After a few event shots, I came back to Dream Catcher Project in the past week in capital region area of NY state. This time a girl named Ashley stepped into my brilliant Photography world. Unlike the other girls I've ever worked with, she surprised me for a couple of reasons. She contacted me an hour before we finally agreed on the time and location to shoot, and then we immediately left to meet each other and started shooting. Though we both checked the weather, it began to rain really heavily right after we arrived at the park. So we have to wait, in silence listening to the rain symphony. She came with her mom, who suggested a pavilion in the park might be a good shooting stage even it was raining outside. Then we started driving in and out until we found it, and then the rain stopped. Amazing, right? But what really kept me thinking in the middle of shots is her unique look and expression in my viewfinder.
She is cute, I mean, so cute, which kept affecting my photographic vision this time. My biggest secret to shoot people in my own unique style is that I always try to "feel" my subject from the inside so that I can predict and capture the decisive moments. For girls at this age, I never tried to put this word in my photography vocabulary as I know almost all of them want to be shot like a sexy and beautiful woman, which is exactly what I did in the previous series. While for Ashley, I changed my mind. I found we might picked the wrong theme, the wrong location and the wrong time. In my mind, we should met at a pleasure ground like Six Flags, and in a sunny day for the theme of joy and happiness. I love that kind of "ice-cream" feeling, the prime essence of teenagers that I had before but left behind already. If I were only 20 years old, it would be such a wonderful thing to make friends with a girl like Ashley, keep laughing and keep wishing, love nature and love sports. Especially, she loved her Nike shoes and asked me to do a favor to take some frames for this, which adds another surprise count in my mind.
Last but not least, unlike the other models she just can't wait to see the final images I took. For any models I shot before, most of them even didn't care to take a glimpse of what I did on spot before they left. She was different, she "desired" to see what I did right after the shot at that location. I usually promised to have a single week to process all of the images, but she made me break that rule for the 1st time! She wanted me to show her my works in two days! That's so crazy! She pushed me to speed up my "light-speed" workflow in double or even triple efficiency, which was so unbelievable in my mind. And as you can guess, I made it, that's why I can update my blog at this time instead of near the normal weekend.
So Ashley, I hate you, very very much!......Do I? Maybe not ^-^
Her smile is like a melting ice-cream in this hot summer, fresh your spirit and at the same time warm your heart ~~~ Enjoy ~~~
