A new lockdown, a new project.
Greetings from yet another lockdown!
Per government decisions Wales will be in lockdown from the 23 of October until the 9 of November due to increased number of new cases and fear of further spread and I am certainly in favour of the action taken except in my opinion I don’t think this tactic of a two-week lockdown will be effective. Now I don’t want to rant about this too much, but I know for a fact that just two weeks of lockdown now in October will not be enough to keep things under control in the long term and I’m definitely not predicting any of this to be over in time for Christmas even if it seems like plenty of time away unfortunately. England has also not announced yet what they will be doing in regard to their own lockdown and all this disconnect on the subject between the various areas of the UK really doesn’t make it feel very united on this front…
Anyway, that’s enough of that I know it is tiring to constantly hear about these bleak happenings and I’m sure that’s not what people are expecting here on an art website.
Despite the difficulties, we are already reaching the end of October and it’s been such a busy month. Getting back into the swing of everything after my summer adventures/misadventures and realizing all the work I need to get on top of for my new masters program.
I think the biggest hurdle to get over has been the acceptance of being a portrait photographer in the middle of a pandemic and having to rethink my mode of operation in the months leading up to starting my newest project. It hasn’t been quite so easy and it took some time to really figure things out, but I think I have settled on what I want to do so far.
Ideally, since I can’t work too much with other people at the moment, I want to try and explore a facet of photography that I have always been interested in but never experimented too much with before: self-portraiture. I know it may be surprising, but for the past few years, with the exception of selfies of course, I’ve only really been behind the camera rather than in front of it. I don’t really see myself as extremely photogenic so I tend to avoid photos where I can’t directly see what I look like for fear of looking terrible in them. But in these circumstances, I thought, since I’m stuck inside a lot anyway, to be my own model and see how that goes, so far I’m still just trying to figure out the basics of set up and high end camera tech that I am not completely used. Been a long-term Nikon user and now I’m finding myself working with a super fancy loaned Canon and I keep getting confused about how things work and where the right buttons are (ah the struggles of the average photographer Nikon vs Canon always a conundrum), but unfortunately for my reliable old Nikon the Canon has a flip out screen which I’m so thankful for and I don’t have to blindly hope that I’m actually getting a good picture in.
A selective contact sheet for the Nikon photos taken from my sketchbook.
A selective contact sheet for the Canon photos taken from my sketchbook.
Reflecting on what I want to achieve stylistically though, I have a few doubts on where I want to go with this. The only thing I have really settled on so far is that no matter what I really want to create a project that combines my photography and my illustration practice.
How I will do this though exactly is still up to debate in my head, but ideally I want to still follow up on my wild overlays style just this time with my own drawings rather than more photos. We’ll see how this goes, the only way is to move forward and find out!
For the time being Happy Halloween everyone, may it be a spooky but safe one this year.
-LAS xo