Project 52 - Week 1

I reaveal what lies below the surface.

This exercise challenged me.   I landed on and am going to stick with this vision statement for a while to see how it affects my shooting.    For the image assignment, I liked my idea, which was to show something inside a drop of water.  I decided on a heart, and made the heart cut out in black foam and mounted it to my flash with a red gel.   I put a water drop on a piece of foam and set it up to take the shot.

Ran into quite a few problems.   First, Sony NEX-5n is inferior to trigger a flash.   Second, the main macro lens I have is a Pentax lens that I can use with my NEX (would have been better off using the Pentax K100D).  This lens says "macro" on it, but I'm not sure how you can get close enough to anything to take a photo when the minimum focusing distance is too long.   I couldn't get close enough to the water droplet, and thus the heart looks much more like a fire than a heart.   Doesn't look bad, but the resolution is so low because I had to crop it significantly.

Lesson learned:   Buy a real macro prime lens for my Nikon, so I can use my Pocket Wizards.

Project 52 - Week 1 Preliminary

Saw an interesting project -- Project 52 - that seems a good exercise for me to work through for my photography. The assignment for the first week is about who I am by developing a vision statement and capturing a photo that matches that. This post is going to be a journal of miscellaneous thoughts working through that. It may be rough, but doing something is better than making excuses!


A collection of thoughts on vision statements:

• "I want to travel around the world and make pictures of special features of places and people that I meet."
• I capture something deeper than/below the surface.  To capture what lies beneath

Now onto the exercises taken from the blog:

- Pull the 5 images that you love the most. NOT the ones that got the most comments on Flickr or other Hipstamatic, the ones YOU love the most.

Wow.  This is a tough one.  I looked through quite a few of my images and I have chosen some that I love a lot.

July 6, 2007.  This is an old Uyghur man demonstrating how to use a loom in at museum in Kashgar, China.  I like the warmth of the image and the action of using the loom.  The image reveals a glimpse of traditional culture.       

June 30, 2009.  Big Island of Hawaii, sunset from Saddle Rd.   While taken from a small point and shoot camera, seeing the sunset occurring below the cloud cover was breathtaking.  I love the cactus framed by the triangle of sunset.   

April 2, 2011.  Portrait of Yan.   This is one of my favorite portraits of my friend dressed in a qipao.   It is a very tender and sweet.  The composition is tight and her hands fit naturally in her pose.

To be continued.  This is a thoughtful exercise and will take me some time....

- What do they all have in common… write it down.
What is different about each of them… write it down.

- How would you describe those images to someone who couldn’t see them.

- Do the images that mean the most to you reflect something you are personally interested in? No right or wrong answer, just think about the relationship between you as a person, and you as an artist.

- If you had an opportunity to do any kind of photography, and be paid well for it, what would it be?

Traveling around the world taking pictures that reveal special facets of culture.

- What do you think about when you think about photography? (Gear? Shooting? Experience? The Image? Recognition?) – again, there is no right or wrong answer.

- When people describe your photography, what terms do they use? What terms would you want them to use to describe your work?

- List three photographers who you would love to shoot like. Not as a copy, but as an influence/mentor.

• Erich Chen - I love the simplicity of Erich's images.  Even watching his youtube videos show the care he takes to make images that really hold the spirit of the people he is shooting.  His natural light photography and compositions are moving.
• Ayie Permata Sari - This is a travel photographer I ran across on 500px who has some truly magnificent cultural images.   
• Peter Hurley - Love that he shows amazing character in his headshots.  I would love to build rapport with my clients in the way that he does to bring out their personality in photographs.