I’m loving this dreamy photo shoot by Amber Mahoney for Worn Magazine. The play and interaction between the smoke and the clouds is wonderful. I hope you all have a dreamy weekend!
This past Sunday morning, we woke up bright and early to see the opening of the Rain Room, by Random International, at the MoMA. Rain Room is an immersive environment where it’s actually raining inside a room (well, mechanically raining). When you walk into the room, the rain stops at all the places you stand or walk through so you never get wet but water is all around you. From the MoMA website:
“A field of falling water that pauses wherever a human body is detected, Rain Room offers visitors the experience of controlling the rain. Known for their distinctive approach to contemporary digital practice, Random International’s experimental projects come alive through audience interaction—and Rain Room is their largest and most ambitious to date. The work invites visitors to explore the roles that science, technology, and human ingenuity can play in stabilizing our environment. Using digital technology, Rain Room creates a carefully choreographed downpour, simultaneously encouraging people to become performers on an unexpected stage and creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation.”
For my senior design project in college, I created a underwater immersive environment, so all the concepts and themes of the Rain Room was right up my alley. The exhibition was pretty incredible. To walk around in a room filled with falling water but not get wet was surreal. I felt like Moses every time the water would “part” for me to walk through it. Every time you put out your hand to catch the falling water, the water eludes your hand. The lighting and exhibition design of the whole space was also otherworldly—every falling drop is captured perfectly in the single strobe light installed at the back wall. The rain looked like diamonds and streaks of silver falling from a dark sky. The exhibition is up until July 28th, so if you live in New York or are going to be visiting, I highly recommend checking it out.
Word of advice— the only downside to this exhibition is that only 6-10 people can go into the room at a time so the line gets LONG. We waited about an hour but when this exhibition was in London, I heard the line got up to 6 hours long. I suggest going on a weekday or on an off-peak time.
All photos taken for Bucket of Squash
Kelsey and I are back with another round of Iterative Inspiration. This week, we chose an awesome photograph from Sweet Paul Magazine, photographed by Hector Sanchez. This photo is one of my all time favorite examples of food styling. Everything about this photo is perfection for me (and it doesn’t hurt that the salad looks amazing). When I first started thinking about the photo, my mind immediately starting thinking about how creatively the photo was styled. Normally, food is styled as a whole—with all it’s ingredients doing their part to construct the physicality of the final dish. In this image, each of the salad’s ingredients are standing on their own. The fennel, orange, and pistachio stand at the forefront together. Ideas of deconstruction and building blocks started swimming in my head. I wanted to play with objects that are the building blocks to something larger and make something complicated out of simpler pieces. 
Then I forced myself to look at the image in a different way—visually, and in it’s actual technical execution. To get the beautiful translucent glow the photo has, the ingredients were probably photographed on a light table. When photographed like this, incredible details start to emerge. The orange slices immediately caught my eye. I love how the slices look like viens. The photograph almost looks like a colored x-ray. Playing on the interesting way the photograph was taken, I decided to take an Indian chiffon scarf and scan it so I could get a illuminated effect. It took over 10 scans before I was happy with the fabric folds and the way the light went through the thin fabric. The chiffon responded beautifully to my final scan. I love how the fabric looks denser in some areas and it’s barely there in others. Scanning the fabric helped me really bring out it’s texture and uncover it’s “veins”. Then I decided to create an organic type treatment with the wispy texture. I only made a word for this exercise, but I’m hoping to blow this out and create the whole alphabet in the future! Head on over to Pinegate Road to see what Kelsey came up with. Hope you guys enjoyed round 2— we’ll be back with Round 3 soon!
PS— In case you missed Part 1 of this collaboration I’m doing with Kelsey Cronkhite of Pinegate Road, check out it out here.
I’m a big fan of interior and prop stylists. A good stylist is often just as important as a good photographer. A well styled photo is the missing link that can elevate an average photo to pure eye-candy.
The two stylists above have a knack of creating just that—drool worthy images. What I love about both of them is they each have a distinct style, and they really commit to it in their work. Their contrasting styles speak to the two opposite design sensibilities I tend to have. My natural inkling is to graviate towards color, patterns, and layers. It probably has to do with my Indian upbringing and the type of design I was surrounded by in my childhood. Camilla’s work is rich, colorful and each photo creates a fantasy world in which I would happily live. Lotta’s work is a stark contrast to Camilla’s but the design school student in me finds the images equally compelling. Lotta’s styling is deliberate and well thought out. Her restraint use of color and materials is really what makes her work stand out. I love how fresh each of her images look.
Both ladies are represented by Agent Bauer, a Swedish agency that represents other talented stylists (and other creatives, as well). I highly recommend not only looking though Camilla’s and Lotta’s portfolios, but the entire Agent Bauer site.
I hope you guys had a great weekend. My weekend consisted of a little of this, a little of that. Some work, some fun in the sun, a little drinking on a boat, and it ended with a pint of ice cream, cookies and watching the Warriors in the NBA playoffs—no complaints here.
These days, I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to capture movement when I take photos. I spent a long time fiddling with settings on my camera while trying to capture the movement of the falling petals when I was visiting the cherry blossoms. Did I want the blossoms to create a streak of movement or did I want them to look like they were suspended in air and in time? I’m not sure I really accomplished either, but it definitely flexed my photography muscles (whatever photography muscles I have).
I started doing some research on movement in photography, and the photos above stood out to me. I love how the fabric moves like water, the water feels wispy and the dust off the elephant looks like time stood still for just a moment. Beautiful stuff. Have a fantastic Monday!
*Anyone know the source of the waterfall image?
I’ve been waiting to see the cherry blossoms bloom in Washington D.C. since I moved to the East Coast. My college roommate lives in D.C. and has been telling me since she moved there that I would be obsessed with the whole spectacle. But for the past 3 years, I’ve missed them for various reasons.
Catching the blossoms is a tricky thing. It’s extremely hard to predict when they are going to bloom until a week or two before, so planning a trip in advance is nearly impossible. On top of that, peak bloom (when 70 percent of the trees have blossoms on them) only lasts for a few days. If you go too early, the blossoms are merely buds on winter branches and if you go too late, the light pink blossoms start morphing into green leaves.
I was 100% determined to go this year and it was peak bloom or bust. I monitored the cherry blossoms so closely and became so knowledgeable about these little buggers that I’m confident I’m now a good candidates for any open D.C. park ranger position. Seriously. I could give a lecture about cherry blossoms. As soon as the blossoms hit their peak bloom, Nick and I jumped on a bus for a fun weekend in D.C.
It’s an understatement describing the cherry blossoms as absolutely breathtaking. The entire National Mall and Tidal Basin were lined with trees covered in light pink and white blossoms. It was hard to believe that the scene before my eyes wasn’t fake. The trees were so dense in certain areas, that if we lay under those trees, we could only see small pockets of sky between the blossom covered branches.
Then, the wind began to pick up and started blowing the delicate blossoms off their trees. Thats when the magic really started to happen. We were surrounded by soft petals swirling and falling all around us. A lot of the petals got blown into the Tidal Basin, covering the water like a carpet. I felt like I was on a movie set. Or in a snow globe. Or in a song and dance sequence of a Bollywood movie where the entire dance takes place in a snow globe. It was pretty damn incredible.
We stayed at the National Mall until the sun set and until it was too dark to take any more photos. I came to D.C with the hopes of crossing an item off my bucket list. Instead, all I did was replace “see the cherry blossoms in D.C.” with “see the cherry blossoms in Japan”. My mind can’t even begin to fathom what the blossoms must look like in their native country if they looked like this in Washington. I highly recommend everyone making the spring trip to see the cherry blossoms. Stalk them if you have to. Who knows, if my design career doesn’t work out, you just may see me giving tours at the National Mall…
Hi friends, I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! Remember this mood board I posted about a while back? I want to share the finished results with you guys today. I was initially a bit nervous to work with this color palette, but the end product turned out better than I had expected. The biggest challenge for me was getting the orange and magenta to play together nicely without looking too garish. Though my original mood board didn’t have any navy blue, I quickly realized that using small hits of a more masculine color would help ground and balance the invitation. The final suite had the main invite, an RSVP card accompanied with a magenta envelope, and a double sided information card. I packaged the suite together with a navy blue belly band and a navy blue outer envelope.
I’m thrilled to be collaborating on this new series, “Iterative Inspiration”, with Kelsey form Pinegate Road. We became Twitter friends before we met at Alt Summit, and we totally hit it off once we met. She’s an extremely talented designer and letterer living in Savannah. Kelsey has a killer blog that’s not only pretty to look at, but filled with smart thinking about design, process and creativity.
Kelsey and I have written about iteration and inspiration in our blogs in the past and we decided to collaborate and come up with a series where we got to practice what we preach. We’ve been thinking a lot about both topics and how they apply to creatives, designers, and bloggers. For example, Pinterest is awesome, but where do you draw the line between copying and inspiration? How many times should you iterate on a design or an idea before it’s a true reflection of what you are capable of? We decided to stretch our creative limits and forced ourselves to think about these ideas while coming up with creative solutions.
To start, we chose a photo we were both inspired by and then individually went through the exercise of thinking about the photo, iterating on our ideas, and creating a final product that is a reflection of our thoughts. We left the final product open ended, so we could really create anything we were compelled to. We hoped to show how one source of inspiration can manifest in different ways for different people.
I loved this photo by Ruby James the moment I saw it. It’s a beautiful photo with several layers of meaning baked into it. Looking at this photo, the first words that came to mind were ‘sad’, ‘luxurious’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘gilded’. I thought of a spoilt girl who has so much, she even cries tears of gold. I was inspired to create some DIY gold jewelry, or play off of the idea of gold and luxury.
Iterating on this idea and thinking even deeper about the photo, words like ’unexpected’, ‘tragic’, ‘ironic’, and ‘manipulated’ started surfacing. In the photo, tears—normally made out of water—are glorified and turned into gold. I thought about manipulating natural materials to create something unexpected—just like the gold does with the tear. Because I wanted to keep the element of beauty the original photo has, I decided to use flowers as my subject matter. I wanted the flowers to feel like they were made out of something unnatural and have them behave unexpectedly. I spray painted lilacs a stark white to give them the appearance of porcelain. Then I cut up and broke certain areas of the stems to make them look like shattered porcelain and took a still life portrait of the result. I wanted the end product to be part sad, part unexpected, and part beautiful.
I hope it was helpful to read my train of thought through the process of being inspired by a photo to creating a final still life piece. Going through this exercise was great practice for me to strive get inspired on a deeper, more conceptual level. ‘Iterative Inspiration’ is a 4 part series and we’ll be back in two weeks with another project!
Head on over to Kelsey’s blog to see what she came up with using the same photo as inspiration.
I really love to craft but the reality is that I have little time for it anymore. Because I refuse to give it up as hobby completely, I’ve started crafting on a simpler, quicker scale. I used to sit all day on my dining room table with ton of supplies spread out in front of me, making all sorts of stuff. Now if I see something I want to make, I do it within a few hours, with few supplies, and be done with it (one day I’ll go back to crafting all day, erryday). This brings me to the easiest craft project of all time.
I got these amazing letter pressed coasters from Umbabox when I went to Alt Summit in January. I don’t have a coffee table to use coasters on, and the coasters were too pretty to keep in a drawer, so I decided to make a quick framed art print out of them. First, decide how many coasters you want to use and figure out a good arrangement for them. I decided to keep it super geometric and make a simple 3×3 grid with the coasters. Then you measure out some matte board, glue/tape the coasters exactly where you want them, and frame. Voilà! Crafting really can’t get any easier than this. The best part is that the finished product is pretty darn professional looking for the minimal amount of effort required. Happy making and happy Friday!