Always when I work together with Paulina, we have plenty of ideas, switch our shooting plan completely and start with the ideas from scratch. But in the end, we just get crazy ideas during the shooting and don't stick at all to the plan. I embrace being spontaneous and experimental way more than planning everything in detail. This time, everything changed as well, as she was a little bit sick but still did not want to cancel the shoot, so she spontaneously invited me for a home shoot at her place. And somehow during the shoot, I always make her laugh and she just cannot stop! It is really so funny. her entire portfolio looks so serious. I get the feeling that I am the only photographer making her laugh.
Yesterday, I also made a survey on my Instagram asking "What makes a good portrait?"
a) Message & story
b) Beauty & perfection
I actually thought, most of my followers would clearly click a) but I had to be proven wrong.
a) 53% - 24 votes
b) 47% - 21 votes
To be honest, I find that rather sad. Because overall I see the trend that people go crazy with beauty ideals, living up to fake standards. And honestly, of course "hot perfect girls" are nice to look at for some time, but if they have no appealing character their attractivity plummets rapidly. In my opinion, girls are attractive, if they are not stiff, are smart and don't have a problem to make fools of themselves. Only being a pretty puppet or perfected princess does not appeal to me. That is why I choose to work with models who are pretty but who are up for fun ideas and story telling. making someone constantly look perfect in a photograph is boring. Creating a story is creatively way more demanding than just creating a perfect shooting environment, apply perfect make-up in the perfect light and retouch everything. We need soul and character, not cloned puppets with fake skin. We are all human, so let's show that!
