The last few months I’ve been incredibly busy with work and my 3 kids. At times likes this it’s often self assigned work that gets sacrificed first. Personal work doesn’t earn me anything directly but I still think it’s very important to make time for it.

When doing personal work, I can permit myself to come home without one single usable image. As long as I learn something out of it. It never happened to me but the thought that you can get away with it is powerful and liberating.
I’m not afraid to experiment on an asignement but if the idea doesn’t work after a few minutes, I put it aside.

My personal work allows me to grow as a photographer but it’s also mentally important to me. Such a day of shooting for fun with a couple of nice people is a pure joy.

photo: Ake Vandervelden

I had been looking forward to yesterday. I had a concept in my mind that I would have liked to try out but because the model canceled at the last moment, I had to drop my idea. But since I was so looking forward to a day of model photography, I tried to arrange something anyway. Ake already agreed to assist and Pieter had a few days off and wanted to shoot something together. Didier kindly agreed to videotape the shoot, while models Dirk and Sylviane jumped in.

We all got along from the first minute and it didn’t take long before we could make an image that was more or less what I wanted to do in my initial concept. With a few good images in the can, we started to improvise. It was a day full of fun and I’m happy with the images we created. Didier’s video footage is incredible. I’m sure I’ve got enough material for a few more video episodes.

You’ll have to be a bit more patient to view the images and the video’s. But in the mean time, you can already see some great behind-the-scenes pictures on Ake’s Flickr stream.

By the way, Ake likes feedback on her Flickr pictures, so don’t hold back.