Yuri Arcurs a blog about selling your photos online

I started my time with Yuri Arcurs in the early summer of 2007 applying for a model job. I’ve always had a huge interest in photography and casually asked for an assistant job at Yuri’s facility. This was initially turned down.

I was lucky to know a little about Photoshop, and applied for a freelance Photoshopper job instead -also at Yuri Arcurs. This job I got and when a new position opened as assistant I immediately took the chance and applied. After an intense job interview (Yuri is very critical when hiring core staff) I got the job.

A few days after there was a brand new Mac Pro laptop and a personal mac workstation standing for me on my desk. From that day forward I could use all of Yuri Arcurs equipment, even for my personal projects. I was trained by Yuri and walked through the minute and crazily small details of photography. At one point i was even close to giving up because there was simply too much to learn.

When I got hired as a Photoshopper, I still went to high school here in Denmark on my second year. I decided to leave the school and take classes in photography instead and work full time for Yuri. I’ve been working here every day from 9 am – 5 pm for about a year now.

That was my opportunity and I’m happy that Yuri Arcurs has helped me so much during my learning process and still keeps pushing me forward to produce my very own pictures and my own style.

Working here is busy and there is always a lot to do. Our hole team has just come back from one month of shooting in the US where we went to a conference about stock photography and all kinds of cool places, L.A., New York, San Diego, Palm Springs, Yosemite and other places. We are going to Cape Town for a production in a couple of months. Back and forth, airplanes, airports…

Yuri is obsessed with stock, but I won’t give in, I’m not going to be a stock photographer and Yuri accepts that. I love doing photography but my passion is the artistic part of it. Mostly artistic nude and expressive pictures. I use most of my spare time doing that kind of stuff and hopefully some day I can make a living from it. It is of course very hard to get a living from doing artistic photography, that’s why I’m happy to learn stock photography, so that I can make a living from that, if my art photographs fails. I would love to combine the two genres one day.

I also love poetry and I try to combine photography with poetry. Most of my spare time is used on Yuri’s assignments, but when I’m not doing photography, I write poetry. I also do stand-up performance poetry in Århus and I’m a part of a three man group called Hybris Avler Nemisis (Hybris Grows Nemisis). The other members of the group are some of the two most talented poets in Denmark, Johannes Bech Dalsgaard (Århus champion in poetry slam and 2nd place in the Danish poetry finals) and Mikkel Lodahl (songwriter for the band Svendsen and Lodahl) The three of us performs together, often with music.

You can read my poetry and see my pictures on www.mariadonvang.dk and www.kaffeinthenight.deviantart.com

I live a little outside Århus in a commune with my boyfriend and six of my very good friends, who I often use for my spare time shoots as models.

Underneath you can see a few of my pictures. Visit my website for more. And feel free to leave a comment.

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