It is my honor and I feel extremely privileged to introduce you to a very special young lady. This wonderful young lady is Nicole. To me, she has been a very valuable asset in my life helping me become a better photographer and an artist. I’ll introduce her in this post, but one post is nowhere near enough to cover the work we’ve created together or express my thoughts as to how valuable she has been to my photography.
I believe that fate brought Nicole into my life. She lives a couple of hours outside of Pittsburgh. She contacted me about doing a session as a special birthday present to give her boyfriend who was serving in Iraq.
During our first session, I couldn’t help but notice she was a very quiet young lady. At first, I wasn’t sure if she was just uncomfortable or if that was her demeanor. I felt the session and images were looking good but didn’t have a feel if they were what she was after. Since she had such a long distance to go home, I wanted to go over the images with her before she left. I wanted to make sure she was happy with what we had done.
So we were reviewing images and having a nice little chat. I did a couple of quick edits to show her and she was getting pretty excited about the images. I was preparing to do a fairy portrait session for a local mom’s club, and the props were in the studio. She asked me about this huge mushroom and a couple of other props for the fairy portraits. I explained to her what they were and their purpose. I also told her that I was going to get a model to help me with a trial run before the actual event. She got excited and wanted to know if I might be interested in using her. I told her that I would love to work with her again. For her help with the fairy portraits, her sessions would be free of charge.
Thus started a wonderful working relationship and after that second session, I knew I found my muse. I soon realized that working with her was developing me into an artist. Until Nicole, I was simply a photographer. Any time that I wanted to try a new idea, work on new lighting, studio sets, posing, etc. she was more than happy to come over and model for me.
I view myself as a professional. As a professional, you should know your trade and know it well. Paying customers are not the people you should be experimenting with and trying new things. When you have a paying customer, it is vital you know what you’re doing and can provide proven results. This is where the muse comes in, she or he is the one who works with you to make sure you can deliver as promised. Without Nicole’s help, it would have taken me much longer to be a confident professional.
Before I dive into this post, I want to clear up a matter. The word “Muse” has an unfavorable implication for many in the artistic world. Often people take the word as a person the artist uses sexually. When in fact, a “Muse” is simply a person who inspires the artist creatively.
As I said earlier, it will take more than this post to share my feelings and some of the work we created together. However, I want to share with you some images from our sessions. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did in creating them.
Photographically yours,
Larry
