Absolutely head-over-heels THRILLED with Erin’s dream-shoot and wanted to share the whole session with you’re because it’s just too good to keep secret. Erin is an INCREDIBLE tattoo artist/painter, so be sure to check out her drool-worthy work over at @dink_ink) after looking at all her beautiful photos! We planned this concept for months over covid and seeing it finally happen feels surreal.
When Erin inquired about booking a shoot, she didn’t come to me saying “I want to paint a masterpiece in an open field”. No, it wasn’t an already decided image that inspired this, it was her words and her emotions that brought this forth. She talked about how life has her at a crossroad and how she feels like she’s emerging on the other side new. She spoke of wanting to harness beauty, strength, and self love in her photos. She wanted to create something that was fantastical, filled with color and empowerment, a creative and meaningful depiction of all-consuming transformation. After a bit of back-and-forth brainstorming, we mixed her love for the arts with her story and emotions and came up with this. This was a completely new experience for me in a few ways: both the set up, being a huge canvas situated in the middle of an open field, AND the fact that I was photographing a mix of both candid and posed images (which is completely out of the ordinary for the work I do). Most of my work is completely posed, but as I thought about how I wanted to tackle this imagery, I felt like the photos would be most impactful and spectacularly beautiful if we embraced the candids of a live painting unfurling, sprinkled with a bit of artistic posing here&there. The experience of shooting this was really so relaxing and enjoyable for me— I’m normally super hands-on during sessions, posing the entire time, directing my subject, utilizing props, but this was really the first time I sort of got to sit back and watch as Erin’s masterpiece unfolded, snapping photos while she worked, but pausing here and there when I saw an opportunity to creatively direct her. I’m in complete awe at the vision we made together on this project.