Bahamian Photographer Personal Work – Warrior Women I Samurai (island samurai)

Personal Work, this comes every once in a while to most photographers. This is the time you get to bring out your own creative skills and have fun making images that are pretty much personal to you but you share with the world.

If you don’t know by now I’m not just a Bahamian photographer but I’m also a Bahamian Martial Artist. I’ve studied the martial arts for most of my life and since photography was also a strong calling in my life I usually blend both of my passions of the martial arts and photography into one.

This personal project I came upon the idea to make my own martial characters and some day have them all join forces in an elaborate comic type book. This was not particularly the first time I have came up with ideas that I photographed so I had a fairly good idea of what to do. The biggest set back however is getting all the props I need as we do not have a large selection of costume stores or persons who can make what I wanted. So I started my search for items that I may need.

The difference about this martial art concept was that all my models and characters will be females.  Needless to say this made things a bit hard for me as I actually wanted females who trained in the martial arts and could perform basic techniques. What was i to do as So you see its not easy being a Bahamian photographer, we have to work with what we have which isnt much.

Once I was able to get in the main props I made the call to shoot. We did a preliminary dress rehearsal to ensure the costume will fit properly and to see if anything else would be needed to bring about my vision. There were minor adjustments to make but all in all we opted to do two locations. The first location was at friend of mine dojo. He has a large enough space to capture the images I wanted and his students would enjoy the show at the same time..

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB1BOeJN82w[/embedyt]

Once the controlled images were captured the next step was to find an outdoor location. I must say however that the indoor controlled images were exactly as I envisioned them. I wanted a dark look with controlled edge lighting not to show off to much of the person behind the character and i think I pulled that off nicely.  After some coaching I was able to get the movements and stances down with the model.

Finding a location was the next hard part. I searched the island and came up with about 4 places I would like to shoot. From and old junk yard to a pine forest. Ultimately I decided to go with the island feel and choose the pine forest. A beach image would not have given the same appeal as the others I chose.

While on location and with some help from a fellow martial artist and photographic enthusiast I was able to set up and get some more images to my liking and along the graphic novel side of things. this is where being a bahamian photographer comes in handy. We have to make due with limited locations.

The pine forest images again were magnificent. Having the ability to take an idea and bring it to life was amazing to me. Now I have my first installment of my photo series Warrior Women. I look forward to creating many more warriors and ultimately showcase them all to everyone.