I tend to break a lot of rules. I’m not really crazy about them, and I’m not all that wild abut being told what to do. I supposes that’s why most of the stuff I enjoy doing tends to be creative with the ability to explore a little and figure out what looks good, sounds right and feels perfect.
That can be a real gift in photography – and sometimes a real curse. As a background, I have no formal training when it comes to photography. What I know and what Bob knows has come through figuring it out as we go. When we moved into a studio space, we did so before we had any studio equipment. Forget the fact that neither of us had ever actually worked with any studio equipment. But we did get the equipment and would spend time from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. in our new studio practicing and learning how to use the equipment. No one told us the light goes here and the other light goes there. Our experience with studio photography was basically what we had seen on our own senior shoots.
It turns out that was a blessing because we were freed from the chains of “you must do it this way” and allowed to experiment to see what happened if we moved a light here or shot from this angle. There was a learning curve. Believe me, there was a learning curve and probably some embarrassing moments, but we kept pushing and trying and asking questions. Now, studio work is some of my favorite stuff to do. It’s not unusal to see us laying on the ground outside of our bay doors taking a photo. I have not seen a lot of studio photographers do that by the way. Sometimes our ideas fail. No question about it. Sometimes they don’t, and those are the times that are really exciting.
So we wanted to share a few photos from Steve’s recent senior session. There are some different angles and some shots you won’t typically see in a studio. In one case, we just took him away from the background and leaned him up against a kinda dirty (sorry Steve) metal door to get a different look. For us, our favorite questions is “What happens if we do this?” A lot of times we don’t know the answer, but a lot of times we like the result.
