Claudia Curici Photography

Ines Monnet and I ‘met’ here, in the blogosphere, a few months ago, and we clicked. At the time we had similar concerns (and I think we still have) but somehow it helped both of us to talk to each other and get an outsider opinion. We also decided we want to do a collaborative project, and the theme was a flower portrait, but as we found out it’s not that easy to pick and find a common ‘subject’ when one lives in Texas and the other in Switzerland. We decided on a white rose, just because we thought that must be something easy to find in both places, well… it was not. In the end, funnily enough, we chose something that has ‘rose’ in the name, but couldn’t be more different as a subject: rosehip.

Although in Dallas we have no sign of winter (it’s still in the 80s – 90s or 30s in Celsius), I’m still excited about winter coming so this bloom inspired me winter. I researched this winter’s interior design colors and what I found was right up my alley: deep, dark, rich colors (blues, greens, reds, oranges) strong contrasts of complimentary shades (just searched this on Pinterest).

Because there was no way I would have such a backdrop at home, I just focused on getting the right light on the rosehips, as far away from my walls as possible, so the background is smooth (I added a photo of the setup at the end of this post). I shot with my Fujifilm x-T1, and the fx56mm 1.4 lens (equivalent of 85mm), at 5.6. To change the background color I applied a cross-process in Lightroom and minor adjustments, and then moved to Photoshop to add some texture, contrast and brightness. At my suggestion, we agreed on making a triptych, but here I am cheating a little bit, as I could’t make up my mind on which three images to choose. If I have to frame these, I would rather do it vertically, on a narrow wall. I feel like because of the bottle neck, they won’t go well together on an horizontal plan.

I can’t wait to see what Ines has done with our assignment, it was so fun to do a collaboration – it really pushed me a bit harder than if I was doing this by myself. To be honest, I would had never chosen rosehip as a subject to begin with. 🙂

Later edit: Check out Ines’ part of the project: Triptych | A collab photo project. I am smiling now, because I just realized we picked two different plants, with a similar look :)))). But I am loving it. I think is all part of the experience and I like we kept the element of surprise.

 

And the setup: my mini natural light studio at home 🙂