The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep.
- Robert Frost
When I was in school for photography I shot a lot of conceptual fine art, but upon graduating it seemed that all I was shooting were family events or weddings, and there's nothing wrong with that, I love shooting and editing images of families, creating a lasting, beautiful memory for people to cherish... weddings, however, are a different story. But I wasn't shooting for me. I was always shooting for someone else, never taking the time to plan, shoot, and edit something of my own creation. I also took some time away from photography to self-publish the first two novels in my fantasy series A Chronicle of Crowns. And writing, and editing, and re-writing, and editing again, can be a little tedious and time consuming. And to be honest, I had lost my drive to shoot. But this past spring I felt a strong itch to get out and do some more conceptual, fine art-style shoots, to bolster my portfolio and create something new and exciting to share.
The Path was a short little series I devised after finding an old prop oil lantern at a friends. I took my friend Luis into the woods one bright summer's day, we shot the photos, and afterwards they sat on my computer for weeks. While this series was meant to be set in a dark, eerie forest, lit only by the light of a lantern, I didn't really want to use the lantern in case I broke it or messed it up somehow... I've never used an oil lamp before, I don't know what I'm doing! So instead we shot it during the day, and I figured I could add a light in post. After fiddling with a couple of the photos, I just could not get the forest to look like night. I watched tutorials on YouTube, I read up on different ways to do it, and everything I tried looked awful and incredibly fake. It was very discouraging. I hadn't shot something like this in years, and a part of me wondered if I was capable of editing fine art at all, so I set it aside. About a month later, I went back, changed some things, ignored all the tutorials and videos I'd watched, and played around in Photoshop until I finally got the desired look. Despite all the trouble these photos gave me, there are a couple I really like, and I learned a lot about editing and using Photoshop to manipulate the time of day within photos. I probably won't attempt something like that again, however. If I wanted the photos to feel like a forest in the middle of the night, I should have shot in the forest, in the middle of the night, but lesson learned!
