shooting for the soul

shooting for the soul, some recent thoughts by Mark.

We exhibited some of our fine art work last evening at the La Dolce Via event at Club auto sport.  I got to exhibit some of my own personal Fine art from an Italian series I did awhile back.  I haven’t been doing a lot of my fine art work in the last few years since we have been so busy with weddings and custom portrait work.  This event was awesome and it really felt great to get out there and show some of my personal work.  A lot of my past personal art series I have printed up and stored away in boxes.   I really love a lot of this work and this got me thinking a lot about why its been so long since I have done any personal projects.  I have always loved to travel and really get inspired by telling stories and capturing the feel and the essence of a new place.  I love to travel to a new locations and just soak up the culture, the food and the drinks while creating memories along the way.  Travel has always had a special romance to me, even the craziness of a airport or train station has always been so interesting to me.

We met a lot of great people at the event last night who all loved my work, and it was so much fun to tell the stories behind each image.  At the end of the night it made me realize that as an artist doing personal work can be so important.  It can help you grow so much and that can feed right into your clients work.  One thing I realized after viewing all of these images that have been in boxes for awhile was that some of my favorite images were taken with my good old Holga camera that I have had for about 15 years.  I used to use it often at weddings but lately its been collecting dust.  A lot of the work from this Italian series that I love are shot with the holga and printed  either in a sepia tone or black and white with acrylic oils over them.  It gives the work such a nostalgic, romantic feel to it and also matches the feel that I love to create for weddings.  This evening made me bring the holga out of retirement and dust it off again for some new use.  Im going to break out that T-Max film from the freezer and start popping some rolls off at weddings again and can’t wait!!!  I’ll definitely be posting some images on the blog so look out for some new artistic stuff.  And for all you photographers out there remember to take a little time and shoot for your soul, it will re-energize you and get you focused on your passion!

– Mark

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