Peculiar Things
Kaila Hicks, Peculiar Things, 2021
Welcome to week two of Trusting the Process! This week I decided to create a photograph that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. As you may already notice, my inspiration came from the I SPY books by Walter Wick and Jean Marzollo. I was absolutely obsessed with their books when I was younger; the imagery was always so intriguing. So, I decided to create that same concept but with my own, weird twist!
THE SET-UP
To start off this photo session, I collected various things that would fit this project along with my personality. I gathered up items I’ve collected over the years and little things that I’ve saved from previous projects. I also scavenged some exciting objects from my basement (like the green, two-headed babydoll) and little toys from the Dollar Tree.
I initially was going to use a yellow cloth for the background, but it was too creased for my liking so I substituted it with a red poster board. I then organized all of the items in different positions, which was one of the more difficult parts of this project.
Here is what the set-up looked like when taking the photographs. I used both of my studio lights and a foam board as a reflector. As you can see in the picture, I have a light attached to my camera; this is an RGB LED Video Light by LituFoto from Amazon.
I recently just purchased it, and this was actually the first time I got to experiment with it. To add some more color to this photograph, I used the LED light to protrude a red glow onto my subject. The light is super fun to play around with, and I highly recommend it to fellow photographers!
EDITING
With this project, I used Lightroom to edit the photographs. Once I picked my favorite pictures, which ended up being 5 out of 120 images, I started the basic editing on each of them.
After cropping, fixing the exposure, shadows and highlights on all of pictures, I then picked my number one favorite of the five. With this image, I experimented with different hues and color options. Editing took a very long time for me as I struggled to get satisfied with the colors.
I wanted to create a vibrant image but not too overwhelming to the eye, so I had difficulty accomplishing that. But after about an hour, I finally got the recipe applied to an image that I was satisfied with, and everything was groovy.
Peculiar Things before and after