The blog is back and the triumphant return of #Shapesandshit

Hi everyone I know that it's been a while since I wrote a blog post. Let me explain my absence. For those that don't know Jeannie and I broke up and that hit me very hard and I went into a depressive state. I am no longer ashamed to admit that I suffer from depression and anxiety and I went to the Dr. to get back on some meds to help with that. The medication seems to be working well and I go back to see the Dr. in two weeks to re-evaluate and see if changes need to be made.

I am also very thankful for a group of friends to reached out to me and lent an ear to listen and give advice and I am so thankful for that. I have some amazing friends and I am so happy to have them in my life and I love them for it.

Since I was starting to feel better the urge to get creative again has come back and I reached out to my friend Emma to see if she would like to do a fine art shoot with me and she happily agreed.

Now for those of you who don't know about #shapesandshit this started a couple of years ago when I was shooting my friend Emily and we were in a park and I was posing her to blend in with the shapes of the rocks and I said we are making shapes and shit and she said that I should start using it for all my fine art work. So began the #shapesandshit hashtag. I even own the domain name for it. 

So on to the shoot. Last week on our day off we went out to Occoneechee Speedway in Hillsboro NC which is an old Nascar track that has long been abandoned but turned into a park with walking trails. The old concrete grandstands are still there along with some of the buildings. I knew that if we went early in the morning when most people were at work the park would be fairly empty and we could pull off the shoot with no issues.

We arrived at the park and there was a couple doing stair climbs when I wanted to shoot so we decided to walk around to the back of the speedway to see what we could find to shoot in the meantime. We saw a bench and with nobody around we started our shoot. 

Emma is very flexible and does a lot of pole fitness so I knew that her poses were going to be epic. We shot off a few frames on the bench and was able to get this amazing shot.

Bendy

After this we walked around back to the grandstands and the couple was gone so we started figuring out the poses that we wanted to do. Emma was very good in figuring out the poses and we just started shooting and we got this images which blew me away when I saw it.

Zen

I have this in both black and white and in color and I cant decide which one I like better. Emma likes the color version hence why I am posing it here. We did get interrupted a couple of time by walkers but since it was dirt we could hear them coming and Emma was able to cover up quickly. We continued shoot a few more poses. 

Backbend

Vulnerable

Contemplating

Since it was very humid we decided to start to wrap up but I had an idea for one more shot using the frame of a window in on of the concession stands at the top of the grandstand.

Framed

That wrapped up our shoot and for me this shoot was very therapeutic for me. I know that I am happiest when I have a camera in my hand and I am creating art. I need to get out there a lot more and continue creating on a regular basis for myself. While I am glad that my business is getting busier and I am shooting for work a lot more often noting compares to doing personal work. 

So that is going to wrap up this weeks blog post. I hope you enjoyed it

Another throwback with Emily

Happy Sunday everyone. If you read my blog post last week I talked about how much editing I had to get done. Well as of Saturday evening I have the main wedding video all complete and exported and I am now working on the highlight video and I hope to have that all done today and then I can start working on the EPK video. If I can get that done by midweek I will be all caught up on my client projects. 

So yes that is why I am doing another throwback post. Everything I have shot has been client work and I have not done any personal shooting for myself recently and hopefully that will change soon. 

For this weeks throwback I wanted to share another shoot I did with my friend Emily. She is one of my favorite people to work with. She really knows how to pose and she is also such a sweet person and a good friend.

I found out about Rougemount Castle through a friend of mine. The owner of the castle was building this for his wife and then the project was put on an indefinite hold. So the theme for this shoot was fairytale princess.

We drove up there along with my friend Mike. The property is located on top of a mountain up a very rough road.

The most interesting part of the castle is the outside as that was mostly finished so we decided to start shooting with the castle in the background.

We then decided to move inside to see what kind of cool shots we could get on the inside. The inside is mostly unfinished so we were limited on what we could get. 

As we were shooting I noticed all the patterns in the shards of glass that was left in the window frame and decided to see if I could get a good shot of her looking out the window from the outside. This was my favorite image of the shoot. 

We wrapped up the shoot and went on to another location but I will save that for another time. I need to get back to editing client videos. Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there and I will see you next week. 

My first model shoot ever

For this weeks blog post we are going to go back to 2012. I had been doing photography for a couple of years but I was only shooting landscapes and nature shots. For me shooting people was not a thought as I had no idea on how to pose people and I was still just trying to learn photography and I wanted to feel more comfortable with what I was doing. 

I belong to a few meetup groups for photography and I got an invite to do a model shoot with a burlesque dancer named porcelain. So I figured why not step out of my comfort zone and try to learn something new. We met at the studio and spent the first half hour doing introductions and getting to know everyone. When it came for my turn to shoot I explained to her that I had no idea how to pose people and she told me that she will go through a range of poses and I can just fire away.

She made me feel so comfortable and relaxed that after a few minutes of shooting I was throwing out idea's that I had.

She was lying down on this beautiful piece of furniture and I got behind her and asked her to look back to me and I got this shot.

This was my favorite shot of the day and I even had it printed and framed and it is still hanging on my wall at home to this day. Overall I went into this shoot so nervous to shoot people and came out of the shoot feeling so comfortable that I decided to focus more on shooting people.

Well thats going to do it for this weeks post. I hope to release some new work for next weeks post as I took part in a bridal shoot competition and I can't release the images until the judging has been completed. See you all next week.  

I wanted to post some images but instead it's video of my dog eating bubbles

So last night as I finished up editing the images from my shoot last Sunday with Jackie tabor I was all ready to share them with everyone in today's blog. Jeannie came over and i was showing her the edits and how beautiful her headpiece came out when she suggested that I need to submit these to some magazines to see if I can get them published.

I immediately became excited about the idea and we started doing the crops needed for the submission process. We came up with 8 images to submit and I will be sending them off to the editors today to see if I get accepted.

Since most magazines want exclusive images that is the reason I cannot share them with you today. But as soon as I find out I will share them so please be patient for the next couple of weeks. I have never been published in a magazine before  so this would be amazing if I get in. Jeannie has been published quite a few times.

Ok so now what do I talk about in today's blog post? Jeannie had bought some bubbles for her cat to play with but Spooky cat was having nothing to do with it so she asked if i wanted them to use with my two dogs.

When she came over last night we tried it so see of the pups would like it. Millie was like Spooky cat and wanted nothing to do with them but Buster was all over it. So i shot some video with my iPhone and got the below video. I smile and laugh every time I watch it and i hope you do as well.

That's going to wrap it up for today. I will keep everyone updated on the magazine submission process over on my Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/DavidSpectorPhotography/ 

Time to get creative again

Over the last couple of months I hardly ever pulled the camera out of my bag to do a shoot for myself. I have been shooting but for clients and not for myself and I fell that I hit a creative wall. I was not inspired to shoot and last month I decided that it was time to change that.

I found out that behind my apartment complex in the woods that there was a horse cemetery. I found this out a few years ago when I always used to see cars park at the end of the road and go into the woods. I stopped one of them and asked and they told me that they were geocachers and there was a cache at the cemetery.  It is only really accessible during the fall and winter months as it os overgrown in the spring and summer and not to mention tons of bugs and ticks.

So I asked my friend Kristen if she would like to do a shoot with me and she had a couple of really cool outfits. So we met at my place and walked into the woods. When I got the the cemetery it was not as grand as I had remembered it when I first visited a few years earlier but the recent hurricane had knocked down a lot of trees and I knew I could make some cool poses with it. 

I had also brought by infrared camera with me and decided to try to take some portraits with it. I did this with my friend Emily in the past and I loved how it turned her brown hair blue. Since Kristen has blue hair I was curious to see what it would do. To my surprise it turned her hair white. I am thinking about doing a whole series of portraits with the IR camera. 

Well thats going to wrap up this weeks blog post. Until next week.