Happiness can be presented in many different ways when it comes to photography, it can forced due to modelling and being set a topic or it can be completely natural and look so much more free.
I chose happiness for one of my projects out of 5 different topics which were happiness, sadness, fear, lust and confidence. Happiness stood out the most for me as the other 4 seem like they can be easily staged. I wanted my project to look as physically natural as possible with very little demand in how the models present themselves whether than be clothes wise or emotion wise. I wanted them to dress how they would normally dress and act how they were feeling that day.
During the shoot for this particular project, I asked for the models to all have their own conversations and to completely ignore me. There was very little eye contact with the camera and a lot of laughter which I caught, which was actually my aim. I wanted the models to show happiness but in the most natural way possible. No fake smiles, no fake laughter, all real and completely how it would look off camera.
As well as the natural side to a person, I wanted this to connect with nature itself which is why I also did a couple of shoots outside working with open space, flowers, etc. I have always believed that happiness is beauty and when it come to nature I believe that can be the other way around also. Nature is a completely huge, open, free space for everything and anyone. The following images of a rose bud and a fully blossomed rose are to represent beauty and life in general. Showing how something so small and unnoticeable can become something so big, beautiful and project the emotion of happiness, something a lot of people would just ignore until they are giving maybe an image of it or had it physically pointed out to them, but still recognising the beauty of it.
These images I believe to represent happiness because as well as their beauty, the colours they give off and the meaning behind them alone can affect a mood and represent a specific emotion and in this case that’s what I was focusing on while taking these pictures. While this project was in the works, I asked around to a few different people what they thought of these images in comparison to happiness and most of them agreed that they are fitting descriptions but a couple of people only thought of the term happiness in connection to this series of images when they were told about it, at that point they also agreed but they had to be told what the feeling was.
Finally, the last series of images were about freedom as I also think that freedom and happiness are equally linked together. A huge open space allowing your thoughts and feelings to be free as well as feeling free physically. The image that follows represents this and these are the thoughts i had in my head when I was taking the images for this shoot and this one particular image stood out the most for me as it holds the most colour and has the most warm feeling to it out of them all. 
The houses are blackened out to look like silhouettes because I wanted no distraction from the open sky, I wanted all eyes to be brought to the open air and to see the lamp post that I involved in the image to represent the sun and the heat.
To conclude, I am happy with how this project went because I got exactly what I wanted out of the photographs. I knew the feeling I wanted to approach when it came to shooting these images but when it came to the outcome I was a little worried that the feeling would not carry through, but after properly looking at them, with a completely open mind and having others comment on them too make me feel much more comfortable with the idea of happiness mixed with a natural concept as well as freedom and beauty. I wanted to do a little thinking outside of the box with these images and not just go for a bunch of models stood around, staring down the camera, smiling, I wanted to capture the natural beauty in happiness and show that it can be done in a different way than usual and overall, I am very happy with the outcome of this entire project.
Thank you for reading!
– Beckkie Cowley ❤
BeckkieCowleyPhotography 