today, but once I sat down under the tree and started putting leaves in my hair (my dad was practicing his fly fishing outside and thought I was insane ... and I didn't even end up using the photo with the leaves), I was reminded of this photo that I made back in 2012. I wanted to combine the two photos into a "mother nature" feel, and I believe I accomplished that. Also, my hair isn't quite this long in real life yet.

Hope you have a great day!