Brooke Shaden is a wonderfully creative photographer, whose images make me wish that I had the opportunity to spend more time on creating and editing more theatrical images. But I can’t complain; my time is, after all, spent on pursuing other passions and fascinating goals.
One of the problems I came across when shooting for my One Frame Movie project was coming up with original and interesting locations, and I ended up being lucky to find places which worked out well enough without having to spend hours post-processing the images to make them visually interesting.
One of the sole exceptions, a portrait which I photographed specifically a couple of years ago with the intention of combining it with an evening view of the Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen, was this one of Sara; a result I’m particularly pleased with.
Brooke takes the technique to an extreme in her latest “behind the scenes” video, where she uses the diffused light (and presumably less frequented and undisturbed location) of a local concrete tunnel, where she shoots individual images to edit together on the computer. (Brooke goes into more detail on her blog.)
You’d never be able to see the final image when seeing the shooting conditions, but you can see that if you have vision and foresight to be able to plan your images in advance, there’s not always a need to find visually stunning locations in which to photograph the individual components. (Goodness knows, there are enough concrete constructions about for us to use here in Switzerland.)
If you’re interested in this subject, I can recommend Brooke’s YouTube channel, where she often posts similar “behind the scenes” videos to show how she works; both using herself and others as models.
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