Visual Inspirations, Photographers Blog » Photography

Women Are Flowers II

admin — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:31:00 +0000

Two last ones from this self-portrait series:

“Better Halves” Japan

admin — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 09:36:05 +0000

In memory of Japan’s earthquake victims..

“Ivory”, 2011

hair, makeup – Tasha Drugakova

models – Tjarret, Shikiko

Women Are Flowers

admin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:32:43 +0000

You will probably agree with me that all women are like flowers. There are as many kinds of women as they are of flowers. Each of them has her own fragrance, her own language. Some of them are scentless, but beautiful, ones are useless, others – not. One – as a timid wood lily, another – a bright rose or a proud iris. And all of them are wonderful in their own way.

In this series I tried to show only some types of them. Being one part of a bouquet they hide themselves in real flowers. Today I’m gonna share with you two self-portraits.

Tulip and Lily Calla

Painterly Portrait

admin — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 18:22:50 +0000

Today I would like to share with you one of my recent works. I was working with this wonderful model for my “Better Halves” project and as we were almost done, I thought it would be pity to let her go without trying other things. Tasha Drugakova was helping me with the makeup and hair and I decided to use some of her hand made accessories to create this medieval look. The work of Lucas Cranach, the German Renaissance painter has always inspired me with it’s colors, lightning and subjects. To recreate that mood I used a dark green velvet background. Also some transparent golden fabric from a fabric store. The crowns were made by Tasha Drugakova and I had the thought to combine them together for the heart shaped look. The lightning was natural window light. To get this painting look I used one of my textures.The best textures for that are stone surface textures.The right image was made with a long exposure, so you can notice a small motion, that also adds a painting like look.

“Better Halves”

admin — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:14:35 +0000

When I was a child I once heard a song with lyrics “where are you my half, I am missing you” and since that I was trying to find out how could one person feel himself or herself a half, not whole.

My first year in University I was studying philosophy and we learned Plato’s Symposium. The speech of Aristophanes made me very curious. It was an explanation why people in love say they feel “whole” when they have found their love partner. It is, he says, because in primal times there were three sexes : the all male, the all female, and the “androgynous,” who was half man, half woman and they were very powerful. The creatures tried to scale the heights of heaven and planned to set upon the gods . Zeus thought about blasting them to death with thunderbolts, but did not want to deprive himself of their devotions and offerings, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them in half, in effect separating the two bodies. Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature.

“Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.”

This was the main idea of the project I started to work in 2009. I wanted to show two parts of a person, one male and another female. I also believe that each of us still has both entities.We all are different and look different but there is something we all have in common. We are all looking for our better half.

Spring Flowers with Textures

admin — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:27:08 +0000

In line with the texture discussions, and as an example of art texture work, I’d like to share with you some pictures from my shooting for Brigitte magazine. The magazine is out now ( issue 6, March 2011 ) and you can see those lovely spring moods that we have created on it’s pages.

The concept (Baerbel Recktenwald and Dietlind Wolf) was to show beautiful flower bouquets created by Dietlind Wolf in a more vintage postcard style.

This comes naturally made through the photography technique I use and serves as an example thereof. The casting was also great and we found lovely models, all in all it was great fun to work on this project. It also gave me some new experience and inspiration, as flowers have not been, until now, a part or focus of my work. And the spring will also come soon to our part of the Earth, so i hope you enjoy this story.

Self-portrait with a crown: textured version

admin — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:49:34 +0000

As I promised here is the post processed portrait from my previous post.
The work I did to get this painterly effect with textured surface on this portrait is not so difficult. The textures I am working with are all hand made, this one was not an exception too. In one of my next posts I will tell you how to create this kind of textures and how to apply them.

You can also comment/contact me if you’ve got points of interest that I could cover in my next posts!

Selfportraits with a crown

admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:49:24 +0000

So here is the result, something I created based on what I wrote about in the last post. I used an piece of sheer material I had from some other shooting, to imitate a dress, and a corset that is a bit modern but does the job of creating the look and feel. And I was lucky to find the crown in one of the antique shops nearby! The photos were made with natural light from a large window. These are original images, only some color corrections where done and some blur added for the mood, but I’m gonna share later a post-processed one, with one of my textures added.

I tried to recreate my vision of the young beautiful queen here, cheerful and carefree, but at the same time very lonely, longing for love.

Here are some more photos from this “mini-shooting”.

Let’s see…

admin — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:19:35 +0000

Welcome to my very first post here! Exciting! If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m Lilya Corneli, and I mainly do photography but I have a lot of passion of visual art in general.

Here I will mainly share pieces of visual art, things that inspire me, whether it is something that caught my eye and I feel like it would be interesting for you, or some of my works – of course I will talk about that, especially some of the methods and techniques I use, how I acquire motivation and what drives me to create my images.