Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Katie Boyden: A Senior Profile Portrait by Willem Geier (2015)

At her very core, Katie Boyden is a teacher. Nearly everything she does stems off of her want to enlighten others. When she studied at UCLA, she was profoundly annoyed by the fact that her professors mostly have intellectual discussions with those already in their fields. They do not particularly try to spread their knowledge to the public, as they mostly write in intellectual journals to each other. Boyden wants to fix this knowledge gap by teaching in a more widespread and digestible way; she teaches in two methods, writing and documentary filmmaking. As a writer, she writes articles and essays that can be shared with the rest of the world, educating those across the globe. However, with the rise of social media, people are less willing to read long articles. Large social media websites like Buzzfeed and Facebook are a lot more motion picture heavy. To adapt to this change in general information intake, she took up documentary filmmaking. Documentaries in a sense, are more digestible pieces of writing that people who do not specifically enjoy reading could themselves watch.

I wanted to get a nice headshot of Boyden, I shot it at night to make it so the background did not show as much. Because it was shot at night, I had to use a speedlight on the Canon T3 with a telephoto lense. I shot in camera RAW which was really useful. It gave me so many more options in the editing process later on. I used a telephoto lense so I could zoom in much further which would compress her portrait making it look much nicer. After taking the photo, I put the image into Photoshop and cropped it to the rule of thirds. I added a vignette, and put a black and white filter over her. I thought this would go with the filmmaking aspect of Boyden.
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