A "Make it Work" Moment

Just a few months ago everybody's lives got turned upside down once it was announced that Wisconsin was shutting down. My semester got put on hold for a few weeks, and the remainder was held online.

As a photography student who loves working in a studio, this posed quite a few challenges. For the final project of one of my classes, I had to create a series of images that followed a theme.

I decided to take inspiration from the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I created this series based off of his series titled "Flowers". You can view his work here.

Being stuck at home, this suddenly became a huge "make it work" moment! I ran out to the hardware store and picked up a couple $10 shop lights and got to work.

My tiny room served as my studio, with various items such as pillows, notebooks, random pieces of cardboard, and plastic bags aiding me in controlling my light. Somehow, with a constantly falling apart set up and a cat that wanted to munch on my flowers and be the star of the shoot, these images came to be. It only took 5-7 hours per image!

Here's the final product.

My goal in this series was to showcase the textures and forms of the flowers using careful lighting techniques. I wanted to challenge myself to take a simple and widely photographed subject and make it unique to my style. I truly learned that you don't need fancy equipment to make beautiful imagery. All it takes is a vision and some hard work!