Okay, so I choose “silence” as my word for the year but that wasn’t suppose to mean that I never blogged again! Actually that’s not quite true — I HAVE been blogging just at Faithfilled Photographers. And that pretty much takes up what little free time I have.
I’m so far behind Kat’s lessons for the second part of her Finding Your Eye course — so this post is my attempt to catch up before Lesson 4 comes out tomorrow.
Rules (Sunday):
Don’t really feel like I have any rules or “musts” or “shoulds” when it comes to photography. I certainly have habits that I try not to succumb too (when I think about it). For example, I shoot a lot in portrait. Yes, I mostly take photos of my kids, but it almost seems second nature to bring the camera up to my eye sideways! And even when I don’t, I find myself switching to it, as though I prefer the tall frame for my compositions. Prefer, or am just more comfortable with? At any rate I do try to remember to shoot both portrait and landscape frames.
Artistic Inspiration (Wednesday):
I wasn’t able to get to a museum or art gallery this weekend. Too many other events going on to allow me the luxury of several hours without little ones. We do have plans to go to the National Gallery of Art this weekend (they have a photography exhibit I want to see). At any rate, I did go to Mass and our church is very much a place of artistic inspiration.
The stained class is traditional and very beautiful but it’s the stations of the cross that I really find inspirational. They are done in a naturalistic way, but slightly stylized. The figures are slightly elongated and very graceful. Espcially the hands. At the 12th station before Jesus dies, he tells John, “Behold your mother,” John’s hands subtly but distinctly point directly at Mary, standing opposite of him. At the final station, kneeling next to Jesus’s tomb, Mary’s hand are held in a way that emphasizes their emptiness. I love the composition of the each image — the artist used a strong diagonal composition throughout and there is a lot of tension within each frame as well.
I’ve never been able capture the images to my liking. The light is poor and I never have my tripod with me and I just feel a little funny taking pictures inside the church. Especially if anyone is in there praying. The camera feels like such an intrusion.
In my work: (Sunday)
Lately in my own work, I have tried very deliberately to compose along the diagonal (or at least recognize it as I’m framing the shot). I’ve had very amounts of success. One trick that really helps me is the cropping tool overlay in Lightroom. In the develop module, once you have selected the crop tool, you can cycle through various crop overlay screens by pressing the letter O. I find the golden spiral and the diagonal overlays very useful in deciding what is the most powerful crop of the image. No matter how much I think I’ve gotten the shot framed, I almost always find a better picture through cropping in Lightroom.