Honestly, I would have to say Miller Mobley is my personal favorite photographer. He's only been shooting for a few years, and he's already got an extremely good career. He is mainly known for taking high-quality photoshoots of celebrities, usually for magazines such as Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter. He grew up in Alabama, where he dropped out of school in order to pursue his career. Not exactly a wise choice in my opinion, but it was what he wanted more than anything. He rose to popularity after he did some shoots for a few big-selling photography books, and he was later invited to the launch party of one book he took part in, where Michael Saba, the owner of Redux Pictures, "saw something in him", and told him he would become huge someday. Mobley's initial routine mainly consisted of long drives in which he would knock on the doors of strangers, looking for "people with character". A few years later, he was walking around one day when he spotted a copy of "The Hollywood Reporter". He decided to contact Jennifer Laski, the photo and video director for The Hollywood Reporter as well as Billboard. She told him to meet her next time he came to L.A. She was impressed by his portfolio, and the way he got random strangers to open up from their camera shyness. She ended up giving him an assignment just like that. Since then, he has been doing photoshoots for celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Quentin Tarantino, Jamie Foxx, The Weeknd, and even Barack Obama himself (His meeting with the Obama family is a moment he holds dear to him, and considers to be the highlight of his career). He has yet to identify what his main "thing" is, but he's proud of his work so far. He has said that lighting usually makes a photograph, and that carefully placed lamps are far more effective than drowning the subject in overexposure and light. His wife, Jana, is the creative genius behind most of Mobley's work. While not a photographer herself, she usually comes up with ideas for mood and how the subject should look. Miller and Jana Mobley are two perfect examples of people who went from dropouts straight out of Alabama to one of the biggest photography duos of this generation.
The three pictures I have chosen were not only three of my favorites, but also three that I thought would especially suit my model and I well. The one based off of Mobley's picture of The Weeknd represents my more artistic and "deep" side, the one based off of the ZAYN picture represents my taste in fashion, and the one based off of the Kevin Spacey picture represents my humorous side. My model, Ella, was very fun to work with. Because we have a lot in common, I think she did a good job at capturing exactly how I wanted my pictures to look. Lightroom is a hard-to-use tool, but mastering it seems like it could create masterpieces.
