This self portrait fine art series is becoming more important to me in so many ways. It’s challenging me to be creative and try new things. It’s forcing me to get better at photoshop and understanding light. It’s teaching me to experiment and explore ideas… reaching for more. By giving myself this space to create and be creative – I’m finding a passion for this type of creating and all that it can do and be.

You may recall that this not yet titled series is a self portrait series dealing with emotions or traits like hope, strength, anger, sorrow, etc… You can take a peek at all my fine art work features here. This is an image I had sketched out in my idea notebook many, many months ago. But I put off creating it because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to execute it. I finally just decided to jump in feet first, and see what happened.

The idea for this Fine Art piece is Knowledge. I’m the type of person who likes to learn. I always liked school and I’m always trying to expand my own knowledge base so that I can be a better person. One of my favorite ways to learn is through reading. So I had this idea that learning is a sort of quest… you go out to seek more information. And for me that journey often begins in a book. So I liked the idea of creating a kind of forest scene where the trees were book pages… So that’s what I tried to do here.

In order to create this image, I first set up my books in a way I felt might look reminiscent of tree trunks. I got my nice close up shot of that. Then I pulled back and got to work on the self portrait portion of the shoot. I tried a few different positions but ultimately decided I like the idea of my back being to the camera… partly because I’d never done that before and partly because I liked this idea of moving into the unknown… away from the viewer. After I got the shots I liked for my body, I took some shots of hair flips to add motion and my sweater appearing to blow behind me.

I pulled all these images together and started working in photoshop. Playing with my hair, my sweater, adding some light from the lamp and then figuring out how to make those books look like trees. I’ll admit it doesn’t look exactly like what I pictured in my mind, but I’m still really happy with what was created. It’s different and I tried something new. What more can I ask for?

I put together another behind the scenes video for you guys on my YouTube channel too! You can check it out below 🙂

And the final image: