As you know – in recent months I’ve been exploring a new area of photography – Fine Art Photography. I think for years I discredited my own creativity. When you go to art school, you are surrounded with incredibly talented people and it can become easy to compare yourself to those around you and feel inadequate. But in the past two or three years – I’ve given myself the opportunity to create and it has been the most fulfilling and liberating experience. With everything that has been happening in my life – my art now provides me with a way to try and express some of my thoughts and feelings and ideas.

You may recall that this new (yet-to-be-titled) series is a self portrait series dealing with emotions or traits like hope, strength, faith, growth, etc… You can see a little about my first piece, Hope, here. Like the previous piece this one also deals with emotion but on the opposite end of the spectrum. This is Sorrow. If you’ve ever experienced loss or depression or infertility, I hope this image resonates with you. I wanted to try to visually represent what sorrow can feel like. How all around you the world may be bright and sunny and cheerful – people are happy and laughing and good things abound. But invisible to everyone else, you have this ever present rain cloud looming over you. Sometimes it’s a downpour, sometimes it doesn’t rain at all but just hovers over you. But this little cloud is your constant companion leaving a constant little shadow over your life.

I created this piece a lot like my previous one, but with some slight differences. Where the Hope image was created primarily in my living room, this shot was created entirely outdoors. We actually live a couple miles from the lake in Sullivan. So I hopped in the car and drove over to Wilborn Creek. Once I found my location, I set up my camera on a tripod, got my focus set, and started taking pictures. I tried several different poses and ideas so that I could play around later and see what I liked best. I had my camera set up on a tripod and used a remote and timed shutter release to get the shots I wanted. It was kind of funny doing this in a public space. I did have a couple motorcycle guys drive over to the area I was shooting in. They kind of parked and watched me for a few minutes – I heard them talking over their engines thrumming and then they took off around to another area of the park. Pretty sure they were at least amused by the weird girl playing with her dress taking pictures of herself haha.

Now the sky had more clouds present on the day I was shooting this – so I decided to use one of my sunny skies overlays to get the look I was wanting because I wanted it to be obvious that this grey cloud is not part of the skyscape but a part of me. I pulled the little rain cloud from an old sunny sky image as well. This edit was a little trickier than the last one so it took me a couple days and some critique from a friend (Thank You Sarah!) to finally get it where I wanted it. And I’m super happy with how it turned out! I’ve got a sketch book of ideas going for my other pieces in this series and I cannot wait to work on them!

Here’s a little peek at my process:

Well I hope you found this fun! I’m looking forward to working on more pieces in this series and seeing what unfolds as I go! Have an awesome day everyone!