I've not done many personal projects in the last 2-3 years. It's not a proud thing to say, but I have a reason why that's the case.
My idea of personal projects are personal adventures I engage in to reshape my mind, dare myself and break beyond my limits. Especially because I'm not under the obligation to please any client, but to satisfy my artistic desires. And as rewarding as those can be rewarding for an artist, personal projects can be expensive to pull off. So most times, we resort to collaborations.
Collaborations help to breakdown the cost of a project by sharing it among all the creatives involved. That way, the financial burden isn't shared by only one person. I've done a lot of collaborations and they are great however, like with a client, there are expectations involved because the other creatives involved kinda like have a way they'd like their creative contribution expressed. That's not so much of an issue though. The issue for me is the expectation to deliver the project as fast as possible. And that can pose a problem because for personal projects I like to take my time to process them.
The reason I take my time is because, I like to gain new knowledge or experience before trying my hands, else the output would be like what I already got going on. Nothing new, nothing special. And that doesn't cut it for me. With that in mind, I kinda stopped working on collaborations and while I can totally fund personal projects now, there's a lot going on that I'm lost for time to set one up.
For my #monomad entry today though, I'll be sharing photos from a shoot with my friend Latoya. It wasn't exactly a personal project, but she wasn't a client so I tagged it a personal shoot. It was for her birthday and I got the opportunity to try out new things.
For this shoot, I played with lights and a fog machine. The idea was spontaneous but was sponsored by how "gangster-ly" she was looking. I had to add some drama to the look and then remembered that we had a fog machine in the studio, brought it, took some shots then added some lights for more effect. I loved how the results turned out.
I took these photos for Latoya's birthday last year but I never got the chance to edit them until last week. Luckily she's my wife's friend as well and my wife edited some photos for her right away. Helped me to take my time to edit them to my taste and truly what I said about keeping a project until I found new knowledge helped me out with these photos. I'll share the colored variants soon but until then enjoy these ones and let me know what you think about them in the comments section.