Tag: 52frames_inspiredbyaphotographer

For this week’s 52Frames, the theme was “Inspired with a Photographer”, with an extra credit for “… and do that with the first photographer provided by our randomizer”. The randomizer assigned Thomas Ruff to me. One of his most distinctive work is his Portraits series, where he has a series of large dimensioned portrait captured in a passport-like format, with subjects keeping a neutral expression. So, I did that. His pictures also tend to show details that are not necessarily visible in today’s smoother pictures, which I tried to reproduce on this self-portrait too.

I actually have a significant amount of pictures of myself with that expression on my hard drive, because whenever I setup for a self-portrait, the first pictures kind of look like that, always. Normally it makes me cringe; here, it’s part of the brief. Sooooo it’s not my favorite picture of myself, but it’s what I was going for, so there we go 🙂

Aaaaaand 100 in a row. It shows here: all time streak, 100. I almost gave up a few time this year, and I almost accidentally broke my streak (had an upload snafu earlier this year), but it got maintained by the kindness of the Powers That Be at 52Frames 🙂

I must say that, for a 100th week theme, I groaned a bit when I saw the theme. I’m not too fond of that kind of “inspired by”: it makes me feel like crap, because I feel that anyone I’d be “inspired by” may actually feel insulted that my meager attempt may try to emulate them. I did consider getting the inspiration from a fellow Scavenger (I had several people in mind 😉 ) and decided against that for that reason because I *know* these people. (Although, considering the average Scavenger, I’m pretty sure I would have found nothing but support there!).

Anyway, I looked at the problem from the other direction. I considered what I wanted to experiment with, looked for someone working in that direction, and tried to emulate their style as best as I could. And, trying to play with still life and light and that sort of things appeals to me greatly these days. I searched for that kind of thing, and stumbled upon the work of Sharon Core. In particular, I liked the light visibly coming from a diagonal in one of the upper corners; I tried to emulate that. To the best of my ability, I also tried to take more care than usual in my whole setup (subject, tripod, light, background) – it was also the first time I used the background-holding tripod I bought a couple of months ago! – and ended up with the picture above.

I’m actually happy with it, although I still have significant progress to do to light my subject: as it is, I didn’t get what I was going for, although I don’t hate the result. It also feels “right” to have celebrated my 100th week on this project by taking a bit more time to think about what I wanted to do and how to do it, instead of half-baking something at the last minute – as it has happened more often than not in the past few months.

Anyway, now that I have the 100… I can’t leave it like that, now, can I? Here’s to a hundred more!