About Daria

Daria Khoroshavina is a 25 year old from Russia. She has teaching degrees in both English and Japanese. Describing herself as a hardworking and passionate experimentalist, her love for photography eventually outweighed her background in teaching. Simply put, photography for Daria is the “power to create what doesn’t exist, to tell stories and make people feel beautiful.”

As a young student, Daria started photographing friends and learning about fashion portraiture. She continued shooting along with teaching and doing other jobs for about a year after graduating until she decided that photography is the only thing that truly makes her happy. Though fashion is probably her favourite thing to shoot, Daria loves to experiment with techniques and different styles, which is one reason why she was drawn to create cinemagraphs.

Discovered by Flixel on Behance, a network of creative Adobe users, Daria’s work is celebrated by artists from around the globe. We were immediately impressed and mesmerized by her Kitchen Ghosts cinemagraphs and had to reach out.

 

 

For the 2014 release of Creative Cloud, Adobe celebrated creativity by bringing together amazing artists from around the world to remix the Creative Cloud logo into a collaborative mosaic. Daria was discovered by Adobe and asked to create a tile of her own. When asked to describe it, Daria explains the process as “probably the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. I felt so special for having been chosen for the project, I did 3 or 4 different shoots and as many variants of my tile! My head was exploding with ideas.”

Check out her final tile, and the Creative Cloud mosaic below.

Daria Discovers Cinemagraphs

The first time Daria saw a tutorial on creating cinemagraphs, she had to try it and she was hooked.

“You know, people often confuse cinemagraphs with regular GIFs, but they are so different. Every GIF or a video has a beginning and an end. You can watch it, replay it and move on. But with cinemagraphs it’s different. I’ve heard people just can’t stop staring at them. It’s hard to make a photograph that can catch attention so easily, cinemagraphs are kind of a cheat for a human eye. Spotting a movement is exciting, unexpected; it makes you search for it and brings some sort of satisfactory and calming feeling.”

Kitchen Ghosts

Whenever you mention her popular food blog, Kitchen Ghosts, Daria laughs. Undecided on what to call the website, Kitchen Ghosts was the first iteration. She describes how “it’s so weird, you slap a quick title over something and it sticks and then you have to say it over and over until it sounds natural like your own name.” Naming aside, we got to the bottom of how this blog started and the creative direction behind each shoot. Check out her Flixel strudels here!

Daria had a long break in portrait shoots and needed a vacation. Her friend and second shooter (Olya) is a mom, who, coincidentally, is a fabulous cook. Like all great ideas, Kitchen Ghosts started on a whim. A seedling that grew into something neither Daria or Olya could imagine. Daria suggested she would go over to Olya’s house, shoot her making lunch and create a few cinemagraphs out of it. They loved the results so much that they had to continue.

Like any great food blog, Daria and Olya are inspired by recipes. Olya finds something to cook, gets excited, invites Daria over for lunch, then they shoot (and eat). Daria adds emotion to each cinemagraph, so that they not only act as a step in the recipe, but an actual finished piece. From strudels to borsch, Daria and Olya make everything look pretty damn good. Maybe it’s Olya’s charm, or maybe it’s Daria’s ability to capture and create beautiful art. Either way, their cinemagraphs make every viewer hungry for more!

The Evolution of Cinemagraphs: GIF to Video

“I believe in cinemagraphs, I really do,” Daria exclaims. Her hope is that this new form of hybrid photography continues to evolve. As time goes on and technology advances, cinemagraphs will grow and adapt. Flixel’s mission is to be an innovator in the visual storytelling realm. With this in mind, we have created an alternative to the GIF which Daria is excited to be embracing. “The GIF format is extremely outdated. It physically pains me to see them on Retina displays and the process of adjusting GIF colors makes me cry sometimes. The Flixel cinemagraph alternative is nice, I hope we’ll be seeing them on more platforms soon.”

View more HD versions of Daria’s strudel series by checking out her Flixel page.

Let us know what you think of Daria’s work in the comments section. And feel free to suggest another cinemagraph creator that should be featured on our blog.