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For the past few years I’ve been meaning to visit the Tulip Top Garden. Only this year we finally managed to go there. The garden opens for roughly one month long every year, so I felt lucky we ‘caught’ it in time this year.
The garden was beautiful, the flowers were gorgeous -the tulips looked so vibrant and healthy- and even the weather was kind to us that day. The flowers in the garden provided a very colourful and perfect backdrop for this week’s portrait project.
This week’s portraits were not really my usual cup of tea. I mean, yes, I do portraits photography, but I do more of lifestyle photography; candid photos in an events or taking portraits in an event, where the fashion or what the people are wearing is not really the focus of the photographs.
This weekend, there was an opportunity to take portrait of real models. What’s more interesting was the fact that the models were acting like mannequins and uniformly made up ‘mannequin-like’ in their black short bob and cherry red lipsticks (excluding the male models). This fashion event, ‘Guardians of Style’, was a part of winter fashion campaign for Canberra Centre. There were several fashion show at the Canberra Centre all weekend, and right after these shows, the models would walk to several designated spots inside the Canberra Centre to stop and pose mannequin-like. They had to stand very very still, minimise their blinking frequency (I assumed), moved in choreographed pose with no smile, zero engagement, and stiff expression.
It was an interesting experience, I gotta say. There was no expression to capture as they were all looked (almost) expression less with no emotions. Fashion had to be the focus of the photographs.
I’ve never taken photographs of real models before, so it was a real treat.
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As it happens, summer is (officially) nearly over here in Australia. The new routines have started to kick in, daily activities soon became a blur, and before long our summer fun will turn into distant memory.
We have had a great summer holiday. Despite the extreme weather (extreme heat, extreme cold, heavy rain, and more) we really enjoyed this summer, maybe the fact that the two summers past have been a real fluke (constant rain and cold weather) made us really grateful for the ‘real’ heat.
We went for Kangaroo Valley Safari at the beginning of January. We, my family and one visiting old friend, had to peddle in canoes for 3.5 hours, find a campsite, pull up a tent, slept for one night, then pack up the next day to do another peddling for 2 hours along the river to get to our meeting spot at Tallowa Dam to wait for a bus to drive us back to our car. With two young kids and a bunch of people with under trained upper body muscles, it was a full on trip. The view was beautiful, and we practically had the place to ourselves. The second day was extremely hot, I was grateful we were surrounded by water. The experience was super exhausting, but fun.