Friday, January 26, 2007

Project 2 Journal: Form that gives substance

So Friday's my half-day off work... I work nine-hour days and just four hours from home on Friday. Throw in time saved from the one-and-a-half-hour commute, and that's a solid chunk of five-and-a-half hours on Friday that's pretty much all mine. And the kid's at school and the wife was out of the house today. So I watched House of Flying Daggers. Hong Kong wuxia films are cool, and director Yimou Zhang really knows how to do them.

So, when that was over, I gave thought to this current assignment and dusted off a Beanie Baby polar bear for the project... my wife, who makes jointed "teddy bear friends," doesn't keep much of her finished work around the house (selling it or giving it away), so I had to settle for a commercial product. I thought it would give me some practice for shooting her stuff, and the white would work well for showing gradations of shadow.

In the end, I got some images that fulfilled the letter of the assignment, but they were just boring. I feel like I won't get anywhere with this whole "improve my photography" effort if I go through each project with the goal of meeting the assignment without trying to be creative. I don't expect every shot to be fine art, but it ought to at least be interesting.

I've decided that what I really want for this project is a white rose, or similar flower with large, curvy petals. I think I could do something more interesting with that.

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Thursday, January 18, 2007

Project 2 Planning: Form that gives substance

Project due: 01/22/07

See my Complete Guide to Photography overview to see what these projects are all about.

This project calls for creating an image that portrays depth or volume through light producing a gradation of light to shadow. Lighting can be natural or artificial, with the admonishment to, "Keep lighting simple, not multi-directional."

Again, I've got a pretty broad canvas and it's difficult to choose a subject. But that's the way it's going to be through the first nineteen projects, titled as a group, "The Essential Elements." With my off-camera flash setup and the chilly weather, I think I'll look for something I can do in the studio. Probably a simple still-life. And it'll let me play with my new tripod.

With that in mind, I figure I can knock this out this weekend. Let's make it due this coming Monday, January 22nd, which gives me three or four days. That'll help me catch back up from my slow start.

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Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Project 1b Results: The power of shape

Ooookay, I've got to get moving faster than this if I'm going to get 71 projects done in under a year. But maybe a year is an unreasonable goal, I dunno... I'll reevaluate that later on.

Project 1: Shape

The goal of this assignment was to create an image in which the primary element is "shape." This is a path in the main park in Hesston, KS, just down the road from where I work. It was 23 degrees and breezy, so I braved the elements for just fifteen minutes when I noticed the paths in the park from the road... with the weird sleet/freezing-rain/snow thing we had recently, followed by three days of below-freezing, sunny weather, we ended up with perfectly smooth ice on the paths, but clearing spots in the grass, creating a kind of reverse effect of how snow normally melts. The path stood out, and I looked for one with a pleasing shape. I think this one works.

Project thoughts: I really stewed on this one for a long time, probably making it a lot harder than necessary. With only "shape is the dominant element" to guide me, that's a pretty blank canvas. I kept forgetting that Hedgecoe's examples had a lot of non-shape elements... I'm tempted to say that he didn't have much in his portfolio in which shape was really the dominant theme. In his examples, he had to explain why the other elements weren't crowding out "shape" as the most prominent. I kept eliminating ideas because the real interest came from things like repetition of shape or pattern. I think I was too narrow in my interpretation for most of the week.

When given a blank canvas, my mind goes blank, and I had a lot of trouble coming up with something that wasn't just a shape... something at least remotely artistic. With the cold and snow, I wasn't inclined to shoot outside, but I really wasn't coming up with anything inside either (not to mention that we're moving stuff around in the house and there's not much room).

What did I learn from this assignment? Get shooting. I spent far too much time wondering what I might shoot and not enough time shooting. Some of that was just a time issue... with 9-hour days and a 1.5-hour commute, I just don't have that much time, let alone daylight, to shoot during the week right now. The other thing I learned was not to interpret the assignments too narrowly... that choosing one element to dominate doesn't mean having to exclude the other elements.

I'm glad to have that behind me and am looking forward to Project 2, where the assignments start to become more complex.

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Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Project 1a Results: The power of shape

Okay, so I got half the assignment done, shooting a silhouette. I picked two to share and review. Your thoughts on these images are welcome, and anything you have to say will be encouraging.

Project 1: Silhouette 1

This is a church east of Hesston, KS. I drove out over lunch in a nearly-last-minute attempt to find something to shoot, so this is shot against a winter noon-day sun. Fortunately it's early January, so the sun wasn't too far overhead, though I did have to get in closer than I wanted.

I over-exposed the scene for a silhouette... I don't have any experience shooting them, and this was a white church with lots of ambient light even in the shade. So I tweaked it in post-processing.

Project thoughts: The point of this project was to start developing an eye for shape, and I find it interesting that I never saw the point on the tower until I downloaded the images. And while I knew that powerline was there, I mentally erased it and didn't think much of it... but it certainly stands out here.


Project 1: Silhouette 2

This was the really-last-minute attempt, the branches of a downed tree on a side road near Beck's Farm (a peach orchard) south of Newton, KS, taken shortly after sunset... about 5:45. (Now my wife knows why I was late to dinner.) I got the exposure right on this one... no post-processing.

Project thoughts: This one is a little busy, but I kind of like it. There were less-busy shots in the set, but they were all kind of blah. There's a lot of texture to the branches that you don't really see in direct light. This project would have been easier to do in the spring, with sunflowers and the like in bloom.

I'll try to shoot the second half of the project (a non-silhouette in which shape is the dominant element) in the next couple of days. I don't have any really good ideas, though I'm thinking Exploration Place as a bit of a cop-out. (I could have shot the Keeper as my silhouette, but hasn't everyone shot the Keeper in silhouette by now?)

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Sunday, January 07, 2007

Project 1 Planning: The power of shape

Project due: 01/10/07

See my Complete Guide to Photography overview to see what these projects are all about.

This first project is about seeing and utilizing shape as a image element. Two photographs are called for: a silhouette and a lit image in which the dominant element is a shape.

I've been thinking about this one for longer than I expected, in part because weather and life aren't cooperating. Yeah, I could set up the lights and just shoot an indoor silhouette, but that seems like cheating. I'm looking to create "good" images, and not just fulfill the letter of the assignment.

I've been thinking a lot about "pre-planning" or "pre-visualizing" the shot, and not just going out and wandering around until I see something to shoot. But I'm starting to wonder if the latter isn't such a bad thing.

I can come up with a lot of ideas and I can see in my head the final results... none of which are easy to carry out because of things like "sunflowers aren't in bloom right now" to "there's never a hawk on the right side of the road on the drive to work when you need one." I'm hoping for the hawk, though. But I figure I'll shoot several silhouettes before I move on... it's something I've never bothered to do before.

The second image is more difficult for me to pre-visualize... it's a very wide-open assignment. Part of the reason I chose to do this series of projects was to narrow my field of choices, but this isn't very narrow yet. I can find something though... buildings seem like an easy out.

So I'm going to try to complete this assignment by this Tuesday. I'm not sure how much time I'll need for these, but I'll have to keep them fairly fast-paced if I'm going to do the whole book in under a year. That's one project about every five days. But working under a deadline is part of the point. So I should have something to show by Wednesday if everything goes according to plan.

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Complete Guide to Photography: Project Overview

CGtP Cover

John Hedgecoe's Complete Guide to Photography is essentially a workbook. The first section is a general overview of the camera, light and exposure... but only enough to get you started. The bulk of the book is made up of 71 projects, each one taking two pages with a fairly short overview of the subject and several photographs with descriptions and comparisons.

Oddly, and probably because of space reasons in the two-page layout, the author never really gives an explicit assignment in the form of, "Create an image using texture as the dominant theme." It's just assumed that, if you're reading the project on texture, the point is to take photos that use texture as the dominant theme. I'd rather have something a little more straight-forward, but I'll work with what I've got.

The 71 projects of are divided into six chapters.


The essential elements

People

Places

Still life

The natural world

Action

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About The Raven's Photo Workshop

Updated: 01/24/2008

I'm a novice photographer, and this blog is about my ongoing self-assignments... my "personal workshop" to keep me working on developing my skills. It's mostly here as a personal journal of my progress, but it's public to share with my friends and family and my immediate photographer peers around Wichita, KS.

I welcome any and all feedback, whether you know me or not.

I started photography with a Pentax K-1000 over fifteen years ago, and I fell away from it when my family acquired a point-and-shoot digital. Film was too expensive, the digital was too restrictive. At the end of 2006, I purchased a Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D) and a couple lenses, and set out to rediscover photography. I thought working through a formal set of assignments and keeping a formal journal of the process would help me improve and keep a record of my improvement.

I started working through John Hedgecoe's Complete Guide to Photography, but found it less than useful. Instead of getting me out and working, I found it frustrating. It doesn't actually contain clear assignments, despite being a "workshop" and I found myself working too hard to do things like, "shoot something that shows texture". I keep trying to turn simple ideas into "art" and get frustrated with the assignment not being inspiring enough. So instead of encouraging me to get out of my chair and shoot, I sat in my chair and pondered the "perfect" shot for the vague assignment.

I'll probably return to the idea later, but for right now, I'm hanging out with the Wichita Flickr group and shooting whatever they guide me into, and I'm working on projects shooting things that interest me.

I also found a book I like much better than Hedgecoe, (The Photographer's Eye, by Michael Freeman, a revision of an earlier book I own) and I may work my way through it, applying the ideas to the current projects I'm working on.

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