Great Shot: Lane Collins

© Lane Collins

Lane Collins took her first photography class at 16 and her mom bought her first SLR for her birthday. It seems that she built up her knack for photography the same why I did, she wondered around town taking pictures in the back alleys, and when she made her first print in the darkroom she was hooked. For her work she gets most of her inspiration from the Internet and paperback books, also because she graduated from SFAI, her projects seem to evolve out of what she is experiencing personally or come from a random idea that sticks. The photograph that I posted is from her series titled Chasing Rainbows it was made around the time she moved to New Zealand, while saying goodbye to family and during the long and awkward post-immigration adjustment period. What I like about Lane's work is that it is very simple, also her photographs use a unique lighting situation where it either looks very natural or limited, and also using simple objects to symbolically portray different ideas or emotions.

More work by Lane Collins can be found on her website: www.lanecollins.com

Beauty In Nature, © Elizabeth Shipley

When I look at the world around me, I always seem to look at the uniqueness and beauty that nature has to offer. I have always loved nature, and when I started my photography as a student nature always seemed to be my main theme in all of my series that I created. My freshman year I did a series on tree barks, and the difference of color and textures that the bark contained, then last year I did a series of what lines, colors, and textures are created in nature when humans destroy it. I feel that nature can portray a lot of emotions to humans in a photograph such as happiness, life, death and even wonder. Nature contains an individualistic quality as humans would, this being, that no two things in nature would look alike.

Who I would compare my work to is Sally Mann, in her series of southern landscapes she takes a normal tree and she looks and the unique line it has going across the trunk. When she photographs the tree she gives it the feeling of sadness, but at the same time she gives this tree beauty as well. That is truly what I want my work to give to my viewers, I want to take something simple and look at it from a different angle and give it an emotion and beauty for the human eye and mind to see and feel.

What I want from my work this coming year at MIAD, is I really want to push myself out of my comfort zone and try to do work that I would feel intimidated by and hopefully, I will be put on the path I have been waiting for.