windy.

The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneous than that.

I decided to go against what felt right. Out of all the images we were offered, I decided to purposefully choose the one that I liked visually but knew would have trouble conceptualising.

The other images were very packed with almost explosive visual sounds but A Sudden Gust of Wind really spoke to me in its style - faint, blush, pastel colours, the idea of a painted event becoming reality, the film-likeness of it, the seeming possibility of a single person being in multiple places, thereby creating a movement within a still. I could imagine the quiet breeze and softness of sound it could bring. It was a contrast to the intensity of the other paintings.

Ejiri in Suruga Province was one of Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

I like the thought behind Jeff Wall's image. It's a recreation, it's a beautiful serendipity but it's fully staged. It's sort of like a copy. It was a real moment turned into a drawing that then got recreated and frozen in time through an image. 

First notes:

sounds of paper,

whistle and chimes moving in wind, 

river and flow of water

To me wind and rain are escape, paper is creation and water is meditation. 

Recently I watched Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. It's a film about a bus driver who is also a poet. He starts his day writing, then listens to people chat on the bus, and then at lunch he goes to his favourite place - a waterfall - and keeps writing. 

For some reason that's exactly what I envision in this photograph. A journey in writing, if that makes sense. I realise it might be a strange approach but I've created a story that I want to create the soundscape for. I know what I want visually, so now I need to produce that within sound.

squares.

last night i cried over
the pain within us

created by the endless

youth and naivety

us and [sr].

< when i was twelve
i had to choose between german and russian
my dad told me to do russian because then he could help me with the homework

i was confused as to why he knew the language so well
but when he was a child, russian was our country's language

see, my sister was born in 1990,

a year after the baltic chain of freedom

but a year before the fall of ussr.

she was born in soviet union

and i was born in latvia,

only a seven year difference.

i was born in a free country

childishly i was unaware

that nothing in life is as easy as it seems, and that when i grow up
hearing latvian on a street would become almost unusual.

most of my friends fell in love with travelling,

they moved, and so did i,

and what's left now is the generation who fought for our freedom

left to watch it disappear. >

greens.

the shoot above.

In the previous post I mentioned that my mind was filled with countless ideas of the style I wanted my portraiture to explore. Perhaps unsurprisingly I found myself so overwhelmed by the stylistic ideas that I felt like I had some sort of a photographer's block - I felt like I couldn't take any photos until I figured out a meaning or a journey. It was almost like I refused to try until I had finally developed a final series in my head. To no surprise, that is a very nasty, worrying feeling. 

So I did what I do best and took a train, met up with my friend and just kept snapping images until the battery of the camera died. Whilst I wouldn't say this in any way relates to my previous train of thought, I did try to keep in mind that for these series I wanted to push myself to do something I hadn't previously done. 

And in this scenario that was me directing. Properly so. All of these images are wholly staged, including clothing and make-up. To my own surprise I found it very easy to tell Clio exactly what I wanted from her, something I never thought I'd be comfortable with. 

The last two and the bottom image are my absolute favourites from this shoot. I directed Clio to use her hands and legs as if she was moving to Madeline Follin's Funnel of Love - a feeling of free flow and feather-like lightness. I also tried a low angle - something I never do as I usually aim for shots from above or on the eye level. I found out that it is actually something that I like. On top of that, I really like the use of reflection I had in the first two images so that is definitely something that keeps sneaking into my photography recently, so perhaps I could explore that some more.

In the end, I realised that sometimes a photograph doesn't need a deep, thoughtful meaning - sometimes it creates it for itself after it's been captured. I'm thankful I did this because I finally don't feel stuck. Instead I just want to see what else new I could try.

And not to forget, Lightroom and Photoshop were a big part of why I feel these images are such a success. They were all individually toned and coloured, and I played around with the levels of rgb hue and saturation. Afterwards I added a thin white frame around them in Photoshop.

m.

As the title suggests, I find it very hard to explain what I did in this little video. I had a whole vision of a strange video I wanted to shoot but I've now decided to keep it for later as last week didn't really go as well as I hoped it would. Nevertheless, I filmed some shots and went crazy on Premiere Pro. This includes using warp and twirl distortions, color keying colours that really should've remained untouched, using multiple layers, timelapse and RGB curves on top of two still images and five shots of clouds, Jack under a huge blanket and a close-up of a guitar amp.

A week and a half ago I also decided to go a bit crazy with the live music footage we recorded. Although it started as me just playing with editing tools, I soon realised that I actually quite liked the low, grainy quality of bad color keying and multiple, colourful layers. I might come back to that again.

The video beneath is one I did a very long time ago for a poem that I wrote, however the shots following the one minute fourty four second mark are some of my favourites as they are more abstract and unusual than the rest of the milk/honey/ink visuals. I like textures, both of the subject filmed and the actual digital outcome after editing, so I might bring that into some of the other experimental shorts to follow.

joke's on us.

The plan was simple. I was going to visit my friend and her roommate, and ask them to sit down in front of the camera. Little did I know that I would end up using toilet roll as a tripod and leaving the low-battery camera on for continuous shooting whilst my friend and I pretended to laugh at nothing (because the roommate was feeling too annoyed to accept the offer). And then at some point we actually started laughing (genuinely) and wouldn't stop until about 80 photos later.

So the hardest part was actually choosing images where the two of us didn't look like absolute bums, in disbelief of our bad jokes, and editing them to look somewhat nicely coloured.