For this Monday’s photography post (brought to you each Monday, here on the daily news blog), we dig deep in the Advocate archives. All the way back to 2012 — December. OK, not that deep.
For the December issues we focused on neighborhood-manufactured gifts, and the interesting folks who make them.
Photographer Danny Fulgencio took this action shot (yes, we got an action shot in a story about arts and crafts!) of Whitney Holley, a designer of scrapbooks, memory books and other nostalgic items. Here’s how the shoot went down, in Danny’s words:
Sometimes doing a little homework pays off.
All I really knew of Whitney Holley was that she was a mother of twins who made notebooks. Luckily, she was also a blogger and so I did some reading before our shoot. My eyes popped when I read that she’d been a ballet instructor.
I wanted to communicate a celebration of life, parenthood and domesticity. And what better communicates these things than a lovely woman dancing, surrounded by her childrens’ toys? But it’s one thing to have a photographic vision, another to meet a total stranger and say, “Hi. I want you to be a bird: Flit around your home with incredible elegance and seemingly little effort.”
Needless to say, we worked up to that point.
(I still wonder what the family dog was thinking.)
And the result was a stunning and dynamic shot. Thanks, Whitney, and your little dog too, for being such a good sport.
