A Winter Walk at the Beach

I wasn't going to do the homework assignment for this week's Make Films class. Slo-mo, that wasn't my shooting style, and I saw no need for it. Part of this attitude was influenced by the fact that it is winter and so far I have only been shooting inside. There is nothing I could do inside that would need slow motion. Also, Findley and I were working on our next film, and I wanted to put my available time into that.

Tuesday afternoon I watched the class videos, and Xanthe said something that changed my mind. She said, even if it isn't your style or you don't see a need for slo-mo, make the film, watch how things move, learn from it. Point taken. Still I had no idea what I was going to shoot. Then I watched her inspiration films, and had a thought. What if I took you all on a photo walk with me. I have shown you photographs for years of the state park near my house with the big red lighthouse, what if I actually took you on a filmed walk of it.

Thursday morning was clear and still, even if it was only 29 degrees. I loaded up my gear: two dslr cameras, a tripod, a poetry book, my iPhone mount that fits in the hot shoe of my dslr, and my phone. It was fairly early and cold, so there weren't many people around, but the glassy stillness of the water was perfect.

Let's go on a walk...



Xanthe was right. I did learn a lot from filming this. I thought a lot about movement, and found delightful surprises when I was editing it all together. Little nuances that I will bring into future films.

This entire film was shot on my new iPhone 8 Plus. I have been talking about upgrading for the last year. In the last couple of weeks I have been doing lots of research, mostly comparing which would be the best to use in film making. The decision was between the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X. Yes, there is a price difference between the two, but I also budget for a new phone every two years, and it has been three years since my last phone. What it ultimately came down to was how it felt in my hand, and the iPhone 8 Plus felt right.

Only three weeks into the Make Films class, and I already feel I have learned and grown so much.

End Notes

Glen and I have three days to go on our Whole 30 food cleanse. The first week seemed like an eternity, the last three weeks have passed in a blur. I would definitely do this again, it may become a January tradition. 

In researching slo-mo ideas on Pinterest, I came across this YouTube channel. It's all about photographing and filming on your mobile device. These guys are young, hip, and funny.

Have a great week!

Mornings with Fin

Most of you will know this face, either from here on my blog or if you follow me on Instagram, and especially if you follow me on Flickr. He has become easy prey for my 365 photography project this winter. If you haven't met him before, this is Findley, my grand puppy. Although he isn't much of a puppy anymore, since he will be turning two in one short month.

I take care of Findley a couple days a week to help break up his monotony while my daughter works. Plus it helps satisfy my dog itch, a least for the moment.

The one problem with these adorable photographs is that you only see one facet of Fin's character. But trust me, there is so much more to Fin, he really is Mr. Personality, and has been from the beginning.

To showcase his true nature, Fin and I have been working on a short film for the past couple of weeks.

Have a watch...
 

This also happens to fulfill the homework assignment for Week 2 of Xanthe's Make Films e-course.

Three years ago, I tried to take a year long Xanthe film course. I never made it past the first month. I realize now why I failed; I was too new into the journey, I was trying to find out who I was. I wasn't confident enough to stand up and do the assignments my own way, I thought I had to do them like everybody else, but I wasn't like everybody else, so I gave up.

Now at the start of 2018, I know who I am, I know my style, I know what I like and what I don't like. I am hungry to learn more, to take who I am and express it in the truest way.

This course is also teaching me why I struggle with sitting down and writing a story, I need a visual story. It's the same story just told in a different way, with a lot less sitting.

I use to be a daydreamer, creating elaborate stories in my head. This helped to make the boredom of my receptionist job tolerable. I would often carry these daydreams into my sleep, my imagination working on its own while I slept. But then motherhood and sleepless nights replaced deep sleep, and I was too tired during the day to daydream anyway. Eventually, if you stop using your imagination, it goes into hibernation. But it can be reawakened, you just have to start using it again, and that is what making films is allowing me to do - use my imagination again.

I love taking a subject or theme and creating the scenes to go with it. I love editing in iMovie. I love the challenge of finding the perfect music to accompany the film. I love how the films capture the essence of people/dogs and places, so much more than a still photograph can. I am also amazed at how much I can say in a one minute film clip.

Well, it's time to start working on my next film, I have some ideas floating around in my head. Stay tuned...

End Notes

My husband I have completed twenty days of our month of Whole 30. I would say by mid-way through week two it became so much easier. There are still a lot of eggs, and a lot of dishes to wash each meal, but it's worth it. All my clothes are fitting looser, and the tight yoga pants are now the only yoga pants that stay up nice and snug. I still miss my chai lattes, and a bit of sweetness in my drinks. I don't miss melty cheese or bread (too much). We definitely are never hungry.

I just completed day 140 of my 365 Photography Project. January has been a little tough with all the cold and snow. I miss being outside.

Also, if you missed it on Instagram here is my Make Films homework/completed film for Week One. 

Fin is starting to demand a higher salary. I guess I will be going back to the Pet Store for some more biscuits.

Have a great week.

Scene & Story - December 2017

I took this photograph on a particularly cold and snowy day in December. I had been to the gym early and stopped at the grocery store on the way home for a few necessities. I was over by the almond butter and bread when I saw the brightly lit case of fresh(ish) muffins next to the deli counter. I needed something for my 365 Photography project anyway, so why not. Even for "freshish" it was delicious.

Yesterday, when I started thinking about writing this post, I wanted to jump through the screen and devour that double chocolate muffin with those large chunks of granulated, crispy sugar on top. It is best that I don't even begin to describe the chai latte that is in the muted shades of green, blue, and rust hand thrown mug from my favorite potter in Leland, Michigan. Because if I start to think about HOW much I am missing my chai lattes, I will go upstairs and make one right now.

Why this suffering? My husband and I are doing the Whole 30 Lifestyle change in January. If you have never heard about Whole 30 you can check out information here. Basically it is an elimination diet, and a gut reset diet for 30 days. No dairy, no gluten, no alcohol, and no sugar. You don't realize how many things have sugar in them, until you start reading labels.

So, what can you eat? Eggs...lots and lots of eggs. Can I say at Day 6, I am tired of eggs. But you can also eat meat, almost all vegetables and all fruit.

The good thing is that there are so many recipes out there for Whole 30. I think this "diet" has been around for a few years now. Manufacturer's are catching on that this is a niche market, and creating products that are Whole 30 compliant. There is even No Sugar bacon out there now, thank heavens, but you have to get to the grocery store early to get it, because every other Whole 30 participant wants the bacon too.

So, why are we torturing ourselves like this? First, after the holidays and all the sugar, we needed a reset. But also to figure out what might be causing some intestinal issues my husband has been having for the past couple of years, we are pretty sure it boils down to food triggers. Once the 30 days are over, we will slowly reintroduce foods, and note how our bodies react to them. When the food triggers have been figured out, we can then eliminate them all together, or chose when we want to pay the price and have something.

Like I said we are only six days in, and haven't reached the rewarding days yet. We have been through the craving days, the crabby days, the mental fog days, but we are nearing the end of them, so we keep going, taking it one sugarless day at a time, one egg at a time.

Interested in recipes? Check out my Pinterest board of saved recipes here.

End Notes

Adding a new section to share some things that I am working on...

1. To torture myself further, I signed up for a food photography class last week, this is the class. After all, it is January and it is winter, I have to find something to photograph inside, and if I can make eggs look good, maybe I will like them more.
2. Xanthe Berkeley's Make Films class starts this week, so excited. I have already started working on my next film - A Day in the Life of Findley. If you missed my first film, you can view it here.
3. We painted our bedroom over the holidays, it only took us a year since we started talking about it. So proud of ourselves though, we got all my photographs hung on the wall the next day, this never happens. 
4. The kitchen project will be starting soon. Went and picked out countertops, backsplash and flooring last week. 

The End

This is the last Scene & Story Link-Up. Lee and I want to thank every one who joined us in 2017, sharing your stories and your favorite photographs. I feel like we learned a lot about you all through your stories, and hopefully you learned a little about us too. My wish is that you keep taking photographs and thinking about the stories surrounding them, continuing to share them somewhere. 

An InLinkz Link-up

A Haunting Tour

"By resisting the beginner's mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely."                                                                 ~ Ed Catmull - Creativity, Inc. 

On December 27, 2017, I embraced the beginner's mind. I signed up for Xanthe Berkeley's Make Films class that starts January 9, 2018.

I gave myself plenty of time to think about the class, almost a whole month, and I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I knew that I was making the right decision.

In preparation, I took this class on how to use iMovie so that I had some clue what I was doing before the class starts. I know that Xanthe will teach us on iMovie, but sometimes I get so hung up on the technical stuff that I never get to the creating part.

Thanks to that easy to follow class and a trip to Traverse City a couple of weeks ago with my husband; him for work, me for pleasure, I visited the insane asylum with my iPhone and shot some clips to put together into a short little video.



This captures a sense of the buildings that captivate me, more so than a still photograph or even a series of stills could ever do. You feel the eeriness of the broken windows, the tattered curtains blowing in the breeze, the warning signs.

I think I failed in my previous film making attempts for two reasons:

1. I was already pretty good at photography, so I figured I should be pretty good at making films as well. When I wasn't, I viewed it as failure and quit, and went back to what I was good at.
2. I invested money to learn, but I didn't invest time to learn.

Pride and impatience, two things that don't belong in the world, and especially in the creative world. 

Reflections On A Reclaimed Year

The end of the year, such a busy, chaotic season, but I always make time to reflect. It helps me to see how far (hopefully) I have come creatively, things I liked and things I didn't and what I learned from them. Also things I want to pursue further in the year ahead, and things that it is finally time to let go off.

Personal Projects

I have half-heartedly dabbled in personal photography projects before, never lasting long enough to learn what I needed to learn from them. Early in the year, I took a class taught by Pam Korman called The Personal Project You Already Shot. The only personal project that I had enough images of to put together for this class was my self-portraiture. The class was awesome! I finally, finally started printing my images with regularity - I did 8 X 10's so I could lay them out to sequence them for the project. It is helpful to have the physical images to move around. I completed the class, made a book from Blurb, and learned a lot along the way. Is it my finest work ever? No. But I started and I finished, there is a lot to be said for that. I plan to work on more personal projects in 2018, I like the non-rushed feeling of them.

Starting in June, I decided to do some #30dayprojects for the summer, picking one word to focus on and use for inspiration in my photography each month. June's word was flowers. I photographed my own gardens, flowers at local gardens and the farmers market, and then the meadow at a nearby county park.

The Meadow became my personal project for 2017. Starting in late June, I went almost weekly to photograph at sunrise.

I honestly don't remember what July and August's words were.

The Meadow

The meadow taught me so much.

It taught me discipline and joy.

It taught me a love for sunrises and that magic golden light. It taught me to love my tripod, at least on location. It taught me to love my 55-250mm zoom lens, before the meadow I used the 55-250mm maybe once a year. One week I forgot that lens, that taught me something too, I was very uninspired without it. Every lens has a purpose, I just needed to find it.

I loved watching and capturing the changes from week to week.

A paved loop trail lies in the middle of the meadow, I discovered so much by walking both directions of the loop.

I am sure there will be a few visits to the meadow next year, I can't imagine not.

The Blog

Almost six years of blogging, and still I have more to say, more to share, more people to connect with. Each year my blog sees a slow but steady rise in readership, which always amazes me.

The blog posts I enjoy writing most are on sharing what I have learned about photography, either through classes, trial and error, or something I have read.  I also love sharing my travels, whether they are day adventures, solo adventures, date days, or family vacations. All of these are planned again for 2018.

Photography Conference

Photo Credit: Glen Huizenga

I went to my first photography conference combining it with vacation. We had a great time on vacation, and I learned a lot at the conference and met some really talented photographers. I also learned I can play with the rest of the group, I am good enough.

My husband and I also attended a iPhone photography workshop, it was nice to do it together, and see how different our styles are, which is a good thing. I can see us doing more of this in the future.

Words

I developed a love of reading poetry this year thanks to Laurie Wagner and her 27 Days of Wild Writing course. I can see poetry playing a bigger part in my projects in 2018.

I am still doing my daily Morning Pages. At the end of September, I started my fourth year. Each morning I also read the entry from the year before. It is good to read how far, or sometimes not, I have come.

I have definitely felt a stronger pull towards photography this year than writing.

Photographic Style

I have really honed my photographic style this year. I would say it is most prevalent in my iPhone photography and processing. My obsession with leading lines and paths continues.

2018

I am excited to explore 2018 and see what awaits me.

2018 | The One Word

There are many benefits to doing a 365 Day Photography Project. Words like perseverance, determined, focused, discipline, improved, all come to mind. But I have also discovered that I am so focused on getting that one great good photograph for the day that something has become lost. I have lost the ability to tell the story that a series of good photographs can convey.

Last week I put on my bravery bonnet and submitted this photograph to the FaceBook Group that goes with David duChemin's photography class - The Compelling Frame. This is what I wrote to accompany the photograph: 

"For the most part I have been happy to sit back and read what others post, enjoy their photography, occasionally comment and leave it there. You know the scary thing...sharing your own photography, yes I have been trying to avoid it. But, honestly how is that going to help my growth. This week, I took an idea from a challenge in another group I am in and went to the laundromat. I have wanted to do a personal project at a laundromat for the last two years. Monday I conquered fear and the curious looks from other laundromat patrons and took my camera out. First scary obstacle cleared, now the second...sharing a photo here."

I wasn't looking for feedback or praise. I simply wanted to push myself to start sharing in the group. But I got good feedback anyway, even from the instructor himself:

"Very geometric. Very isolated. I find it hard to give good feedback on this one because I don't know where you're at in the learning process, Sarah. If you're closer to the beginning this is an excellent exercise in geometry and in creating a clear subject. If you're further along then I'd like to see the whole series and see if there isn't something there with more story, or more of an emotional hook, or stronger conceptual contrasts, perhaps."

In his response was the WORD that had been hammering on my creative heart for the last few weeks - STORY. I knew exactly what he was talking about and I knew that I had let what made my photography compelling in 2016 slip away - the STORY. 

Once I opened my heart to the Word, I remembered the Adobe Spark stories that I did at the end of 2016, my favorite being the one titled Connections that I shot at our public library with my daughter. But that raised another question that I posed to David along with this photograph...

Question - Is it wrong to set the story up? 

The overwhelming response was: No, it isn't wrong to stage the story. Even when we frame a landscape photograph from our own perspective, we are skewing what we want people to see. 

Again David's response spoke to something deep inside me...

"I’m inclined to side with the masses on this one. I have no problem with setting the stage like this. Cinematographers do it all the time. Novelists put their characters where and how they want. I’ll say it again, where art is concerned: there ain’t no rules and there is no “should” except what you desire and what serves your intent."

It was the single sentence "Cinematographers do it all the time." 

That sentence gave the nod to something else that has been rumbling around in my head. An on-line course taught by Xanthe Berkeley called Make Films. I have a strong urge to explore film making. I feel the experience will contribute greatly to my ability to create stories. The course begins January 9, 2018. I haven't decided for sure yet, but I have written on my desk calendar on Tuesday, December 26 - Decide on Xanthe Film Class!

My One Word for 2018 is STORY...

365 Project

Day 80

On September 3, 2017 I began what I like to think of as my third successful 365 Project, I am only 95 days in, so at this point it is still speculation whether I will actually finish it.

Day 1

I had no intention of starting a 365 Project, it was just a whim, inspired by the photo above. A plate empty of Labor Day snacks casually left on the steps to the deck, while my girl played frisbee with her dog in the sun-warmed, late summer grass. Something about the way the light was hitting plate, the weeds that were poking through the railing, made me want to capture the moment.

Day 4

Capturing that moment made me think about other every day moments that I would like to document to tell the story of a year in my life.

Day 5

My last successful 365 Project began on September 1, 2013 and ended August 31, 2014. I knew I had an album of almost all of those photos on Flickr, so I took a trip down memory lane as I went through the album. Back then I had just begun doing Backroads Adventures, it was fun to see those places again for the first time. Both my golden retrievers were alive in 2013, seeing photos of them was bittersweet. In my new 365 project, Findley, the grand dog, gets to be the star of the show.

Day 59

In the 2013-2014 project, I was part of a group doing it together, that support was priceless. This time I will be doing it alone. In the 2013-2014 project, we didn't have any constraints, just post a photo a day in the Flickr group; any subject, any lens, any camera. This time I wanted a little more structure, maybe not necessarily in subject matter but in something...

Day 43

Since that first Labor Day photo was taken with my Canon and the Lensbaby Velvet 56 Lens, I decided to do the whole project with the constraint of the Velvet 56 Lens. I love the lens and using it for a whole year will definitely force me to know it like the back of my hand. The lens has the capability for macro and also great depth and detail, perfect.

Day 63

Things were going along great until my mom had her emergency heart surgery. Suddenly, I was trapped in a hospital while it rained and rained outside. But...I was already 61 days into this project, and I refused to lose those completed days, I refused to quit, so I did the best I could with what I had.

Day 73

November was definitely "the lows" compared to "the highs" of September and October. Even our family trip to Disney failed to inspire me, but still I refused to quit. I kept pushing on, taking it day by day, knowing that none of these would be my favorites but they were proof of perseverance, and there is something to be said for that. There will be more "lows" and "highs" before this year of 365 photos is over.

Day 37

Winter will present its own set of challenges, the inability to go outside, the cold, the snow.

Day 91

But this is my story, my adventure, my life and it must include all the exhilarating highs and disastrous lows because that is how life's sea billows roll.

If you are interested in seeing all of my 365 photos thus far hopefully this link will work.

**One interesting little tidbit my Lensbaby Velvet 56 lens arrived on my door step one year ago today. We have come a long way together in a year