So, a while back I had a mini-interview/meeting to give input for an app targeted towards creatives. The app, Quadio, was originally marketed towards solely music-creatives in or recently graduated from college, but their team decided to expand after their Beta version to include creatives of all kinds.

While the new version of their app is still in production, I was added to a Discord server where a bunch of other college-aged creatives collaborated, gave feedback, and participated in challenges. They recently announced they would be hosting their first Visual Arts Club, a subset of the Discord community that will meet once a week for four weeks.

I decided to sign up to see what I could get out of it, figuring there would be no harm done seeing as how I have the time to and it’s completely free.

We just had our orientation meeting and first group meeting, so I figured I would share my thoughts about it with you all!

1. Orientation Meeting

The orientation meeting was pretty brief, pretty much just going over how the club would work and then giving us an opportunity to meet some of the other club members.

One thing that I was really excited about was the fact that there will be a prompt each week to create new work with, that we’ll share at the following week’s meeting. While I’ve had some inspiration and have been pretty good about continuing taking pictures, having an actual deadline is definitely a push I’d appreciate.

It was also super great to meet some of the fellow club members, even those whose meeting group is different than mine. I connected with several really cool artists (photography and otherwise), and even made plans to collaborate on projects with a few of them. Time will tell, as always, but something to definitely look forward to.

2. First Group Meeting

The day after our orientation meeting, we had our first small group meeting. Because of the short time period, our prompt for this meeting was to bring a piece of art that showcases our creative style. This caused me no end of stress, seeing as how I haven’t even really determined my creative style yet. Instead, I decided to just share a photo that I really love that embodies the styles I tend to favor.

I ended up with two options, which are as follows:

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The reason I was deciding between these two pictures (which are edited, as I wanted to showcase my best work with the group and not just raw images) is that they both showcase the type of photography I love. Both are portraiture of some sort, but also show a candid nature since they were taken during an open mic concert/lacrosse game. While recently I haven’t been capturing as many candid images, they’re still something I love to do. Even during more formal photoshoots, the photos I tend to love the most are the ones captured between poses, when the models are laughing or caught off guard.

For those curious, I was actually able to show both pictures plus a few others because a couple people weren’t able to make the meeting so we each had a little more time to share.

The other people who were able to attend were actually primarily videographers, which was super interesting to see and learn more about. One even suggested a cool way I could incorporate my photography with videography using Adobe Premiere, so I might just have to check that out. Who knows– maybe I’ll become a videographer 😉

Overall, the group was really fun, super supportive, and gave great feedback. It felt amazing to connect with other creatives, especially around my own age.

The prompt for our next meeting is “Shadow”, and while I have some photos that could fall under that prompt, I really want to take this opportunity to use the prompts to get me to create something new, so you can expect a shadow-inspired photoshoot blog coming soon. I’ll definitely keep you guys updated on anything new or interesting that the group brings forward or that I find.

Until next time!