As you guys know, I’ve been carving out some time for myself to work on some projects just for me. Creative expression has been a huge outlet and benefit for me with trying to convey the things I’ve been thinking and feeling. I’ve currently been most inspired to create and work on my fine art photography series. It’s been a lot of fun working on these self portrait pieces. And it’s given me the opportunity to further hone my Photoshop skills, practice the elements of design, and focus on relaying a message visually.

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 or my second piece, Sorrow, here. Where the previous two portraits were emotions, this one is a little different because it’s more like a character trait than an emotion. This one is Strength. I think we’ve all had times in our lives where we feel like we’re carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. Or maybe we don’t even realize we’re doing it because the weight was added so gradually. But one day – that weight gets lifted and you realize how long you’ve been carrying that heavy burden.

I had been brainstorming about this image for a while. I drew a little sketch for it over a month ago so I had an idea of what I wanted. I knew that I wanted to be hunched over with the rock on my back. It took me a while to decide what kind of outfit I wanted to be wearing for it. I finally realize that I needed my legs to show in this image so that I could really emphasize the weight of the rock. This particular shot was created entirely inside (with the addition of one former outdoor shot). I set up one of my BoxDrop backdrops and got my camera prepped on my tripod. I used the soft natural light coming in through our big windows, and left my face in shadow. I tried a bunch of different angles to get the shot I wanted. There was a lot of back and forth running between my spot on the floor and my camera to see if my arms were where they needed to be and to see if I was leaning forward enough.

Once I felt like I got my body the way I wanted it – I shot a bunch of pictures of some little rocks from a variety of angles. In all, I maybe spent 30-45 minutes on the shoot and then from there the rest of the time was spent finding the right images to put together. I think I spent two or three hours compositing this one so it wasn’t too rough. As always I think the difficult part is trying to make it look realistic by making sure the light falls in all the right place and that there are shadows where they need to be.

Here’s a little peek at my process:

All in all, I’m really happy with how this one turned out! I’m looking forward to working on the next one in this series and seeing what unfolds as I go! I’d love to hear from you! What do you think about these pieces?