Hi, my name is Evely Duis.
I'm fashion and portrait photographer from The Netherlands.
The reason I chose this photography is because I want to create images I have in my head.
So I can create everything that's in my mind with my photography.
In this video, I'm going to talk about the creative process,
of making an image and making your own projects,
about finding inspiration, how I find it, how you can find it
and how you can grow as a photographer with your work and your personal projects.
The camera that I use is a Canon EOS 5DS R , that's the 50 megapixel camera.
With this camera I can get every shot, all the details, what I need in my fashion and beauty photography.
The lenses that I use are the EF 85mm f/1.8 USM
and the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM.
With these lenses, I get the most out of my photography. So I can get close for beauty and portrait shots
and get a wide shot with the 24-70mm, when I get the total shot on location or in studio.
But how do I get my inspiration?
I get my inspiration everywhere I look on the streets, on fashion.
Sometimes the model inspires me,
so it's everywhere, and that's what I like about it.
It's important to find what you like and what attracts you. What is your inspiration?
And get all that inspiration together, so you know what you like and what inspires you.
Lately, I challenged myself to take every day, one picture.
I did it on my analogue camera, so I couldn't see it right after I took the picture.
But in this way, when you have to take one picture every day, you need to look around.
See what inspires you.
One day it was the light, shadows, flowers.
Everything can inspire you, but you just have to see it.
And it's always different in everyone's eyes.
So is just what inspires you.
So this challenge was really nice to do for me and at the end of the month to see all the pictures together
and my vision of what I liked and what inspired me.
I normally work with bigger themes for my projects,
but at the moment it's not always possible,
so I try to manage it to get smaller teams so we can just get creative.
But also doing self portraits and doing projects on my own to get my creativity out.
These days, it's really important for me to stay creative.
That's the moment when I do personal projects.
For me, it's very important not to be a slave of my clients.
So when I do only client jobs, sometimes my creativity gets in the way.
That's for me a sign that I need to do something that I wanted and where I get my creativity in it.
The fun part of it is that you can trial and error.
Nothing is good. Nothing is wrong. You only can create and can be creative.
This way no one is telling you what you need to do or you can or cannot do.
But how to start?
For me, it's placing all my inspiration in a dummy book and get it all together.
I combine all my ideas like sketches, photos from magazines, drawings, music lyrics,
everything I combine and I get one book with inspiration.
When I get my subject for the project, I will first do my research.
I go search online so I can see what I find about this subject.
So what is typical about this theme? What can you find about it? How is it visualized?
And what are the facts about it?
When you got all that, I mostly start to write some visible ideas and make some sketches.
When you got your visible ideas, you can make a mood board.
For this, I search online, I look at magazines and find all this together and combine it to one mood board.
In a mood board, you can find the look at feel.
Make it visual. So you can see what kind of light I want to use.
What kind of colour, styling, makeup, hair and all that combined into one.
When you got your mood board done, you can start to test something out.
Well, sometimes for projects, I do a test shoot to see what kind of mood I want in the pictures.
So I get more an overall view from what I want, what camera or lenses I want to use, what kind of colours.
So I can just test out what I want for this project
When everything is planned out, you can start the shoot.
Get your team together or just make self portraits and do everything on your own.
At the moment, I'm working on a personal project about migraine.
I've got chronic migraine, and I just want to get it visualized.
It is just a challenge for me because it's something that you can't see and how do I want to make it visual?
So that's a bit of a struggle, but I'm getting there.
For me, I like to do my personal projects really personal and something that is just with me.
And that's the challenge that no one can make the thing that I want or I experience.
So that's what I want to do with this project, get it visualized so people can understand what I've been through.
Doing personal projects is not only a challenge for yourself.
It can bring you further as a photographer.
You can challenge yourself at different levels than when working for a client.
You have to look different at your own photography because you are the client.
I challenge you to start your own personal projects. Something, that's close to you but also something new.
Thank you for watching and if you have any questions for me, leave them in the comments.