August 2008
Visuelles Adrenalin
Fortsetzung, Teil 3
Interview mit Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir
Visual adrenaline
Intense photographs from Rebekka Gudleifsdottir (Iceland)
CREATE OR DIE: Rebekka, I first stumbled upon your photos on Flickr, unaware that you are well known for your projects already, so
would you please briefly introduce yourself?
Rebekka: My name is Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, i'm a 30 year old photographer/visual artist and mother of two boys. I take pictures, I draw, I
knit and I run a lot.
Much to my surprise, my flickr page, which i've had since may 2005, has become increasingly popular in the last 3 years, which has sort of "accidentally" pushed me into making photographic art my career. Not something i had planned on, exactly (although i had always planned on being an artist of some kind) but now that it's happened, i wouldn't want to have it any other way.
CREATE OR DIE: How have you learned your skills and techniques? So tell us something about you started in this career. How did acquire
the necessary skills and techniques?
Rebekka: I first became interested in photography back in 2000, when i took a fim and darkroom course at school. Developing prints
fascinated me, although back then my photos weren't all that good. But i learned the basics of how SLR cameras work, all about f-stops and shutter speed and
ISO and such. My interest was sparked again when i bought myself a very simple point-and-shoot Canon Ixus in 2004.
I started using it to take half-decent pictures, becoming obsessed with framing and finding interesting images in everything around me. I posted these images on flickr and people like them a bit. I soon upgraded to a digital SLR camera, a Canon 350D, and started re-learning how to shoot in manual mode. I spent literally all my spare time taking thousands of pictures, and teaching myself post¬processing in photoshop.
With this first "real" camera i created my first "really" popular flickr photos. While i was still mostly playing around with this camera, in the summer of 2006, i was approached to do an advertisement campaign for the Toyota Prius here in iceland. At that point i was able to buy myself a professional quality camera, Canon 5D, which i'm still using.
CREATE OR DIE: Your work has widely varied facets, from stunning sceneries through to people and self-portraits. What type of Photos
would be your favorit, if you should pick just one of them?
Rebekka: I'd have to say the creative self-portraits are my favorites. I love the whole process of getting an idea, going out and often
putting myself thru a lot of uncomfortable situations in order to get the idea from my head and into a photograph for others to see.
I love being able to tell little stories with my photos.. not necessarily stories with a beginning and an end, but more like "stills" from a movie, where the viewer can guess what's going on and make their own assumptions and come to their own conclusions (Rebekka's pictures are available for purchase: (http://rebekka.myshopify.com).
CREATE OR DIE: Where are you focused on when you implement an idea? Is it the preparation, the moment you take your picture(s), or is
it the post-production afterwards, or some combination of everything?
Rebekka: It's an even mix of all those things. Even though i spend a good deal of time post processing most of my images, I make a point of
starting out with good "raw material" . Meaning, i do all i can to get as good an image as possible in-camera, rather than rely blindly on photoshop to "fix
things up" afterwards. Sure, i've sometimes had to do that, if something has gone wrong during a photoshoot, i'm sure all photographers have, but I don't
want to become too reliant on it.
I feel very strongly that photographers should have a good foundation, meaning they should know all about how a camera works, why an image turns out the way it does, and preferably, have some experience with film and dark-room work. I have this knowledge, and thus i feel I have the artistic liberty to choose if i want to take the "raw" image further and create something more with it in photoshop afterwards. I approach the photograph a bit like i would a painting, and enjoy making slight changes in color and texture , and sometimes combining elements from two or more photos, until i have an image that pleases me.
But really, I think too many up and coming young photographers just jump right into digital photography, buy an expensive DSLR that they don't understand, and just start playing around with it, not having any idea what they're doing. I know people who own a 5D and have never set it to "manual" .. Just shoot away with the camera on autopilot, and think they're taking the pictures, when really the camera is making all the decisions for them. That's just not right.
CREATE OR DIE: Tell us a little more about your creative process. How long do you carry an idea with yourself, before you actually take
action on it?
Rebekka: That can vary from a few hours to several months. Some ideas come almost by accident, once i've begun working on a more "solid"
idea i already had in my head, and the finished photo ends up being something completely different and much more interesting than i had originally planned.
For instance, my photo "Af jörðu ertu komin" (eng. "from the earth you were born") , which shows a nude woman (myself) lying in a ditch , was not a
previously conceived idea. A combination of coming across the perfect location, and playing around with possible ways of using the location and myself to
create an image, resulted in what is probably my all time personal favorite. Even the title came later, when i was post¬processing it.
Other times an idea, complete with title, forms itself in my head, and is executed exactly the way i had in mind, and ends up being exactly what i wanted it to be. Two good examples of that would be "an exercise in futility" and "once in a blue moon". Both were ideas i'd had in my head for a while and had plenty of time to plan before executing them.
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