As your passion for photography grows, you'll find yourself surrounded by many like-minded people; photography enthusiasts.
Naturally, you create groups for socializing further. You meet, talk photography & on occasion, you organize events & friendly competitions.
Our group decided to create an event with a special theme; freezing motion. We as photographers had to come up with a concept that involves freezing time / action.
For my concept, I got my inspiration from the many images I saw of dancers frozen in motion with a mix of colored powder. However, I didn't want to simply copy someone else's work; I wanted to create something different.
I decided to go with 'flour'. Logically, I had to go for a dark background to create contrast & make the flour pop out. Luckily, there was a good looking young model available on shoot location & enthusiastic to join.
We started with some shots of her standing throwing the powder around in different patterns ... yet that wasn't 'good enough' for me. I wanted something more dramatic, more powerful.
You can imagine how the floor would have looked like with all the flour being thrown about over 10 mins ... and here the creativity spark ignites. I asked the model to sit down on the floor, and smack into the piled flour with her palms. Ok, now we were getting somewhere!
Over the next 5 minutes, I got what I was looking for; a dramatic action shot.
As I was showing the images I captured to a 'competitor', he helped me add the cherry to the top by stating "I can vision dark clouds over the model in this picture'. There and then my concept was complete.
What I learned from this experiment is that the creative concept is a team work; listen to your assistants, listen to your model, talk to friends, very often they might add valuable ideas and input.