Scene & Story - September 2017

September marks the start of my favorite season ~ the Learning Season. I never enjoyed it as a kid, but I loved it as a mother.

I was not an outstanding student, especially in math, there I slipped to the bottom of the pool; but English, English was my life saver. I understood and excelled in reading and given time, I probably would have excelled at writing as well.

When September started this year, I felt compelled to get back to some writing exercises. I scoured my board on Pinterest that held photography/writing prompt lists and picked the one that felt right. Conveniently it was a September Photo A Day list, but I picked it because I loved the first prompt - Music. On September 1st, I sat down at my desk with my word and revived a writing exercise I learned a couple of years ago when I took Laurie Wagner's writing class Telling True Stories. The writing practice is called Wild Writing, fifteen minutes of continuous writing on your chosen word or phrase, pen never leaving the page. Don't try to make sense or correct or edit yourself, just write.

I spent the first two days writing about how I didn't want to write, how I would rather go check the laundry or wash the dishes. In the final two minutes, I would write something about Music. On the third day, I had cleared all that other junk out of my head and could focus on writing something about music. I stuck with the topic day after day as more and more memories continued to emerge. The best one was remembering music class in elementary school, and the blue milk crate that contained the fun instruments like finger cymbals, maracas, and my favorite - the little silver triangle with the silver striker. I even remembered my music teacher's name, which led to a Google search. I learned she had passed away in 2008, had never married but was an awesome aunt, and spent most of her years teaching 2nd grade, not music.

While I dip my toe in and out of writing, I remain fully submerged in photography, so I thought it would be fun to find a little silver triangle and striker and have my daughter hold it so I could photograph it to go with the story I was writing. Of course, I couldn't have a brand new triangle, which I am sure I could have easily found. Oh no, I needed a vintage silver triangle, so off to the antique store I went, and after five antique stores I still hadn't found one.

About this time an email came into my inbox from Laurie Wagner. She was starting a brand new, self-paced e-course called 27 Days of Wild Writing. A daily video with a daily writing prompt for 27 days. Well sign me up, I wasn't getting very far on my own. I am currently on Day 19 and when I finish, I plan to start all over again. What I wrote last month on a prompt will be completely different than what I write this month. That's the beauty and the frustration of life, it is always changing.

So what does the photograph at the beginning of this post have to do with this story? Absolutely nothing, or maybe everything...

An InLinkz Link-up

Velvet 56 Love

Late last fall, I purchased the Lensbaby Velvet 56. Lensbaby was having a pre-Christmas sale on some of their lens. I have always been intrigued by them, but wasn't sure if I was ready to be that brave and different. The sale was too good to resist (Merry Christmas to me), so I clicked "purchase", and waited for my new lens to arrive.

The demo video that sold me on it, showed beautiful, shallow depth of field portraits of people, hmm... self portraits? My daughter? and of dogs...Findley?

As soon as it arrived via UPS, I sliced open the box and put it on my Canon 6D. Findley...where was Findley? What I wasn't prepared for, was the manual focusing, and I total skipped over the fact that I had to manually set the aperture. Let me say, manually focusing on an energetic puppy, well...the photo says it all.

I slid the Velvet 56 into an empty lens slot in my camera bag, and returned to my 35mm auto-focus lens. The Velvet 56 would stay in the camera bag until this month.

April, a new season, and new subjects to photograph. I dug the Velvet 56 out of the camera bag. I did not go looking for Findley, instead I went to the garden center.

I do get frustrated with not being able to do something well, but rarely do I give up, so I watched some Lensbaby videos and actually learned what to do with the Velvet 56, there was that bit about manually setting the aperture.

A successful outing at the garden center, and I was ready to try the Velvet 56 on a trip. I was tagging along with my husband on a business trip to my favorite part of northern Michigan. A good place to try the lens, on things I know and love, and have photographed many, many times. I was looking for a different approach to these places.

The Velvet 56 stayed on my camera the whole time we were gone. This time the 35mm stayed in the camera bag.

I still have more to learn, more videos to watch, and more practice is needed, but I love the look I am achieving. The Velvet 56 sees the world the way I do - one spot of sharp focus and blurry around the edges.

My husband and I are leaving for vacation in a couple of weeks. We are going through upstate New York, to Boston and to a photography conference in another part of Massachusetts. I have a feeling the Velvet 56 will be getting a lot of use.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism seemed behind me, but that is only because I have become fairly good at what I do.

Last week I began something new - Art Journaling. Perfectionism returned like the nasty, caught in your throat slime that it is, slowly choking me until all my creativity was extinguished.

One of the things I want to reclaim this year is making with my hands. I have tried collage work at various times over the past two years. Generally, I would get to the halfway point in a project and then my love for photography would return and the half-finished collage piece would sit on my art desk for months while I was at the beach, in the woods or exploring old buildings with my camera, completely captivated again by my first love.

Part of the problem with collage pieces is that I start too big. Smoothing drywall compound on 11" X 14" wood panels, letting that dry for the required 24 hours then coming back and staring cluelessly at it.

This year I am determined to try again, but on a smaller scale. I went to Hobby Lobby and purchased a cute, little red 5" X 5" art journal.

Being an explorer I love maps. Recently I purchased an old map of Lake Erie at an antique story. It was perfect for my first project. I got busy measuring, cutting, gluing and stamping. Loving what I was creating, I was ready to put the finishing touch on it - a stamped date for the date created. I inked up the stamp, did some sample stamps on the craft paper that covered my desk, one final ink and I was ready to commit. After pressing firmly I lifted the stamp, despair filled me. Only half the date had stamped on the paper due to the uneven, bumpy layers of paper and glue. I walked away.

An hour later I came back, picked up the matching color marker and tried to fix the error. It looked exactly like that - that I had tried to fix the error. I loved everything else about the pages, but that one mistake was the only thing I saw. I tried to embrace the concept of each piece having one mistake in it, it wasn't working.

I went back to Hobby Lobby and bought a new, smaller date stamp. I bought two new art journals. I began again, creating two new pages in a 5.5" X 8.5" journal. I loved one page, hated the other. My 52 week project was held up for a whole week as I struggled with these pages. My theme for the week was Being a Maker. Success was not coming as a maker.

Then it dawned on me, I didn't start out good at photography, I got good from lots and lots of practice. Why did I think I would be good at Art Journaling and collage pieces without putting in the practice time.

Constraints

I pulled into the parking lot just as the golden light crept over the edge of the horizon.

I had discovered this sparkling jewel of a park this past spring while participating in an eight-week group walking program. I had explored the lower half of this park in years past, in the autumn and winter months. Always avoiding the warm summer months, certain that a large snake was lurking somewhere in the mown grassy paths waiting to slither across my foot and up my pant leg. The upper part of this park, where I was now, had installed wide, paved paths in the last couple of years. So much easier to spot a snake without the hinderance of grass.

Climbing out of the car, I reached into the back seat to unzip my camera bag. It had been so long since I had been out shooting landscapes with my big camera. I knew my camera bag contained my camera, which might seem obvious, but trust me I have unzipped that bag before to discover than I had left my camera sitting on my desk at home. I also knew there was a picture card in the camera, that has been forgotten before too, and I had an extra battery, just in case. 

What I hadn't given any consideration to was what lenses were in my bag. As I unzipped my bag, I remembered the last time I had used my camera was a few weeks before when I had done some head shots for a friend of mine at her house. There were not going to be any wide-angle, landscape loving lenses in that bag.

Just the day before I had watched a youtube video by David duChemin on Seeing More Creatively in your photography by embracing constraints. Pick one lens and shoot with it for the whole day. So I searched through my bag and settled on the 55-250mm telephoto lens. I have no idea why that lens was even in the bag, it definitely wasn't for the head shots, and it is probably one of my least used lenses.

My photography has run into so many constraints this summer; the heat and humidity, too much sun, not enough time, there is never enough time. I decided to finally embrace a constraint and see what this challenge could bring me. I put the 55-250mm lens on my camera and set off down the wide, paved, snake-free path.

What constraints have you been dealing with lately?

Waiting

I sit next to my dad in the hospital waiting room. He is awaiting an ultrasound procedure to see if the swelling in his feet and right hand is being caused by a blood clot. A blood clot that could have happened post shoulder surgery. A week into recovery, his shoulder is doing as good as it can being confined in a sling 24/7 for the next eight weeks, but now there is this pesky swelling. He has had blood clots post surgery before, so there is reason to be concerned.

In the corner of the room a suspended television broadcasts The Weather Channel. On the screen are images of the flooding in West Virginia; whole houses floating by in rivers that have overrun their banks, houses where the water has receded but left behind three inches of mud on the main floor, bridges washed away and people stranded at Walmarts and McDonalds, sleeping in store conference rooms and in booths meant for enjoying Big Macs and french fries. On the television the scene changes from the floods of the east to the wildfires of the west; rubble where ten houses once stood, people standing next to the television crews car being interviewed about how they had lost everything, including their cell phones.

As we watch these images, my dad turns to me and says "I wish I had traveled more, seen some of the things you have seen: Yellowstone, Glacier, The Rocky Mountains. But I wouldn't want to travel on those crazy expressways, I would want to take the back roads." In my best loud voice I say "It isn't too late dad, you could still do it." He looks at me and says "Oh Sarah, at 81 it is too late".

They call my dad's name and off he goes for his ultrasound. I rub my right shoulder, feeling the ache of the constantly changing temperatures.

My dad comes back and we wait for the ultrasound results to be read and the decree from his surgeon.

As we pull up in from of my parents' house an half hour later my dad says "I'm sorry I spoilt your day for nothing". I said "You didn't spoil anything, we found out you just need to stay away from salt, and wait for the swelling to go down, and the best part, I got to spend time with you".

Evolution of a Photographer

The words have left me. Whenever that happens I turn back to the thing that started me on this creative journey in the first place...photography.

When I quit my retail job in September 2011 to pursue my passion for photography, I thought I would take a couple of photography classes, practice a little and I would be good. I did not know about the long and winding journey that lay ahead. It is probably good that I didn't know or I may have never started.

It is now the spring of 2016, four and a half years after I started on my photography journey, and I finally feel confident to say I am a photographer when a stranger asks me "What do you do?" It helps that I have the work to back it up, in the form of a couple of published pieces, and a worthy Instagram account.

Writing this post I finally found a good reason to keep my less-than-perfect early work, because when I look at this I can see how far I have really come.  MY goodness...

Confession time - I have ALWAYS hated taking still life photos of flowers, and now in the midst of, what seems like, my hundredth e-course I know why...it isn't about the flower. It is about the light, the lines, the angle, the camera settings, and the post-processing. It is about portraying emotion within the frame.

In the beginning I compared myself to everyone, and everyone was better than me, or so I thought. If they were better than me, it was only because they had already put in hundreds of hours of practice and had earned the place they were at.

It would have been so easy to give up a year into it, when I was still far from good. But if I quit I not only let myself down, I also let my family down who had supported me whole-heartedly into this passion pursuit. So I kept going, chasing the specific things I needed and wanted to learn. It wasn't an easy journey, it isn't a quick journey, but it is a worth-while journey to that place of confidence and being good enough.

Ladder Love and a Lesson

I have been delaying doing this week's lesson for our Flickr group - The Visual Workbench - for a couple of reasons.

1. I was impatiently waiting for the summer people to have their last hurrah on Labor Day. Labor Day is over and they have gone home. Yay!
2. The instructions for the lesson were a little long, and I was having a hard time remembering them every time I was out shooting. I solved that problem by printing out the instructions and carrying them with me in my coat pocket.

Here is the first part of the instructions, the part I was planning on tackling first:

• Concentrate on one element. The simpler the scene, the better. Now make six to eight different photographs, changing only the position of the camera relative to your subject. Get higher. Get lower. Move left. Move right. Walk around it. The element might not move in a hundred years, but you have astonishing control over its shape relative to the frame.
• Study those six to eight frames. How does the energy and balance change? How does the shape of that primary element change as your position changes?

 Here is my primary element and my simple scene...

I am in love with these orange ladders that are on the edge of the pier at our State Park.

This is shooting from the left to the right of my element, the sun, if it was out, would be behind me.

Shooting from above. It makes me a little nervous to be so close to the edge.

Changing energy and direction, shooting from right to left of my element. I would never shoot this direction normally, because the sun, if it was shining, would be shining directly into my face. It also feels more chaotic shooting this direction, even without people, compared to the peaceful scene shot from the opposite direction.

If I hadn't done this exercise, and studied this one element, I might not have noticed the thin piece of rope tied to the ladder. This additional element became my favorite part of the photographs.

It is still the surprise discoveries and the little details that delight me the most.