WHILE STUCK IN QUARANTINE
Today I sat in a talk online with contemporary photographer, David Brandon Geeting, as he wanted to express to us how to stay creatively active during the current lockdown, and how he and his girlfriend have been creating project for themselves.
He began by explaining his line of work up until this point and how he is constantly looking at ways to create bodies of work that don’t fall under the typical work that might be produced by someone with a camera. This was especially the case during his travels, as he didn’t want his work to become the typical Instagram tourist that we all know, and so he talked about how he used things like cheap items to diffuse light and cheap speed lights, as he didn’t own much professional equipment at the time.
In terms of quarantine, he created a project called ‘Self Quarantine Residency’, which he described as something that created ‘so many opportunities’; which I found very interesting as, for the most part, I’ve only heard of this lockdown as a means of disruption to creative flow and artists saying it was generally minimising the amount of opportunities they had.
This actually really challenged me to reconsider the way I look at this quarantine, and has lead me to potentially start to create my own project based on how we can turn this lockdown into some sort of motivation, rather than purely seeing it as a negative.
“If it’s beautiful, shoot it and later find what it means”
He found that ambient lighting is definitely something to be utilised during this quarantine, and that backlighting the subject of the image just helps to make it that much more impactful! These are again, very useful tips that I’d definitely like to explore further within my own work, both during the project I create but also just in my general body of work, as I feel it’s rare that I actually do use ambient lighting.
Overall, I found this a very very useful talk to have been apart of and I feel it’s really going to help me with my outlook on working during this lockdown.
V E E L I S E K 