On Tuesday, I went on a photo shoot with a friend of mine who I met at the college youth group I attend. I didn't know her very well when we went on the shoot, but in the rough hour that we spent together, I learned so much about her. It was actually a very inspiring ad eye-opening experience to go out on a shoot with her. To protect her identity, I will call her Lara. Let me tell you a little bit bout her:
Lara, like me, will be attending college this year as a freshman. Also like me, she has quite a creative side. You see she has a kind of project that she is working on called the "FEARLESS Project". Her goal? To be able to freely express herself through writing, but also to experience life without fear. She believes fear is something created within, that if you don't feed the fire, it cannot continue to exist. She wants to destroy the fire of fear and replace it with memories and experiences. Lara writes about everything. About herself, about earth, about life. She desires to capture each aspect of life and create the world through her work.
The idea for photo shoot came up after youth group one night when we decided to go to someone's house afterward for ice cream. Lara mentioned that she wanted to start writing the word "fearless" under her eye and just walk around with it day to day. She thought it would be an excellent conversation starter and that she could spread the word about her project. When she mentioned this, I asked if I could take pictures of her when she started. I needed to expand my portfolio and this seemed like a very unique and excellent opportunity. She delightfully agreed s all we had to do was decide when to go out and shoot. At first we planned for the same week, but it turned out we both had other plans. Then, the same friend that had us over for ice cream held a tea party. Lara and I both attended and decided that would be a perfect day to go out. So both of us dressed in our favorite sundresses went out and searched for locations have no plan except to go out and take pictures.
Now I am not the most daring person and I am very shy. Lara on the other hand is completely open and exuberant. She suggested something completely different for our first location. We drove until we found a house that we really liked the front of and asked the owner if we could take pictures in front of their house. This experience took me by surprise because I normally find public locations, being too shy to ask something like this. The owner was shockingly nice. Honestly, I would have thought they would less willing or just stiff about it. However, the man who answered the door talked to us about why we were taking pictures and had a very pleasant conversation about both his house and how he admired the arts. Apparently, the stone work in front of his house had been done by a family who taught each generation the trade passing down their heritage, from I believe Croatia (though I could be mis-remembering exactly where he said the family was from). We took plenty of photos in front of the house. When we were done, we thanked him and left.
We drove around some more until I saw a wooden bridge that I really liked. Actually, the part of the bridge I really liked was on the road so we settled for the wooden walkway. The lighting was beautiful and the background was woodsy and free from distraction. While we were there, a man came walking by with his dog Hobson. Lara asked if we could take pictures with Hobson and so we struck up conversation with Hobson's owner. Apparently, Hobson was a service dog and the owner had trained and raised him. They gave him to someone who needed him, but the guy didn't him for some reason and so after about four months, Hobson retired and came back to the family that had raised him. When we had finished with Hobson, his owner continued walking and we decided we were done at the bridge. We travelled across the street to an office building that had a second floor and used the balcony for another location. We took only a couple photos before continuing to our final location.
As we drove, we were trying to decide where to go until we were about to pass a high school that I had taken a summer class at once. Having been on the campus before, I knew there were a variety of locations we could use. It being a catholic school, there were statues of saints everywhere. We finally decided on a small circle surrounding a statue of St. Francis. The area had trees, grass, and benches that were all perfect for our task. As we took some pictures, Lara noticed a friend of hers and called them over to take a picture with us. They left and we took a couple more photos before finally decided we had enough. We ended our photo shoot, and she gave me a ride to a friends house where I had an art party to attend.
The whole experience brought some very interesting new experiences for me. For example, I would never ever talk to someone walking by or ask about their story, not because I don't want to but because I'm so shy. I am not the kind of person that goes out and asks someone if I can use their house front. Going out with Lara gave me a chance to make once in a lifetime connections with people that I would never have made on my own. Hearing people's stories and being able to connect was such an inspiring thing. I want to be able to do that more often. I want t be that kind of person that can stop a random person and something special about them. Everybody has a unique story. Imagine if everybody took two minutes out of their day to learn something about just one random stranger. Think of how friendly our society would be. And learning something abut someone can be so encouraging. To tell someone, I think your story is interesting and I want to hear more can change someone's entire day. if we all took just a couple minutes everyday, we could do so much good. That's the kind of thing I want to do with my life. But I don't want to create the world through writing like Lara, I want to create it through photography. I want to spend my life taking the things people don't notice and showing how beautiful they are, when others don't notice. I want to show the world from a different perspective.
Anyways, I hope you are inspired by all this as much as I am.
If you want to see pictures from the shoot, I will have some up on my tumblr in just half an hour!
Check the pictures out --> here <--
With Love,
PolarBearMoose <3
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