When it comes to fashion photography there are names everyone knows at the tip of their tongue, like the ones we spoke about in this article. But apart from them, how many do you know specialize in beauty/editorial portraits? Well, today we speak with one Noor Okulo virtually to find out why he chose this route of photography:
Who is Noor, in your own words?
I think in simple words, I’d say Noor is a crazy person. You know. I really love colours. I love adventure. I love making new friends and just focusing on a lot of different things. I often find myself you know, doing different things, trying out this and that.
I noticed the photos on your page are a particular style what inspired you to take these kinds of portraits?
I think it was the love for skin massively influenced me to take these kinds of portraits. I love more close up portraits than full body or half portraits, because you see less skin in them. My beauty of work comes in with the skin. How I blend skin with the skin tone, together with the skin texture – that is something that really sparks me, you know?
Retouching seems to be one of the things you do well… why is that part really important in the photo producing process (especially for makeup shoots)?
I think of retouching as packaging, like product packaging. If you really have shitty product packaging, who’s gonna buy the products, you know? So if you have beautiful packaging, definitely that’s gonna attract people. So, if you think of it that way, then yeah, I think that’ll kind of communicate why retouching is really important in the makeup field or in the creative field.
What inspired you to get in the creative field?
One I would say is my mom, actually, she’s an artist in her own way. From that, I think I got the love for colours. I always looked at colours as beautiful art. That just kept pushing me to learn more about art. I used to sketch a lot when I was younger. So I just kept growing with it.
Who are some of your artistic inspirations?
People that have actually inspired me; one is Aïda Muluneh. She’s a contemporary photographer, and the owner of Addis Foto Fest. I was her apprentice in 2018 in the contemporary photography field. So before I used to do contemporary photography and fine art photography. So that actually helped me a lot to basically fine tune my kind of photography and have a different eye for photography. So yeah, I would definitely say Aïda Muluneh. Second person, I would say, is a colleague of mine called Tata Plechkova, her Instagram account is @retouch_tata. So she’s a full on retoucher. Like she does it full time. And I’m more of a part time retoucher right now. But yeah, she’s been an inspiration to me as well.
It says on your profile you also do graphic design, do you incorporate that into your work or there’s a whole other side to your work?
Yes, my profile says I’m a graphic designer, and definitely I do incorporate my design ideas are working to my photography. So a good example is the use the use of colour; colour theory and whatnot. That’s where I look at colour blending you know, so all of that comes from my graphic design background.
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