30 day challenge: day 1

I have many ideas for my 30 day photo challenge, some more elaborate than others. Since I just made it back to Ohio at 7 pm last night, I went with the simplest for day 1.

The biggest issue I am dealing with, and what has kept me from making these photos all summer long, is that the lighting studio + lighting equipment at my school are not available until fall quarter begins (in a month) due to us switching buildings. For now I am working with what I have, but I hope to acquire a set of my own off-camera flashes with umbrellas within the next few weeks! Not as good as having the whole lighting studio and lots of strobes at my fingertips, but it'll be better than using lamps and will allow me to shoot at faster shutter speeds.

Now let me explain the series I am working on. It is branching off from things I came up with during the past year. Some running themes:

1. All photos are staged, most are self portraits.
2. I'm working with patterns on top of patterns on top of patterns, mostly florals. I add in solid colors to give the eyes a little break.
3. I tend to obscure the face. I'm looking for ways to do that but still leave in some of the subject-viewer gaze, such as with the lace in this photo (if you see the photo up close, you can see my eyes).
3. I'm interested in exploring topics like DIY and craft, home, women's past and present roles in the home, natural vs. artificial.
4. I see each staged photo as having a sort of performative quality and am interested in adding video or real-time performances in with the still photos.

Today and tomorrow, I'll be working on setting up some kind of lighting arrangement over at my new temporary studio space (until our building switchover is complete) and I'll go there every morning to make my photo of the day! The space is very large and I'm excited for the possibilities. I'll also be shooting both on film and digitally, which I didn't do today because I'm in need of a shutter release cable for the film camera I want to use. I will also try to include multiple people in the photos 1-2 days per week, and the rest will be solo self portraits. I wanted to get started immediately after coming back from my trip, so today I just made do with what I could!