Today, I like the word Wintering (the act of staying at a place throughout the winter) as it has an underlying message of being at…rest, peace. A seasonal nap time.
Nikon D750 f/7.1 1/500 50
During this time of year in which nature slumbers, there is an invitation to sit beside the fireplace and study the amazing images of Michael Kenna and Bruce Percy.
February has within it whispers of spring, It also–like November–is a time of heavy snow storms and cabin fever. Last year I set out on a “frame within a frame” photo assignment.
What gifts did February, 2018 bring you this year?
A life review, a year review, an anniversary review, a retirement review, or a graduation review invites us to reflect upon memories and begin a private process of shifting through remembered moments as if they were grains of time in which we place into value-laden categories that generally fall into piles of “good”, “bad”, or “indifferent.” This is the ground work for the emergence of future plans, goals, and yearly resolutions.
Photography, through its visual recording of time, offers a quasi-concrete way of revisiting our yesterdays. It is the coming together of aged and blurry photographs and shared family stories that have formulated and validated the pre-memories of my childhood self beyond my birth certificate and my parent’s marriage certificate. As an aside, I have wondered about the impact cherished family photos have on remembered and shared childhood memories especially in contrast to the time before photography when family stories, diaries, paintings, drawings, songs, biblical records, and cemeteries were memory keepsakes.
At this time, I thought it would be interesting to do twelve photo review blogs of the images created during 2018 as part of the aphotostudy project I began last January. I would love to have you join me and share the photographs that highlight your blogging journey through 2018.
Also, as this year fades into memory and opens a door to 2019, I wish to express my gratitude for all of you who shared your creative endeavors, knowledge, and thoughts throughout the year. May each step you take throughout the coming days be accompanied by love, joy, and peace.
Ted Forbes brings his Master Class Live series to a close by identifying a number of important reminders for amateur and professional photographers:Â Â
photographs come from your mind, your talent, your skill level, your experience, your sense of creativity….Â
…what you are as a photographer is a sum of all your experiences and everything you have done up to this point comprises your skill level.
…the camera doesn’t make images you do
Developing your style as a photographer is:
…an ongoing process…this is something that you get better and better and better and better at, and I think, hopefully, one day you get really good at but it never stops….
Exercise 1:Â tell a story without words
identify a story or how-to-series you would like to create
use your camera to create a series of photographsÂ
use as many perspectives as possible
keep it simple
think about composition, that is how could various elements assist in telling your story
create a lot of images…15-30+
edit the series of imagesÂ
identify those that specifically show what you are trying to communicate
removing those that are not essential in the story’s key points
edit again to pare the number down to as few as possible. Can you remove all but one and still tell the story?
The absolute goal of this exercise is to tell a story with one image that interacts with a viewer and evokes an emotional response, a reaction, or a change in perspective, thought, or understanding.
A number of various genres that may inspire you are:Â
…what we’re doing here is getting you to think…over the course of a long period of time you may see some of it very quickly, some of it in a matter of weeks, depending on how hard you work, it may be a couple of years before you start really feeling like you defining yourself as a photographer…the catalyst, which I think is really important…what we are looking for right now…is to get you to start thinking differently…
The first part of this Developing Your Personal Styleseries invited us as photographers to learn how to see and think–visualization. The second encouraged us to utilize the meditative process of concentration and returning to the object as a means to extend our creative endeavors by encouraging us as photographers to “exhaust all possibilities” and “to train the brain to think.” Â
This week Ted Forbes has offered three separate photo assignments that blend two things together…emulating an identified feeling state of experience and engaging with a subject in such a way as you create a portraiture that represents an identified feeling.Â
Exercise 1:
Start with a basic feeling…identify an event or something that happened in your life that is associated with a feeling — happy, angry, sad, worried, etc.Â
Visualize and mediate upon this feeling state.Â
Get your mind to think differently….how do I bring that certain feeling into an image? How do I just shoot something that represents that state of experience? What do I need to do to get that feeling to be represented in a photograph?
Replicate this feeling through a still life, landscape, or abstract image.
Don’t expect to be good…it takes time to emulating feelings.
The initial photographs we create during this time “…may not be great, but the whole point is [we’ve] got [our heads] thinking and [we’re] getting [our] mind around composition and possibilities and that’s what’s really important…”
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Exercise 2:
Go to the library or book store and find a photo book of a photographer whose work touches upon the multiple emotions within the human experience; e.g., Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans.
Ask yourself what is it about this photographer that inspires you to start seeing the varied possibilities of photographing and evoking feelings. Â
Remember you don’t have to try and be like him…just see the possibilities.
Create a portraiture of someone that demonstrates an identified feeling state.
Engage with your subject, share what feeling state you wish to convey, develop a sense of trust, be like a movie director encouraging an actor to communicate a specific feeling.Â
Keep in mind
  there is discomfort for the viewer when she can not see someone’s eyes.
  people communicate emotions all of the time through their facial expressions and body postures.Â
  interacting with people will help increase your comfort level
  experiment with how to evoke feelings of people so that in time your work demonstrates your individual touch and people will “want you and no one else.”
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I hope you will enjoy these challenging exercises that encourages us to stretch our imaginations while creating images that represents your personal style. Â As always, I’m looking forward to seeing some of your work and reading your thoughts. Â Let’s tag with #aphotostudy.
“The fact that one may misunderstand the content of a picture is of no concern to the picture, which leads its own life independent of our interpretations. For some years the writer thought that the tree in Edouard Boubat’s picture grew on the top of a hill… What he finally realized that the tree stands not against the sky but against a wall, it was a momentary shock. But the picture refused to adapt itself for the sake of the new interpretation. It remained precisely as it had been before. …A picture is what it looks like. ~J Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs
The absolute goal of this exercise is to tell a story with one image that interacts with a viewer and evokes an emotional response, a reaction, or a change in perspective, thought, or understanding.
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