What started as a simple project to sharpen his photo editing skills has turned into an online sensation for 15-year old Zev Hoover from Massachusetts.
1. Why did Ed start his project?
2. How did his pictures become popular?
3. What's the main inspiration for his work?
4. Who is the character is his pictures?
5. How tall are the characters in his pictures?
6. What motifs or subjects does he use for his pictures?
7. What feeling does he usually evoke in his pictures?
8. Why does he make the pictures?
9. What does Ed say about his pictures and the internet?
My name is Ed Hoover. I take pictures of miniature people and they sort of exploded online recently. I wanted to improve my photo-shop skill so I started the Little Foot Project which is… started as (1) just a way of getting better at photo-shop. After about a year of doing little folk pictures (2) they got picked up by some design blogs and then they just sort of exploded.
(3) Nature is very important in my work and definitely inspires a lot of it and I think a lot of that comes from living where we do.
(4) Alice, my sister, is very often the character in the pictures.
Yeah, that’s fine. Let me just see what sort of the back on you… it’s going to be on…
I find my inspiration… a lot of the time just in the scenes that I photograph, so just thinking about how sort of fun it would be, how different that would be our experience if we were like (5) one and a half or two inches tall because the world would be an entirely different place.
I certainly put a lot of myself into the characters because they almost always are doing some (6) hobby I’m interested in or somehow related to something I happen to be doing at the time.
One of my most popular photographs is of me piloting a paper airplane. I think it’s a popular picture because people like imagining, I mean, I certainly think about how in the photographs I try to evoke a sort of (7) feeling of loneliness because I feel like there’s something about that feeling that can be really very beautiful.
I think it’s certainly possible that being homeschooled has inspired that because you’re alone more often or with fewer people more often certainly than if you were to go to public school.
Why? (8) I make them for my own pleasure because I, I love making them but at the same the comments and feedback certainly really encourages you to keep going because just knowing that people are passionate about it is incredible that, you know, someone else would care about my little project. But the internet has made the world a lot smaller, so anyone who’s interested in this type of thing can now go on and just find my work that easily, whereas (9) without the internet it would, it would be almost impossible. I’d just be… a kid taking pictures somewhere and nobody will know about it really maybe forever.
