I’ve always been into photography as a form of documenting my life. From holidays, special events, school days, I’ve longed to capture my life in photographs from as young as I can remember. My obsession peaked at college when I had picked up a compact camera, owned by my father & taken a photograph that inspired me. Now, the photograph in question had little to offer but mere wonderment.
From a technical point of a view it was underexposed, badly composed & lacked any interesting features, but as soon as I had made it I found that I could capture many tiny details of an object with just a click of a button. I could then explore that object in a way I had never before. And that was it, my obsession with macro/close-up photography had begun. Since then, I have invested in a DSLR & macro lens & taken many hundreds of macro photographs.
I am influenced mainly by everything around me. Nature plays a big part; the frost, raindrops, spider webs, I could go on, inspire me to capture the world around us. Bringing this back to memories, I believe that I could look at every single photograph that I have taken & I could tell you of a certain time, a certain event that it is associated with.
My images are not of people, but of the flora, fauna & objects around at the time. Snapshots are nice, but not essential to holding the information of memories. My photographs are a prompt to my mind. To the normal eye my photographs are just of flowers, nature & random objects but to me they are a personal visual journey.
My images are made to be visually appealing, with a variety of colours & extremely shallow DoF (made usually with an aperture of f/1.4) which gives me a trademark style. They are then edited with a personal Photoshop action which adds layers of colours which I then tweak according to my taste.
I am inspired personally by many photographers on Flickr. Many of them are now good friends to me & we inspire each other to create images. I have tweaked my own practice with help from them as they have helped me to progress with my work. I am still learning new things every time I am viewing their images. It has been & will continue to be a great journey with them.
In the future I aspire to be an exhibiting artist, showing my images to the world with an insight into my life & my journey with photographs over the years. I’d like to be a published photographer which would give me a lot more satisfaction with my work but overall I would like to be a photographer who inspires people to create images that are visually appealing & help prevoke happy memories. I want people to enjoy photography in a way that is different from the usual snapshots that are part of our everyday lives.
My name is Sarah Lewis & I am 22 years old. I live in Lancashire, UK.
Links:
http://www.facebook.com/purplefacephotography
http://www.purplefacephotography.co.uk
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahpurpleface/
I found your photographs via Twitter and your Flickr account.
You are a very talented young woman.
The focus, bokeh and depth of field you capture make for some stunning photographs.
So many wonderful photographs.
I’ve spent most of the afternoon enjoying your work.
Thank you.