dress (as shirt)/belt: thrifted // shorts: asos // cardigan: borrowed // boots: forever 21 // tights: romwe
Happy Monday, you beautiful people! I hope you have a wonderful day today! Two more weeks ... just two little more weeks, then finals week, and then I'm home for the summer! I'm really excited for this summer, because I finally got my first real job! Well, I got a job as an unpaid intern, but I'm working for a local photographer and will most likely be doing a lot of office work and hopefully will be able to go with him to photoshoots and things like that. He is a really successful photographer and I am so excited to be mentored by him. It will be a full time thing, so hopefully I'll have time to take outfit pictures and do my own shoots with clients (if I actually get any, come on people, I want to take your picture!).
Plus I just love summer in general. Even though I love winter and all the snow, there's just something about the Alaskan summer that has captured my heart. The endless sun, the wild flowers, the perpetual smell of campfire in your hair, running around barefooted in the woods, climbing mountains, picking berries, walking along the beach, driving to the sea towns and exploring abandoned buildings, I could go on and on for hours. I live for the summer.
Also this summer, I'll actually be able to see Matt on a regular basis. No more long distance, hooray! We already have a list of movies that we want to watch together, and we are also planning on doing P90X together. I did it with my mom in 2010 and loved it, so I can't wait to do it again with him.
Speaking of Matt, I have some exciting news ... drum roll please ... Matt's transferring to my college next year! Hooray! He has been considering switching, so two weeks ago he came to visit me and look at the campus. I know it was a really hard decision and he's really sad to leave his friends, but I am also excited that he'll be a little bit closer. Our film program here has exactly what he wants to study, and even though it's not as developed as the program at his current school, I think he will really enjoy it. I'm friends with several film majors and they're all really cool, so I bet he will get along with them easily. We would have been okay if he decided to stay at his college, but hey, can you blame me for being excited? No more crying at the airport or saying goodbye!
I hope you all have a great day today!
mini instagram art project // acting in a film
It's been an exciting week. Coupled with last week, I've received several bits of exciting news. The first was that my photograph that made it into the Student Art Show at my college made it to the "second round," if you will, by being nominated by the professors for a Lippy Award, which is basically the highest honor at the Student Art Show. So students voted for the nominations and in a couple weeks the winners will be revealed at the awards ceremony. Cross your fingers! Another exciting bit of news is that my photography teacher "nominated" (not sure if that is the correct term, but it's the best one I got) me to submit a portfolio to the first annual photography awards at my school, where a panel of judges will look at everyone's portfolio and vote on the best one, which will also be revealed at the Student Art Awards. It's all very awesome and humbling and confidence boosting that my art is being recognized, especially when it's put in competition against people who are actually in advanced photography classes and who are older than me and who I really admire as photographers.
I've also been emailing my photography teacher about viewing photography as an art and what it means to be a photographer, and since we have been talking a lot about this recently, I just wanted to share some of the correspondence with you:
Up until very recently, I didn't consider snapshot shooters real photographers, and it wasn't until reading the words of Ansel Adams that I realized that even those candid photos have meaning, and sometimes greater meaning and emotion than the photographs that take hours to prepare for. For me, what it means to be a photographer, and really an artist in general, is to be able to adequately evoke an emotion from the viewer. If I can create an emotional response from the people who view my photographs, then I have succeeded as an artist. And the photograph in question shouldn't be confined to a fine art label, because simple senior portraits, fashion shots, and yes, even the snapshot can create deep emotions. Sure a photo can have perfect composition, perfect lighting, etc., but if it doesn't have that emotion, I would argue that it wasn't successful. So my argument is that it doesn't matter what label you give your photos, if they have that emotion, then they are art, and the person who created that art is a photographer and artist.
For the longest time I didn't consider myself a photographer or an artist, just someone who took pictures every day, due to the fact that I was constantly comparing myself to popular photographers while I was still a beginner. And while I think it's necessary to compare your work to others', especially within the business of photography, you should never be discouraged by their success. When people started taking note of my work and asking me to shoot them, that was when I began to consider myself a photographer. But now that I have been doing it for a while and I can look back on my journey so far, I think the moment I became a photographer was the moment I picked up a camera and began my first 365 project. That was the moment I took pictures seriously. Whether or not I was a good photographer was a different question, but in that act of creating that I began to undertake, that was the moment I put on the title of photographer, just like when a great painter picks up his brush for the very first time. It is that potential for greatness that labels us.
Well, this post has turned into a photography post again. Sorry about that, haha. In other news, the rest of my week (as revealed by my intagram), was filled with helping my friend Jenna with an assignment for her film class. I got to channel my inner Oklahoma girl (I used to live there) and be a cowgirl on the wild west. It was really cold and really fun.
I hope your week was fantastic!
A film photo taken and developed by me for my photo class.
Here is the short story I wrote to go along with the photo:
Funny how one object can hold the weight of the entire world—whether that weight be of the world changing or of the world falling apart—in the memory of one’s mind. It was a quiet sunny day, a cold, fall evening, a misting night with the stars beginning to twinkle into existence; it was a million different days and nights for the little wooden bench at the back of the park, with its rusting nails and chipping paint hanging on for dear life and weathering bark showing more of its skin than the paint that was fighting a losing battle.
A quiet, sunny day found the bench gazing upon two people, a man and a woman, walking up to it hand in hand. Her hair was curled and she wore a white dress with lace and flowers, and he wore glasses, a newsboy cap, a button down shirt, and a nervous smile. They sat down on the bench close to each other, the land silent save for the light wisps of wind giving hints about the future. The man stood up suddenly, that wind twirling the tuft of hair underneath his cap flirtatiously. He held onto his girl’s hand and led her a short distance from the bench. He spoke softly. The bench felt the same tickle from the wind and heard a bit of that future insight, and just like it heard, it watched as the man knelt down on one knee and pulled out a small, light pink box from inside his coat pocket. The girl gasped and started crying, but the bench knew from its lifetime of observations that these weren't sad tears. After several moments of the man talking and the girl wiping away tears, they sat again on the happy bench, she resting her head on his shoulder and him resting his head on hers. The three watched as the sun began to set on the gleaming city lights before them.
The sun was beginning to set on a cold, fall evening and the bench saw a girl walking towards it from the right, chatting away loudly on a cell phone in some language the bench didn’t understand. She had a bag over her shoulder and wore high heels and her feet jumped quickly one in front of the other as if in a race to a finish line. The bench felt its wood aching, wanting to let her rest on it. The view of the city was beautiful that day, with hues of red and orange and yellow glittering through the fog, and the bench knew, for it was wise and saw many people, that the girl needed a glimpse of those city lights and needed to be held within their aura. She needed just a moment to be reminded of the ground she came from and of the beauty of that ground. But as it was thinking about this the girl came and went. It saw her shadow leaving and then she was gone and only little stars began to twinkle from her trail.
The stars twinkled into existence as faint clouds cried over a darkening world. An old woman sat crying on the old bench, her tears mingling with raindrops dampening her graying hair. The bench too felt the weight of her sorrow caving in on it, and wished, as it had a million times before to a million different people, it could tell the woman to just look at the beautiful city, with its raindrop races sliding down every window and the stars being spotlights for every person who looked towards the hill where the bench stayed. It longed to pick up its stools and wrap around the woman, shield her from the rain and comfort her. But she just held her face in her hands, never looking at a city that held a lifetime of memories for her. If only she knew how many lifetimes the bench had seen and how life was still beautiful. She didn't notice the rain whispering thoughts of the morning.
No one knew quite like how the bench knew. It knew the city. It knew the people in it. It saw forever stretched out like it did not know time. And it knew that despite the good and the bad that people thought would change their lives forever, those things were only a progression to another day and another night, another year, another lifetime of memories, another lifetime of chances taken and chances missed.
Funny how one object can hold the weight of the entire world—and yet, that weight did not sag its beams. It only left dents and scratches and paint chips and the bench knew that the city would continue, even if it—though it could stretch out the timelines of generations of people it knew—knew it would one day too lose the battle.
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