Inspiration

Another ramble, but only a short one – inspiration comes from a variety of places, and sometimes places where I least expect it – the supermarket has aisle after aisle of possibilities, at reasonable prices! But inspiration also comes from more expected places, like the websites of other awesome photographers!

What really gets me are those concepts that are so far beyond my own ideas, that I’m blind-sided by their awesomeness and immediately relegate my own idea to the archive (ie bin!!).

Here’s two examples:

• I had an idea to do a dancer in smoke shoot, with a scrim. It’s a challenging concept, because the lighting is potentially complex and smoke always behaves unpredictably. Add a scrim between the lens and the model, and the concept does rely on the various components playing nicely together. This is exactly why I was keen to do it – complex enough to be not easy to replicate in Photoshop!

  But another photographer sent me a link tonight, to Nowness who have what is basically a video clip called “The Runaway”, from electronic music group UNKLE. Their clip is basically what I wanted to do as stills, and very well executed. I’d perhaps get the models to avoid touching the scrim with makeup (since the smudges don’t look so great), but the effect of touching what is obviously an elastic scrim does pose some great image potential.

  I don’t want to embed the clip and steal their thunder, but you should definitely go over there and check it out yourself

• I assisted on a jewellery shoot a very long time ago, and wanted to do a jewellery shoot of my own at some stage. I had this idea to do it as an implied nude shoot, using jewellery that would allow lots of posing potential (ie big enough to allow more than just tight crops of tiny pieces). While looking at the UNKLE link above, I came across my jewellery shoot idea, taken to a completely amazing new level!

  Everyone has seen jewellery shoots – the still images are always very pretty, the jewellery always very pretty, and it’s all been done before. However, photographer and filmmaker Sebastian Faena stepped it up more than a notch, he’s taken it to a whole new level with his concept of jewellery tableau’s!

  I’m not even going to begin to describe these images – the first time I took a look at the images, I fell into the trap of thinking “oh yes, very pretty, seen it before, ho hum”… and then one of the images moved!!

  Go and look at the images – there’s not many of them, but they are worth a look. Make sure you pause on each page, you’ll see what I mean! Check out “Eniko gets her rocks on”

On one hand I’m crushed that my own little pieces of inspiration are shadows of such grander ideas, particularly when they are so well executed. Perhaps I won’t relegate my ideas to the “archive” just yet, but I am going to have to develop them into something much more awesome!! And it won’t stop me from looking everywhere for great inspiration.

Be aware that both links contain some nudity. Certainly not enough to offend anyone, but you never know!!