Mari Sierra Photography won our 'childhood emotions' challenge last week, and as she was recently featured on Snap Maven (check out this post!), we invited Mari to share a project with you all. Keep reading to discover more about Mari's 'Alice in Wonderland' project!
"Hi! I’m Mari, I don’t know if I should call myself an
artist, a photographer or a creative… I’m a bit of all."
"Lately I’ve been working on a personal project and I
guess it’s more of a dream of mine. Since I was a kid I’ve loved fairytales, no
matter if they were a movie or a book. I must say that photography might be my
passion but reading has always been my addiction and my escape… So it shouldn’t
be a surprise that my project dreams involve my favorite stories!"
"I’ve been wanting for a long time to create an Alice
in Wonderland series of images, I’m a big fan of the Tim Burton’s movies
because they move my imagination and I feel very drawn to their cinematic
style. So I took the chance to create my own Wonderland world when I found a
little patch of moss forest when visiting a relative’s Ranch last month."
"Luckily I took with me some of my daughter dresses including one of Alice (she
loves to play dressing up as most girls her age) and took my kids, nieces and
nephews there to have a mini session. It was not easy to reach the place, it’s
in the middle of a ravine but the older kids were amazing helping me with the
little ones… by then we were all tired and sweaty so enough said the little
girls were not very cooperative! But isn’t that the curse of a mom
photographer? Still, I enjoyed photographing them but had to make haste because
the little girls (3 and 4 years old) were getting crankier, the down side of
the session was that I didn’t have time to change lenses and only use my
Lensbaby composer."
"When editing the images I found out that is much more
difficult to make a composite when shooting with the blurry images Lensbaby
produces, they are dreamy alone but adding the different elements to the
composite was a challenge. My first tries were using background from the movies
and I really liked them but because of the copyright issues I could not use
them, so it took a while to find stock images I love to create the world I was
imaging."
"I know I did it all backwards, you shouldn’t compose around a given
image instead starting with the idea and plan the images around it but even
though it was harder and probably took more time to achieve I enjoyed the
process and the challenge to try recreate my dream."
"I hope you enjoy the images as much as I do, they
still a work in progress for me and I will work in some other fairytale
projects in the future… it would be awesome if you get inspiration to try your
own creative project no matter if you start backwards like me, it’s all part of
the learning curve and it’s good to put that muse inside our head to work
sometime! ;)"
Find more of Mari's beautiful work here:
