Photo shoot: Amy Jenkins

Amy Jenkins

25

Thirroul, Australia

From the moment I saw the umbrella, I knew that I wanted it to be mine. The fact that it belonged to Amy Jenkins, my KBFF (or Korean Best Friend Forever for those who are not so in touch with the lingo), was the only thing that prevented me from stealing it. If it had been anyone else's it would have been gone within minutes and hours later, the owner would have been scratching their head or tearing their apartment apart in the search for it.

What made this umbrella so special (aside from belonging to Amy, of course)? I had three umbrellas already! What was it about this one that drew me in? Well the colour had something to do with it. The bright red broken by white hearts and compounded by a black stem all melded together to create the perfect combination of colours to make me want to have it. But what was even cooler was the way that it twisted open. It reminded me a little of the cocktail umbrellas that you sometimes get in drinks, and I wanted it!

What makes Amy so special that I wouldn't have taken it from her? Well, as I said earlier, she is my KBFF, and she is that for a million and one different reasons that will all probably sound really silly to anyone but the two of us. All that I know is that stealing it from her would be like stealing something from myself – hurtful, pointless and just plain silly. Instead of stealing it, I decided to capture it on film together with it's owner.

The umbrella required glamour – not just any t-shirt and jeans or sundress would have done it justice, which Amy well understood. She returned from Australia prepared and triumphant, bearing a gorgeous and, we discovered, rather revealing (for Korea at least) dress. It was perfect! The black contrasted wonderfully with the red and we just happened to do the shoot on a day when the sun was shining brightly and it was possible to wear a sleeveless summer dress without catching frostbite.

We started in the park where Amy made friends with some of the trees and rocks, posing away for me and my camera. Soon it was time for the umbrella to make its much anticipated appearance, and I captured shots of Amy walking along bridges, sitting on rocks, posing as Mary Poppins and just plain having fun – you could tell by the wide smile on her face and the non-stop laughter that was emanating from our direction causing the local ajummas and ajoshis to be rather alarmed. When our imagination had run dry, Amy took out a book and started posing with that instead until she spied one of her students and we decided that enough photos had been taken in the park. Instead we walked down to the river, which wasn't nearly as beautiful as it had been just a few days before when it had been frozen over, and took a few shots there before going home.

Because the river wasn't quite the way we had expected it to be, our second shoot (which would have had a winter theme) was put on hold, and we are currently trying to think up a second shoot that we can do before I leave on Friday evening. So check back here soon for more photos of Amy.

Photo shoot: Ross McDonald

Ross McDonald
26
Leicester, United Kingdom

The first word that sprang into my mind when I met Ross was a fairly obvious one - “short”. It was the first thing that I noticed about him, and I was quite fond of pointing it out. Being the shortest of my friends, it was nice to find someone who could make me feel a little taller (if not just more normal) than usual. The rest of the evening was spent calling him “Little Man” and it was only somewhere around 11pm that I actually learned his name. He didn't take it too seriously, and that night was the beginning of a great friendship.

When I first thought about putting together a portfolio of my pictures, Ross was the first to jump in with both feet and suggest a photo shoot. It would be my first attempt at a photo shoot and, not being a particularly bossy person (though I am sure that some people will disagree on that front) I was not used to telling people what to do. I had become used to taking fortuitous shots – seizing the moment when it would let me, and this meant that I had become used to blurred shots as people turned to talk to someone else, shots where peoples eyes were closed, shots that basically did not come out the way that I had imagined them, but were captured moments nonetheless. Making my own moment to capture would be something completely different – I could position the person, tell them what to wear, how to stand, where to look, what to do, and it was a sense of power that I would have to become accustomed to if I ever wanted to be a pro. Ross was going to be my photography crash-test dummy, taking the brunt of my insecurity and nervous uncertainty and therefore having to bounce from place to place as new ideas entered my mind.

First thing was first – a wardrobe needed to be decided upon. I had a couple of different ideas for my photo shoot with Ross, and only ended up using two of them. The first was to bring out his debonair side by dressing him up in a suit and gangster-style hat and taking him to what is fondly referred to as Fish-Bone bridge for some shots of him looking out over the city, smoking cigars and generally just playing around. One of my favourites from this shoot is a picture where he was trying to hold smoke in with a serious face and started coughing, quickly leading to laughter. It is the kind of one-of-a-kind picture that captures a personality perfectly.

The second shoot was definitely a fun one – I had found a graffiti-ed area downtown and took him there with his second set of casual clothes – jeans, a hoodie and a t-shirt – and started snapping brightly coloured shots in different positions. As the area was rather small, there was a limited number of shots that could be taken, but I took them all and had fun doing so, and I think so did he. The cheeky side of his personality shone through and it ended up being a lot of fun.

I learned a lot about Ross that first night that we met. Soon the first words that came to mind when I thought of Ross were “rocket scientist”, “cheeky” and “witty”, and I think that the pictures I ended up taking capture those sides of his personality more than the title of “Little Man” ever could.