The color in Ashley Crawford’s senior photos of this lovely girl just grabbed me. I especially love her use of light and the golden hues she managed to capture. I quizzed Ashley on what drove her obvious creativity in this set:
“As an avid people watcher from day 1 (or maybe day like 500 something, since I don’t really remember day 1) I’ve always been drawn to the details and the different. Glances, faces, clothing, reaction. In college, my favorite class was art history. I was most enchanted with the Rococo movement and I used to spend hours delving into my textbooks even after finishing the assignments. I was glued to the use of vivid colors & deep shadows. When I began using my camera to tell people’s stories, that quickly manifested itself as using color & light to get to the heart of who they were. I try to see through a person or people and show them themselves with new perspective. Switching to film-only sessions has been a great tool for me to accomplish that. When I shoot film, I slow down. I take shots with more thought & more purpose. I find myself planning sessions and specific frames more so than ever before. In order to do that, I try to have a sense of who my subject is before ever beginning, always pre-visualizing some of the posing I want to use to invoke the feeling I’m aiming for. Something that really still highly influences me is people watching. I get so many ideas from just watching families spend time together; the way they touch, the looks they give, the way I see mom show her love to her children. Sometimes it’s just the way they’re sitting in a certain light that gives me ideas of how to use it at a session. I so much prefer being inspired by real movement & real emotion and I find it all around me. It’s a goal of mine to have these ideas in my head before the shoot ever begins.
So much of the high-profile wedding & family film work that’s out there right now is such a similar, specific aesthetic. It’s either light & airy or it almost just doesn’t exist. There are a few exceptions I appreciate but I sometimes find it frustrating not to see film stocks being used with more variety to show mood & emotion. I try to choose what stock to use according to the kind of vibe/feeling I get, paired with the location(s) we’ll be using and keeping in mind the sentiment I want to portray. My goal is always for my subject(s) to see the result and say ‘that is ME. That is US.'”
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