Until the last six months of my life, I truly believed that I did not have an artistic bone in my body. I thought I was "crafty" but not "artistic", a distinction that I still think is very important. Then I fell in love with photography and discovered that I had some talent at it, and all of a sudden, I was thrown into this realm of trying to produce fine art without knowing what fine art really is. I'm not the most self-assured person, so this insecurity has been really difficult to work through while still trying to produce what I need for class and try to grow as an artist. So I ended up having a really long conversation with my professor yesterday about this and other things related to this, and I have to say, I feel so much better. Sometimes that doubt and insecurity gets the better of you and prohibits you from growing, so I'm really determined not to let that happen.
I think it's interesting, too, the way talent works. I may not be really old, but I definitely feel set in my ways. But as a youth I was taught that we are all given talents and that there are some that you are able to develop. I just never thought that I would stumble across a new talent in my thirties. I guess I thought that all of my divinely given talents had manifested themselves before this point and it was up to me to develop any other talents that I wanted to cultivate. But that's contrary to how I feel about my talent in photography. Of course I need to develop this talent, it's not as though I'm producing artwork that is worthy of a gallery or museum, but I strongly believe that I have a talent in this that has been given to me that I'm stumbling upon at this point in life. So it's been a few interesting days as I've been pondering over these thoughts and working to improve my photography.
Throughout the semester, we have some assignments where we're not given an assignment, we just have to produce five photographs of whatever we want. They can stand on their own or be part of a series, we have to decide. There was recently a horribly tragic accident on the highway near my home in which two 16 year old boys lost their lives. Driving by the accident site the next day, I wanted to go out and photograph it as a way of honoring them.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Always learning
I had the opportunity to do my first paid shoot last month, and I was very excited for the end result, especially since it's a newborn and I'm anxious to please her parents. I was all done with the editing and burned a cd to give to the parents when I came across some fun new editing techniques in photoshop that I just had to try out. Well, needless to say, I had to re-edit all the photos before I give them up to the parents. My plan had already been to post them here in a couple days, but my husband started giving me a hard time about the fact that it's been a couple weeks since I've posted. I hesitate to post because all that I have to post about is photography, but it really feels like that's all I do, so I guess that's going to continue for the next couple of months until I finish this photography class.
Back when I was having babies, it wasn't the trend to do these beautiful photos of your new baby, but I really wish it had been. This is a phase that lasts such a short period of time that I absolutely love to be able to document it for the parents in such a beautiful way. I certainly hope this mommy and daddy love the photos of their baby girl as much as I enjoyed taking them.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Controlling Color
Every time we take a photograph, we think about color. More precisely, our subconscious tells us how we feel about the photograph based on the colors in it. In order to become a better photographer, we then have to learn what the colors mean and then learn how to control the color in a photograph in order to get the feeling we desire from that photograph. So our assignment for color was to take 20 photographs focusing on each color on the color wheel. I will be the first to admit that some of my ideas fell short, but such as it is when you have to come up with six different ideas for one assignment, at least half of my ideas were pretty decent. The biggest challenge is that we were not allowed to take a photograph of something that was the color we were working with just for color's sake, we really had to bring the right feelings to a photograph with the color in it.
Green was one I had a hard time with as you can see. Green is supposed to be soothing, refreshing, and evoke feelings of peace, harmony, ecology and nature. I really couldn't come up with anything interesting, so I just went to a place that I knew was really green and tried to take some interesting photos. It works for the feelings I was trying to go with, but it's pretty literal as well, so I'm sure my professor wasn't too thrilled with these ones.
While I was working on this assignment, we were at my mom's house visiting her after her surgery, so I thought I would get my blue done. Blue is supposed to be peaceful, confident, cool, trustworthy, and remind us of the sky and ocean. I knew I couldn't just take a photo of the ocean itself, so I took some interesting photos of the jetty that separates Long Beach from Seal Beach. While out shooting for this one, it was quite an adventure too as I ended up slipping on the jetty while my camera was over my shoulder (and a lens in my pocket). Luckily I fell to the other side to protect my camera, but bruised my hip and shoulder pretty badly. My dad teased me about worrying more about my equipment than myself, I just told him that at least I have insurance for my body, not my equipment. After all that, I was pretty pleased with my photos, only to have my professor say that the ocean and sky weren't blue enough (and joked about how I should have gone to Hawaii--uh, yeah, he's hilarious). I guess that's what you get in So Cal when all the beaches are dirty and you have to wait for the marine layer to burn off in the morning before you get a blue sky. Maybe I should have just slept in.
I had trouble coming up with ideas for purple as well, but I found this great textured blanket at the store on clearance for real cheap, so I thought about having Lindsay dress up as a queen. Purple is calming, royal, eccentric, spiritual, wealth, and well liked, so obviously I was going for royal here. I thought it was kind of a cute idea until my professor took a look and told me it was too literal. Oh well. Lindsay had fun posing for me here (for the first few minutes anyway).
Now getting to some of my better ideas, I saw this bright orange shirt and sunglasses and knew I had to buy them for Lindsay to pose for me in since she's such a cutie (not that the other two aren't, but she's more likely to pose for me than they will). So orange is warm, energy, flamboyant, happiness, stimulating, and attention-getting. I was going for flamboyant here with her sitting in a chair in the swimming pool in February, but after taking a look at the photos, I realized they didn't work as well as I wanted to because February in Arizona looks like summer in other places so you don't have any indication that it's not a nice summer day here. For the record, the pool is absolutely freezing in these photos and I know that for a fact because I had to get down into the pool in order to the the perspective I needed for these photos. So, good idea, but it fell flat a little.
Yellow I came up with the idea for pretty quickly, but struggled a little with where I was going to do the photos and who I was going to ask to pose for me. I ended up asking my friend Tricia to model for me (who you might remember from last semester's photos as well). She's so beautiful it makes it easy to take nice photos, and we had a fun time out there making each other laugh so it was fun (for me anyway). Yellow is positive, optimistic, happy, energetic, sun, and it fatigues the eye. I wanted to go for something happy and sunny, so we ended up with some yellow flowers and my friend. I'll have to post more of her photos in another post because so many of them turned out nice, but I haven't had the chance to edit them yet. This one is my favorite though.
Finally is red, and this is the one I did the print of and turned in. This was the one I came up with the idea for almost instantly and I knew I wanted to light it with mostly candles, so there's very little light in these photos (which, unfortunately blew out the back of the photo where the candles were in the frame). I wanted to go back and shoot this again to get the candles out of the background, but I messed up the lighting the second time by trying to add too much light which really changed the way the photo felt. I thought that I'd be able to replicate what I had done before since I had done it once and learned that it's almost impossible to take the same photograph over again even if you control as many of the variables as you can. In any case, red is intense, love, attention-getting, confident, hot, and a stimulant. I thought this photo fit the bill on all of these counts and added a few elements that made it just a little different than a standard love photo.
So now that we've learned more about color, hopefully I can really start paying attention to color in my photos and make them better by making better choices about what color to use in different places. As challenging as this assignment was, I was really happy that we focused on this.
Green was one I had a hard time with as you can see. Green is supposed to be soothing, refreshing, and evoke feelings of peace, harmony, ecology and nature. I really couldn't come up with anything interesting, so I just went to a place that I knew was really green and tried to take some interesting photos. It works for the feelings I was trying to go with, but it's pretty literal as well, so I'm sure my professor wasn't too thrilled with these ones.
While I was working on this assignment, we were at my mom's house visiting her after her surgery, so I thought I would get my blue done. Blue is supposed to be peaceful, confident, cool, trustworthy, and remind us of the sky and ocean. I knew I couldn't just take a photo of the ocean itself, so I took some interesting photos of the jetty that separates Long Beach from Seal Beach. While out shooting for this one, it was quite an adventure too as I ended up slipping on the jetty while my camera was over my shoulder (and a lens in my pocket). Luckily I fell to the other side to protect my camera, but bruised my hip and shoulder pretty badly. My dad teased me about worrying more about my equipment than myself, I just told him that at least I have insurance for my body, not my equipment. After all that, I was pretty pleased with my photos, only to have my professor say that the ocean and sky weren't blue enough (and joked about how I should have gone to Hawaii--uh, yeah, he's hilarious). I guess that's what you get in So Cal when all the beaches are dirty and you have to wait for the marine layer to burn off in the morning before you get a blue sky. Maybe I should have just slept in.
I had trouble coming up with ideas for purple as well, but I found this great textured blanket at the store on clearance for real cheap, so I thought about having Lindsay dress up as a queen. Purple is calming, royal, eccentric, spiritual, wealth, and well liked, so obviously I was going for royal here. I thought it was kind of a cute idea until my professor took a look and told me it was too literal. Oh well. Lindsay had fun posing for me here (for the first few minutes anyway).
Now getting to some of my better ideas, I saw this bright orange shirt and sunglasses and knew I had to buy them for Lindsay to pose for me in since she's such a cutie (not that the other two aren't, but she's more likely to pose for me than they will). So orange is warm, energy, flamboyant, happiness, stimulating, and attention-getting. I was going for flamboyant here with her sitting in a chair in the swimming pool in February, but after taking a look at the photos, I realized they didn't work as well as I wanted to because February in Arizona looks like summer in other places so you don't have any indication that it's not a nice summer day here. For the record, the pool is absolutely freezing in these photos and I know that for a fact because I had to get down into the pool in order to the the perspective I needed for these photos. So, good idea, but it fell flat a little.
Yellow I came up with the idea for pretty quickly, but struggled a little with where I was going to do the photos and who I was going to ask to pose for me. I ended up asking my friend Tricia to model for me (who you might remember from last semester's photos as well). She's so beautiful it makes it easy to take nice photos, and we had a fun time out there making each other laugh so it was fun (for me anyway). Yellow is positive, optimistic, happy, energetic, sun, and it fatigues the eye. I wanted to go for something happy and sunny, so we ended up with some yellow flowers and my friend. I'll have to post more of her photos in another post because so many of them turned out nice, but I haven't had the chance to edit them yet. This one is my favorite though.
Finally is red, and this is the one I did the print of and turned in. This was the one I came up with the idea for almost instantly and I knew I wanted to light it with mostly candles, so there's very little light in these photos (which, unfortunately blew out the back of the photo where the candles were in the frame). I wanted to go back and shoot this again to get the candles out of the background, but I messed up the lighting the second time by trying to add too much light which really changed the way the photo felt. I thought that I'd be able to replicate what I had done before since I had done it once and learned that it's almost impossible to take the same photograph over again even if you control as many of the variables as you can. In any case, red is intense, love, attention-getting, confident, hot, and a stimulant. I thought this photo fit the bill on all of these counts and added a few elements that made it just a little different than a standard love photo.
So now that we've learned more about color, hopefully I can really start paying attention to color in my photos and make them better by making better choices about what color to use in different places. As challenging as this assignment was, I was really happy that we focused on this.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
A special day
Eleven years ago today, I woke up in all kinds of pain. And even though it was my hardest and longest labor, my little boy has brought so much joy to our lives every day since then. Happy birthday Cole buddy, I hope you have a great day. I have so many hopes for you this eleventh year, that you will be able to control some of the forces that are bringing you down and that you'll be able to learn how to shine in school again. Mostly, I just hope that you are able to be happy and be more of the sunshine that you have always been in my life. I love you more than words can say.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
More Photography
I thought it was interesting to find this Gatorade bottle half filled with dirt among the dead branches here. |
It seems that all I've been doing lately is photography. This class is so much more intense than the last class, and so much harder, so all I've been doing is working on my assignments just to get them turned in on time. Well, that and a fifth grade biography project that we've been working on every day for the last three weeks, but I digress. These photos are for my second Flickr assignment that we had, and I really liked some of these images. This is an area I found near my house and I loved just finding all this stuff out there.
I thought this was really interesting with the building falling down and the sink in the middle, like this building has just been left to return to nature. |
This I thought was interesting because it's just this big slab out there with no building around it |
I really liked the color here and the end of the railroad tracks. |
This was my favorite. I love how the stick is coming out of the pole like a "tree" and the colors were just beautiful. It had a great sense of irony with this one. |
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