Lessons

Lesson Info

Early careers

I have this overwhelming gratitude always just to be I would stand here so thank you so much and thank you. Yeah it's critical we prepared a really neat three days which I feel like I will teach you so much about who you are is an addict as well as a photographer. And larry just brings a whole different sort of thing to the game that I do so hopefully together we can just cross all the spectrum and just teach you so much about us. So enter this morning was about teaching you how we started when I met laura. It was eighteen months ago uh and we met in australia doing a workshop together and you know I was blown away by two things. One is who work is extraordinary into is her age is extraordinary. If I head her maturity I could have done so much more in my career but her age I don't remember being here, I think are strong way that later. But more importantly, the one thing I did want to say was at the end of the day when everybody had gone home, there was two people sitting at the table ...

working nine o'clock, ten o'clock living o'clock twelve o'clock that was here and I know you may be thinking, wow, this girl works as much as I do you know she loves to find that it iss and I get it I just respected that so much also when I started to learn about her and we should came from love people that start and come from nothing and just wiggle their way now I don't want to take away from people that have given a lot of things because I have seen in my lifetime people that have given a lot of things and they still make nothing off it and I realized that you know, a lot of people still have to have drive and you still have to have passion and you still have to do the hard work but anyway that's what I really love and respect about laura and just her work is just extraordinary and so you know, for me liking her was just so easy and I was so impressed by her I'm so glad that you no thank you I'm excited about our course together so yes did I lower photograph may I'm not going to share is amazing it's terrible she was so drunk wait I cried and threw up you know? Well all those things that you do I was really, really ridiculous, which is great, but it was a great experience I mean photograph properly in twenty four years I've never done that I haven't done a portrait shootings has eighteen so you can imagine how nervous I wass oh dear, but anyway we had so much fun and I can't wait to show you but more importantly I can't wait to see them and I get to see them live with you guys so oh my goodness you get to also see behind the scenes which is just hilarious it brought up a really good conversation as we were starting we took this a photograph of us standing together it's photographers and I realized that we have extraordinary lightness is an extraordinary differences when I'm twice your age and white I am a different world I come from a portrait world and she comes from a fashion world which is entirely different our shoot two different out creativity is different but that's what's so awesome about what we do we really bring so many different aspects of the good ones we bring so many different aspects of what we do but we don't compete because we're so extraordinarily different and both of us talk a lot about competing and our industries we compete a lot. You know even after twenty four years of being a photographer I'm competing always to get work she's competing always forget with the time in the fashion industry it definitely yeah but you never give up no, I never give up always a challenge but always overcome in some way and that's what strives me to do better every time a swell wait, so we wrote the twenty things you shouldn't do to nitpick about being a portrait talk from being affectionate topper and we're going to show you those at the end of the day because I feel like those are the steps that we refreshed in ourselves every single day, which is really, really important what I also know it's pretty much what you'd see if we were both photographing you and then you see that e I e I feel like the biggest problem with photographers these days is their spending the whole time competing with each other? Yeah, yeah and there's room for everybody in the industry and if you will can learn from each other and share knowledge I think that's what's most important yeah, I'm not hated compete I'm here to create you're going to learn some of the most bastardized techniques on photoshopped view of you saying I'm there with it and neither of us have any technical knowledge with further shop we taught ourselves and so if you are a photo shop expert, you already heat of us so you don't need thio they did it wrong you just need to go well if they can create that with those skills, imagine what I can do and I think it doesn't matter what it takes to get to the final product as long as you get there whatever techniques suit it's you and just taken on as much knowledge as you can from every everything you do in every challenge you do is well absolutely and mostly I illustrate on photo shop in one layer I haven't actually you have more technical hurry and finish up that idea I've learned to over the past year but I used to always merge you've seen that from not having the psd is available so they're going back through our work we couldn't find laid files from our really work, especially on remember when people in clients with say to me when I had a job at first they were like we need to edit the p std of the layers and I'd be like, I don't have I don't have to do the whole thing again so it's you know that's the way we do it and we're happy doing it that way and we get to the final product but it's kind of funny yeah, so you can learn a lot about their which is kind of intriguing. So this is really I think experimental porch chair and created porch tear is about creating a fantasy world it's about doing it a lot of it's about capturing elements and then putting them together in the shop essentially it's a photo shop class it's a creative photo shop class because ah lot ofyou can photograph elements but not a lot of you can put them together yeah, and you know what would go together? Absolutely. And that's, one of the hardest things a teacher I can't teach you how to see, and I can't teach you how to conceptualize. But we've definitely found a way that we can show you your path to who you are and then start putting it into your business. So obviously this is where we exist now. Yep. Larry is a passion photographer living in new york city, so I do a lot of editorial work. This's editorially is kind of like my playtime alongside my personal work. And then my commercial work of this is slightly different because it's always about what the claim is after. But this is we place this one in here because this is kind of like signifies me and myself as a photographer right now. So we just wanted to put that one in there that color the multiple girls, that glamour inspired by vintage fashion. So fashion is actually a great play element for me. No fashion is always changing in enables me to really get the most out of photography. Yeah, and I am a portrait photographer, so I don't photograph models. I photograph every day women and I was gonna say, riel women because models that real, uh e on s I try and give the experience teo everyday woman that laura has every day and efficient shoot and how that came about was back in the eighties when glamour photography was really big and it was all frilly chul and bed soft lighting and lenses, soft lenses I died and if a rancid it's out of fashion but the cool thing is, is I felt like everybody deserved to experience a photo shoot, like what it felt like to actually be a model or what it felt like to be pampered, and I really experienced that yesterday they were assistance, they were makeup at us and I was the one upon stage feeling like I was right. You thought by different to how you thought I hated it, I really struggled with it, but you're going to see why, but the thing is, is it the end of the day? I wanted to try and replicate what laura does in her everyday life, but with normal people that would never experience that in their life. And so I am a hybrid of what she does for normal people in the world, and she is the, you know, amazing fashion photographer that I draw my inspiration from when I look in magazine so that's, where I learned all of my posing, I'm studying magazines, and yeah, so I think it's pretty cool, but both of us started out making conceptual photography a and the reason we did that is we had to learn how to get noticed how to start with nothing and get noticed with that so how old were you? I was fourteen when I discovered photography on dh we're going to the self portrait um I started shooting myself because that was the only way that I was able to learn him from a small town in the west midlands office see fourteen I have no budget no money to work with I received a cannon three fifty from my parents for christmas andi I loved it it was the best thing it was like gold to me I remember getting it on christmas morning photographing my cat photographing myself through like flowers and I was so inspired by that because I was so shy at the time that I was just experiment to my one just to kind of get a feel for photography I was inspired by finding websites like devi and art and that really helped me gain my confidence to be able to move to the next level so when I started on the internet hadn't been invented yet so I need a head photoshopped that was a little harder to be conceptual until about halfway through my career so maybe around two thousand when fella shot became a really big component in my studio and that's when I learned that you could take to images and make one but back in the days of film film merging has been around for a long time so what we would do is we would take negatives into the darkroom and midge images together and we would also do a lot of nudes on black background and then merge textures and patterns in the data from the top of them. So the concept of that was really, really coming, you know, into that creative photographic world but when I saw a photo shop for the first time in standard to use it I realized that it was limitless but nobody could teach me how to do it. So how island was my nephew wanted to get into a cd I caused to learn computer imaging and in order to get into a cd I course he had to have a folio. Well, how do you get into a course to learn something? Why would you have a folio? You know, so again the chicken or the egg he had to be self taught how do you get self taught? He came to me and I said, well, I'll teach you fed her shop now a seventeen year old nephew what does he love? Transformers, right? So in terms of cg I it's gotta be the ultimate and I was like, well, I can't teach you cd I can teach you transformers I can't make robots but I can do a lot of other staff so I taught him how to do all of this illustrative wig on freder shop and in doing that I discovered that I could do it. Then I realized I could actually illustrate with feather shop so I use away calm tablet with a pin. I think this is really vital. So does laura and I draw with it so I shaved with it in a dodge burn cat paste all this like painting titled do in the darkroom and it's so fluid and easy it's easy like and easily on the shoulder. But more importantly, you can enlarge and get right in close and you can shade and draws I'm gonna teach you how to do that because I feel like this is a huge component of illustrating really well and so what I did was I started to learn that I could go and take elements ofthe photograph so I wanted to make an image that represented they, you know, commercial sort of industry um this is it was recycling. It was an editorial for recycling, so I went to a park and I photographed a whole lot of trees and then I moved them together. I just simply captain pate on finish up and then I jumped over the fence to get this shot, and I felt like the biggest rebel that if I walked on that I was so awesome, I jump this big fans and ahead released calling started I would do that all the time of trespass and jumping too and you feel that you feel like it's not happen this place and took a photo of them polluting here e and I felt like, you know, I was some it's doing something anyway I went back and I photographed tree, road side I got all the elements together and then I made this image and I sing land that there was nothing I can do on friday show nothing and even though some of my creative work is very dark and I'll explain why and some of my newer workers prettier, it has exactly the same illustrative element to put layers on so larry's going to show you how she does it, I'm going to show you how I do it we're going to do takes your overlays backgrounds just putting in compass it backgrounds there's so many different ways to do it we both do it different. Well, actually we both do it the naughty way way to show you the naughty way I'm going to show you the proper way, but I created this image in under twelve minutes so I took the photograph of one of my friends in my lunch hour took a photograph I corrected the body and then I put it onto the background to teaching you how to shoot perspective elements is one of really, really important and what's amazing is how simple that is it's just a white the flat with a girl and it natural light and you can make this beautiful image from it. So when I even saw that I was so surprised great scored eighty three and a national competition and helped me get my mouth's is at the time and sometimes and it was philip I actually lost one of my shots in the last minute because of a copyright issue and they were like you have to put in a competition print. I made that in my lunch hour printed it, met it in center then and you know it scored a silver in the national competition, so we're going to talk a lot about awards faces book covers, faces, editorials this is getting paid, getting exhibited and getting printed I feel like one of the most important things is on facebook particularly this way lara shows a lot of fashion because she currently is built her entire career around being a fashion photographer and I knew that from the beginning when I first started to self portrait always in mind, what can I do to get to this point? So it was always building to that point and I knew that and fifteen yep fifteen again die there I don't even think that they may be because it was a long time ago I always knew I was going to be a glamour photographer yeah but the cool I think well the whole thing the thing that sucks about there is I feel like when you're fifteen and you're like I'm gonna be a fashion photographer you probably hear that year everybody wants to be a fashion but I was like I'm a girl I'm a photographer and people like what s o I feel we've gotta take you back to the beautiful a swell solaris during the whole or beautiful today yeah that's about textures and overlays and beautiful work and you know I also create images of simple is that with compass it backgrounds that I simply shot in the studio just randomly and these textures how I made all of these pictures and light legs I'm going to show you that larrys pictures are so beautiful I want them all I'm so building a creative folio I feel like the only reason you would wanna lin what we're going to teach you this week is to create fine at so you can exhibit your work is a fine artist you khun sell yourself as a fine artist editorial in awards so I think that covers it's probably more editorial definitely yeah so that's a big part of it I think when I first started doing self portrait I never knew that could go into a book cover isn't getting published that way until people contacted me for that so doing this kind of fine artwork just have so many ways that it can be shown exhibiting used and even just for normal everyday clients is while people love conceptual photography there's a lot of ways you can get it out there in the industry so interestingly enough, when larry started to build her folly on deviant act she was a teenager so she's building an online folio just you know because she loved it and she was she wanted to build that and grow as a photographer and as another's I wanted to win awards so I was already a photographer but I felt like I wanted teo compete on the world stage I wanted to compete in the national competitions I wanted teo get recognised I wanted to get noticed and I wanted to win um I wanted to stand out amongst my peers because I don't believe awards really help your clients in a few clients fashion photographers then some of her conceptual works gonna matter but most of it's not and if my clients are just portrait then a lot of my conceptual work not gonna matter to the me that so what is it then? Why would you do it? And that is one is to get noticed two is to build your folio three years too extend yourself as an artist and learned that you can create anything you know, one of the most interesting things, and, you know, it is a photographer now, isn't it incredible that you see other images and you're like, how did they do that? And you and know in your mind you can create it, but you just don't quite have the tool, she it to pull it together. So in your mind you can see an image in your mind, you can conceptualize it, but then you go to do it and you can't do it. So I had this really ah ha moment when I lend about dodging and burning, warping and transforming and cutting and pasting when I learned about compass it element when I realized that there was nothing I couldn't day now I see all these incredible online at us that are really leading the way brooke shade in, you know, doing beautiful conceptual work and it's like I can now create that, and so they just such simple tools. But it's, just about repeating those techniques isn't every day you do it a lot in the beginning, but even like every week, we challenge our self learning new techniques, testing tto learn new techniques, repeat, repeat. But how often? So I went to larry switch up when we're in australia because we were both speaking at a workshop, but I actually attended her day, and she taught me to really amazing thing shooting that I didn't go, so one was shooting through a window to a model, and I did that a workshop three weeks later, I find myself in paris shooting jill, and I walk outside and look back through the french doors of jill's off this beautiful hotel and still sitting on the beard, and I take that photographs off jill sitting on the beard with paris in the background and it's one of the signature shots, and she told me that, you know, she taught me that, and then I illustrated it because as you can as you can obviously imagine, I'm in the reflection wearing black, so I think, you know, like david tryingto hide yourself from china inside, yeah thing what I did was a chained around, and I took a photo of paris that was being reflected, and then I took that picture and I composited onto the reflection so it looks like you're looking at this incredible scene of paris and that's exactly what I was saying, but you wouldn't have seen in the camera. And I mixed up my compass it with what I know about portrait posing because deals doing a beautiful portrait pose with what laura had taught me and it's one of my signature shots from jill in paris, you know, so you learn and then you just keep going with it now, whenever I'm shooting, first thing I'm gonna do is walk outside and look back through the window, and then I'm going to look at the view behind me, and then I'm gonna compass it that on and then I'm then what I did was I sprayed it with color and either to the alien skin. Larra showed me alien skin not being a photographer for twenty four years. She taught me five things that day that I did not know and did not do as soon as I mix them with mine. You and never to anything to lin amazing creative skills like that that would just blow you. Mom, you have to keep an open mind to that you're never going to know everything. I mean, people that are even knowledgeable with photos shot there's tons that they don't know what we don't know and that's what's exciting about our careers, we could be creative were constantly learning. And that's really what we're going to be going over with the chutes and my techniques are going to be experimented as much as possible showing you how simple everyday items can be used so it's all except it's all accessible to all of you out there so larry's going to talk to you about where she came from because this is extraordinary not only as a teenager but what she was creating as an adis with her own self portraiture so of course the first question I asked was do you set a time on the way I like it amazing the helpless I happen to think then I realised that obviously they have remote so I want to ask questions I would just like anybody to ask questions in this round definitely feel like this is a really big thing so lara was doing this nearly ten years ago oh my god don't make me wait hold that was like wass yeah, I just okay say obviously I think this is extraordinary because now people are building entire our online profiles on flicka is deviant and still big it's you people still use it it is not as much photographers but more artists sure. Okay, so I feel like now it's kind of a theme to stop the self portrait your thing but the young years ago it would have been very extraordinary for you to be blasting images definitely anyone crazy because when I first started doing it people were like oh you love yourself why do you take so many images of yourself that kind of set me back a bit because I was so excited about experimenting with myself I was shy girl I was young this was kind of my escape from school and everything and then I would be criticized for taking photos of myself so there was those kind of knock backs originally but then again I get no back and then I want to try and challenge myself what can I do to not just photograph myself so your suit for the next few images I started to use disguises yeah like because I looked like that loser weigh myself yeah that's pretty cool so you started wearing way and so I was really inspired by artists like cindy sherman um so many people that would photograph themselves but disguise so props for this I mean again no budget so I was using wigs from ebay like ten dollar wigs raid in thrift stores charity stores hoop skirts be didn't like on ebay I was obsessed with evening I'm going to get that hip skirt for ten dollars she just sits by the way like bidding on ebay and get everyone to speak english um this is actually one of my most favorite charts like I feel like you have that don't know my name this's chain yeah yeah definitely a name that extraordinary how old do you hear? I was about sixteen I would say and I remember at the time always going to college and I go to college and I was very frustrated because it was like going over the basics of photography and I wanted to learn more and we did a self portrayed theme which a lot of people do at college and university and I went home and everyone mr in these kind of basic you know as they do with the the themes and I was like, I want to do something a little bit different I don't remember think you know I want you know as you do when you're that age and what this kind of god blood kind of red on my fingers and I just had this really hot light I sat on the bed I click my time I think it took me about three hundred shots a lot of the my eyes with blinking because the light was too strong the makeup was wrong the wig looked too fake and that's the beauty of self portrait because it is such a challenge yeah, you can take this meaning they like yeah, I used to get used to get so inspired by doing this because I'd be like yeah three hundred photos and I got that one and I felt like, you know, my night was complete and I was happy I know I did fashion photography and it was much harder I will say though interestingly enough it doesn't have to be you and lisa could have been anybody that we're sprint with laura and then obviously your book covers for a lot of friends and a lot of friends to come in I meet so many people that quite willing to be photographed for free so you know, I mean there's a million different ways to do this it's about sitting inside the time to do it so that's what we're going to teach definitely I want to show you the rest of these because they're pretty cool how woody and this one I think I was against about sixteen seventeen and what was great about this one is I think I had a really bad day and a lot of my self portrait so I was kind of letting off steam it was kind of my way to create you know as I want to create we want to do something I was like a cat again my old t go probably came out here and I was like, okay, I haven't got any outfits have used that outfit of use that wig so I found some old lycra tights and I was there cutting him up and I didn't know it would work I just kind of experimented and I was like, you know, this looks pretty cool, you know trying all this kind of stuff did make up and hair and I shot this in front of my canvas wardrobe it was an old campus wardrobe it was falling down there's some natural light coming in and again what? We're going to be teaching you textures so what made this image special is just the textures and the way that it's been processed and it's so easy to do it's really easy and this one is well taken an old feather hat I found taking the feathers off the hat blurring them around so it kind of looks like, you know there's some movement going on so that's another important thing I think when we do these work and you'll see from the images here bird's this thing's there's movement, this hair blowing and not just really takes an image out there yeah it's all about the elements so I used this technique all the time a lot of people obviously larrys come across it the same way I have when I am working on an image, I will take a compass it layer or I would taken it layer on the top and I will motion blur it if I have a girl seemingly dancing or even a girl in sort of a haunting sort of place where it just suits it, I'll do it and get it there over the top and I'll just go filter blue emotion blue I put emotion blair on it between six and twelve which gives it a movement blue and then I just erase back around her face and so people always say it's shot but she looks like she's moving and everybody always visit to may and I used that blue filter exactly that way and if you put it in what it does is this sort of photography is supposed to take you away from what? Ordinary? Yeah, so we take our skin tones away from normal skin tones we d cetera. We make them punchier would give him a color tone we put textures and that the eye doesn't understand we put movement and where it's not supposed to be movement like why would you put movement in ahead when it faces still, but that works because if it was shot you when you look at that all right, so this is about taking the eye away from in making I look where it's supposed to look and that is right at her friend ty, right? So that's a really big part of my editing all that's interesting. So again, just experimenting with overlay so college really helped me kind of understand the way that the dark room would work, so this was a particular project that I do that again just a wig I didn't want it to look like myself I got kind of sick of two shooting myself, so I'm trying to find ways of doing that and this is such a good challenge for any of you out there even they would experience if you just started set yourself this self portrait challenges even if you do an editorial shoot, set yourself a self portrait challenge that you can get, then get the experience and use a technique for an editorial as well, and I have to do that with myself even today if I get asked to do a cover, I'm even learning as I go with the technique of self portrait teo using toe other work and to use with clients as well and large stick with questions when you're doing these self portrait, especially more conceptual ones, how much are you concept ing them ahead of time and then working toward a vision versus just you're by yourself in your place? I just do a lot of play sometimes it's me seen something online? It's me just going, okay, I've got this wig, I really just want to try this idea it's a lot of different things, and when we're going to be talking about inspiration tomorrow, we're going to be going over that what inspires you? How to find the inspiration, but a lot of these like this and when I look back that I'm like, oh, god, I used to have so much money for this idea was I saw something similar in this conceptual piece, and I can't remember the artist, but I was like, I love the idea, if you know it not being perfect, this girl, this was like a rip out of a magazine where the girl was perfect in the magazine, and I just saw the image, my thought, self portrait, there's to rip some paper, open experiment. So it was all about experimentation back then, and it still is, even with my fashion work now and then one really quick, a technical question. A lot of people are already asking, how do you focus when you're taking yourself that's? A good question, I mean that's, where it comes in to take in three hundred or so images that there's three ways that I would do self portrait one was with twenty, forty, seventy lens, a wide angle handheld austin, you can see the arms, so it would be very close for a beauty type thing. Ordo focus. Keep taking quite a lot of shots. Another way would be a remote timer, either wireless or with the wire, and I would have it quite long. If the y was there, I would edit it out again order focus for the canvas background was behind me I would have the thing I run back into the thing pressed the timer it would folk it's on me run back check and it was just that repeating that process and it was also the timer which is the hardest but the way in which I would do that is the way to put a question or something there I would focus on the cushion within jumpin replace myself and try and take the shot and again a lot of ways of doing it but that's the beauty of it again experiment as much as possible there's no right or wrong way um or even it's it's okay for someone else to press that shut a few if you really want to do self portrait you're up against a wall and a lot of my early ones I would drag my mama and she's gonna be watching right now so she'll remember this but I would drag my mom out to the lake over the road and I had this dress and I'll be like mom I don't have a tribe do you mind like just pressing the shutter for me and I'll set it up and she's like absolutely and it's okay to do that because that's still your vision as well so there's so many ways of doing it also I love that and I really love this yes, this was actually my mom did a hairdressing course and my sister and you get those kind of dulls cosmetology school and I was so freaking I suppose at that age I was I was kind of gothic I will admit I was into the kind of doctor the doctor music so and I was always looking around the house for things to use and I found these and I was like that sun coming through my mom's cardin's in a bedroom this was my life source my mom's room I'd lie on her bed and do the self portrait and I just loved the way it looked and I would just experiment and this kind of posing myself a swell really helped me learn how to pose models later on what works how hands work and you'll see when I'm shooting later how I worked with models and how their hands working how that's important for me with posing as well we had a great posing conversation yesterday obviously after lana photograph because we post very differently I posed too slim on my clients and she doesn't because she doesn't have tio and so I posed to lengthen and slim and her clients are long and slim so I try and make my clients look like models in her clients are models so we talked about it and it was like well I guess your client's move themselves and she was like yes but there are so many styles of model poses and saying, yes, we have themes of genres where, you know, if it explain why I am like a march much eat it, the dresses are always structures, so the posters have to be quite straight and angular. Then you get more of a glamorous shoot is gonna be about the hands, if it's a bit more gothic give it's strong it's gotta be shapes and hips. So you've gotta have so many ideas and references in your head that when I'm posing a model, they have to give me something I have to cast a model that's great for that team and I know they're gonna work, but they're not going to give me everything. I've gotta work from that and tell them and that's what's so important that we reach touch this and I did actually have this idea that these girls know so much that they just walk in and do exactly what they want, you know, and it's perfect and they just click the button and it's like, well, that was easy, so that was kind of easy. I love that, and that was just over lane the hat you see it, the sides there so even taken elements of pictures shooting your props and overlaying them after a swell that's, always interesting to me always build a textual ivory from props so from shoots so if I'm out on a shoot and clouds are actually really great overlay is a smoky kind of thing so if I'm outside on a shoot clouds gravel texture would anything you get beautiful again just natural life does all about the ice so when I'm focusing on this is all about the emotions I'm always focusing in on that I the emotion and this is what I try and get my models to do in fashion is well I don't just want to shoot a girl in clothes I want to capture the beauty I want to capture some emotion I want the viewer to feel like they can connect to that image best photographers in the world always have that I don't have that I don't have the connection image that makes you great and you can create a great elemental image but at least somebody feels connected to it nobody wants it, nobody will buy it and nobody will enjoy the way they do when there's a connection in it you know and I think that's the only really vital I think that's really interesting that she's managed to do that with his self portraiture you know, because the intensity in both their capture and her eye is exactly how she photographs and exactly how I photograph looking for their eye and their intensity in that connection so if you're creating that connection you know, we talk about a poor teacher. We talk about it all the time. If you're creating that connection, then what you're creating is magnificent. And that will sell and create beautiful images. Always that's. My fate and you have to do is look back to the masters of photography. What did they do? How do they capture even finer? What is it that engages people? What is it that makes people spend millions of dollars buying these final prints and look at those elements and the images? Yeah, these are amazing. Thank you. This was actually if you just go back one that was actually my shower one day I just saw the thing on there, and I was like, I really want to practice something. I just got in the shower in natural light time, and it was really hard because you know, the lenses focusing in on the the droplets and then in onto me. But I like that it's kind of focused on the droplets and also like these mistakes when you make self portrait is often work out for the best, maybe a hair is kind of over the eye or addresses kind of slipped down or you were kind of running into camera captured you just before you oppose it, and sometimes they're the best mistake to make experiment so you're talking about and hold our portrait that getting you an audience in getting you noticed you're on deviant at you and you've got no money because you're a teenager you're still a college learning nothing about photography because you're learning everything at home yeah and you do that on my budget yep my remember being a college in my at the time I was confused because they didn't give me any direction I was doing a lot of home I was just in exhibitions but I really wanted to push myself and have teachers say to mean this's the next step and they don't do that I don't remember my teacher at the time said just assist you we find a system I said but I don't want to be an assistant and I remember thinking that to myself and even I went to college and then went to university and university after a year of going I spoke to my teacher I said I'm really unhappy I'm not learning anything you know what? What is my direction and he actually sat down with me and said you don't need any direction you've just gotta go and do it yourself you know move go along where you want to go and I remember at the time my mom, my mom and dad would say don't leave university that's not right for you and obviously university is good for some people eh? So I'm not going to tell people to leave school or anything. But I remember that was such a good push for me because I was like, it's, okay, that I don't have a direction right now. This is what I love to shoot. I'm going to follow this. I'm going to keep experiment in, and then I moved to london, and I think it was nineteen and started to work on fashion and experiment.