January Inspiration Roundup
January has a special place in my heart as a month of relaxation and celebration. I celebrate not only my own birthday, which is in the middle of the month, but the birthdays of my partner, mother, father, and two dear friends. Though the celebrations were limited this year due to pandemic restrictions, the post-holiday glow at the beginning of the month and the hints of spring at the end have inspired a happier, more colourful tone in the photos I have been taking.
My first two studio sessions of the month were inspired by the bright and colourful floral-inspired paintings of Nashid Chroma. He is a Toronto-based artist who has recently taken off on Instagram, and I was excited when he sent me some of his T-shirts to photograph in creative ways.
I bought a huge bouquet of artificial flowers and three foam circles, and combined them to make large flower crowns that matched the motifs on the shirts I was photographing. I put out calls for a variety of different models, and shot the shirts with seven different people, four with the crowns and three without.
On my last day of shooting these shirts, the weather outside was bright and sunny. January sun is my absolute favourite lighting, because it stays low in the sky and casts interesting shadows that can not be seen year round. I shot three different models that day, and shot each one both inside and outside, allowing for a broad range of lighting and stylistic variations.
The studio I rent is located in Chinatown, which is my ideal location for outdoor street-style photos. It was absolutely perfect for the images I was hoping to create with the shirts, and capped my collection perfectly.
Later on in the month I contracted COVID-19 and was confined to quarantine. During my time in recovery, I began experimenting with digital collage. I photographed myself in several different poses, lit only by an intense red light with a black background. I painstakingly cut out each image and layered them together in photoshop to create strange and uncomfortable looking creatures. Perhaps these images were inspired by the bodily-horror of being afflicted with a contagious and potentially deadly illness, but Iām more inclined to believe that they are simply products of boredom and fear of creative atrophy after laying in bed for days on end.
After recovering from the more intense symptoms of COVID, I began taking daily walks to stretch my legs and re-introduce movement into my life. As always, I would bring my camera along and take the opportunity to capture street photos. I have a backlog of dozens of these photos, but I have edited and finalized some of my favourites to accompany this blog.