a sharing of readings, thoughts, and photographs
Week 14: Composition: Center Frame Portrait (Center Framed composition is a great way to isolate your subject. Use this knowledge to create a portrait that exhibits loneliness.)
Image submitted in response to Dogwood Photography’s annual 52-week photography challenge.
Week 11 Composition: Fill the Frame: (Using Fill the Frame is a great way to isolate your subject and create interest in your photo. Can you do it with only one color in the frame? Fill the Frame with one color.)
Image submitted in response to Dogwood Photography’s annual 52-week photography challenge.
Today, is one week shy of my year-long photo study project! I began this blogging journey with the intention to explore, experiment, and learn about various aspects of photography.
Through the unparalleled sharing of knowledge Ted Forbes’ offered through his YouTube videos, The Art of Photography, I was able to set out learning about the basics of composition within photography: the rules of thirds, odds, and space; as well as, the elements of lines, shape, simplification, negative space, repeating patterns, sub framing, and triangles. And from this ground work we explored perspective, seeing, low and high angles, tone, color theory, and the characteristics of light.
Was there a specific topic or post that you enjoyed the most, the most beneficial, the most challenging? I would enjoy seeing 1-7 of the images you created during the past year. Let’s tag with #aphotostudy.
As I review the blogs posted in August, I noticed an increased shift away from black and white images to color. I attribute this to the increased “focus” on the various elements of contemplative photography and an intention to seeing what is as opposed to compositional elements.
“…April showers bring May flowers.”
April stirs my slumbering hunger for color to counteract the depressive yellowish-brown, tired, and bare world winter leaves in its wake. Growing up in the western part of Colorado, I wasn’t aware of how brown, dry, and “un-alive” this state can be until I saw Southern California’s multiple shades of green from the window of a plane and felt the amazing touch of the ocean’s breeze as I left the airport.
As I reviewed the blogs posted during April, I found that some of the composition elements that my photo study explored were:
“From now on, before I go shoot, I’ll consult internally to focus on one thing I want to capture, and have that point of departure. It’ll give purpose to my work and me being out there. The advantages are that I’ll learn patience, presence and a deeper sense of observation. This is a powerful and deep message…have a point of departure.” ~Ralph Gibson
My favorite parts of blogging is the sharing of photographs and reading the thoughts you share in the comment section. This ongoing exchange is like an ongoing virtual trip through various countries and ideas that result in an expanding worldview. Thank you.
March is that time of year when the promise of spring begins to be seen in the subtle transitions of yellowish-brown to green, tree buds, bicyclist, and clothing. With the sounds of rivulets created by melted ice and snow, my soul also begins to thaw.
The photo study project for this month included:
rhythm & tone
rule of space
abstract photography
While I understand that tone and rhythm are found with repeating patterns, I still struggle with the transition of these elements from music to photography. Oh well….maybe one day there will a moment of enlightenment in the early morning hours or during a morning shower.
When you look back to March, did you find a theme or a project that guided your photography?
A life review, a year review, an anniversary review, a retirement review, or a graduation review invites us to reflect upon memories and begin a private process of shifting through remembered moments as if they were grains of time in which we place into value-laden categories that generally fall into piles of “good”, “bad”, or “indifferent.” This is the ground work for the emergence of future plans, goals, and yearly resolutions.
Photography, through its visual recording of time, offers a quasi-concrete way of revisiting our yesterdays. It is the coming together of aged and blurry photographs and shared family stories that have formulated and validated the pre-memories of my childhood self beyond my birth certificate and my parent’s marriage certificate. As an aside, I have wondered about the impact cherished family photos have on remembered and shared childhood memories especially in contrast to the time before photography when family stories, diaries, paintings, drawings, songs, biblical records, and cemeteries were memory keepsakes.
At this time, I thought it would be interesting to do twelve photo review blogs of the images created during 2018 as part of the aphotostudy project I began last January. I would love to have you join me and share the photographs that highlight your blogging journey through 2018.
Also, as this year fades into memory and opens a door to 2019, I wish to express my gratitude for all of you who shared your creative endeavors, knowledge, and thoughts throughout the year. May each step you take throughout the coming days be accompanied by love, joy, and peace.
Ted Forbes brings his Master Class Live series to a close by identifying a number of important reminders for amateur and professional photographers:
photographs come from your mind, your talent, your skill level, your experience, your sense of creativity….
…what you are as a photographer is a sum of all your experiences and everything you have done up to this point comprises your skill level.
…the camera doesn’t make images you do
Developing your style as a photographer is:
…an ongoing process…this is something that you get better and better and better and better at, and I think, hopefully, one day you get really good at but it never stops….
Exercise 1: tell a story without words
The absolute goal of this exercise is to tell a story with one image that interacts with a viewer and evokes an emotional response, a reaction, or a change in perspective, thought, or understanding.
A number of various genres that may inspire you are:
Photographers:
Duane Michals @
http://www.dcmooregallery.com/exhibitions/duane-michals-sequences-and-talking-pictures?view=slider#8
Eadweard Muybridg @
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/eadweard-muybridge
Movies and short videos:
Ted Forbes’s Photo Assignment #6
A photo study
a photo study: story photography
Looking forward to your images and thoughts. Let’s tag with #aphotostory.
…what we’re doing here is getting you to think…over the course of a long period of time you may see some of it very quickly, some of it in a matter of weeks, depending on how hard you work, it may be a couple of years before you start really feeling like you defining yourself as a photographer…the catalyst, which I think is really important…what we are looking for right now…is to get you to start thinking differently…
The first part of this Developing Your Personal Style series invited us as photographers to learn how to see and think–visualization. The second encouraged us to utilize the meditative process of concentration and returning to the object as a means to extend our creative endeavors by encouraging us as photographers to “exhaust all possibilities” and “to train the brain to think.”
This week Ted Forbes has offered three separate photo assignments that blend two things together…emulating an identified feeling state of experience and engaging with a subject in such a way as you create a portraiture that represents an identified feeling.
Exercise 1:
The initial photographs we create during this time “…may not be great, but the whole point is [we’ve] got [our heads] thinking and [we’re] getting [our] mind around composition and possibilities and that’s what’s really important…”
Exercise 2:Exercise 3:
This week’s a photo study continues with Ted Forbes’ Master Class series, Developing your own Creative Style. Last week’s blog reviewed and invited us to open ourselves to visualization by remaining in a selected location, without a camera. Within the second episode, he defines meditation and then offers two exercises designed to increase our awareness of mediation within the creative process.
In the world of photography, mindfulness has been described as “meditative” or “contemplative” photography.
While out on a photo walk, my eyes scan the environment, searching for that something (shape, patterns, color, light/shadow, story) that draws my attention or for the perfect background scene. As I move through my environment, my mind begins thinking about a photo article I read earlier or an image created by one of my favorite photographers. I then consider the various camera settings and variations that may help me recreate an image or avoid repeating a past mistake. For a moment or two, I ponder about what kind of image would be a great accompaniment with a particular haiku. I begin composing and designing my next post which then invites me to slip into a fantasy about recognition and praise and then silence an inner smile as unease creeps in with, “Most likely your pictures will not be good enough”
All of this invites me to question, “Am I really on a photo walk or am I engaged in a private screening of movies of my own making?” This mindlessness chatter of thoughts, expectations, and desires are like dense clouds that prevent me from really being present with and seeing the world around me. To see requires a meditative mind.
For some people meditation is shrouded in esoteric mystery. Others understand it through images of a person sitting in the lotus position with eyes half-closed. Others associate it with holiness and spirituality. In its most general sense it is deciding exactly how to focus the mind for a period of time and then doing just that.
In theory, focusing the mind upon an object sounds very easy, but practice acquaints us with a mind that seems to have a will of its own as it drifts from one thought, image, conversation, or memory to other remembrances, conversations, concepts, and thoughts. This internal stream goes on and on like a personal conversation with oneself or a perpetual story upon a movie screen…
…at the point when one realizes that the mind has traveled here and there, one is simply to note this to oneself and with acceptance gently return again to the meditative object…cited: A Meditative Journey, b c koeford
Even though they may not specifically use the word “mindfulness,” many of the great masters talk about photography as awareness of the present moment in which we forget ourselves. We let go of the goals, desires, expectations, techniques, and anxieties that make up who we in order to more fully immerse ourselves into the experience of seeing. We open up our receptive awareness to what the world offers us…. We’re not looking for anything in particular. We’re not going anywhere in particular. We’re not expecting or trying to control anything in particular. Instead, we’re wandering, perhaps rather aimlessly, without a goal or purpose. We’re fully and naively open to the possibility of the unexpected, the unique, the moment when things come together… to the flow of life. Under these conditions, when we let go of the self, “it” appears to us. We don’t find and take the picture. The photograph finds us. It takes itself. We unite with the scene not so we can see a shot we want, but rather what the scene offers. The experience comes to us and the photograph is simply the icing on the cake. cited: http://truecenterpublishing.com/photopsy/mindfulness.htm
In photography, mindfulness is like observing something for the first time, even though you may have looked at it a thousand times before.
With an understanding of the importance of returning, again an again, our concentration to the moment, Ted Forbes invites us to
1. Spend 30 minutes to an hour creating a still life.
2. Spend 30 minutes to an hour with a building or an outdoor space. — If you have chose a building that is in a public space and not a building that may arouse anxiety, a government building.
If you are interested in meditation within the street photography genre, I invite you to visit Keep the Focus website. The Keep the Focus is a project initiated by German Street Photographer Thomas Ludwig who wants to bring the benefits of meditation techniques into street photography. On the site he offers a free ebook. A Meditation Guide for Street Photographers
I enjoy reading your comments and viewing your creative work. Thank you for sharing. Let’s tag with #aphotostudy.
