SNOW DAY

As the north thaw from a cold winter, Jennifer reflects on the images she made
during her Thanksgiving visit back home.  Shooting in harsh climatic weather
can be both frustrating and rewarding.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a snowfall, and so I was childishly excited about the  inch-and-a-half of snow that fell while I was in Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. I had forgotten how snow makes the landscape a soft, blank canvas where footsteps and errands get scribbled with black lines. The snow kept falling, but people in the neighborhood needed to keep up with their lives, going for a run or going to pick up kids at school. What I started to see in the snow was not the snow itself, but the blank spaces left by moving cars and people. No one stayed to enjoy the snow. Even the sky was empty, the sun seemingly just gone, the sky a blank gray. 

JKay

Point-and-Shoot

In January, Leica hosted a workshop at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens for owners of the company’s compact camera systems. I took my V-Lux 20 for a refresher course on all its functions and buttons.

Aside from giving tips on how to maximize the features on my camera, the Leica instructors advised us on how to use our “point-and-shoot” cameras to make pictures of the gardens. 

• Have a subject, and then give your subject room to move within the frame. 
• Get physically close to a subject, instead of relying on the camera’s zoom. Take advantage of the macro setting.
• Light coming from the side reveals texture in a subject.
• Play with the camera’s white balance to change the tone of an image.
• Odd numbers of things = interesting.

The workshop reminded me of how powerful my "little" camera really is, and I think I'll be taking it out of my camera bag more often. I'm particularly encouraged by a "high dynamic" setting I had forgotten, which produces images in high-contrast black-and-white.

Do you shoot with a point-and-shoot camera? What settings do you recommend? 

JKay

PUBLIC ART

Art Basel Miami Beach is annual marathon of parties, traffic, crowded exhibition halls and posturing (not that we’re bitter or overwhelmed, or anything). It’s also a long weekend of art on display for free in public spaces, and my favorite part of the frenetic Basel hustle is watching passersby interact with the art around them.

 

They stumbled through the colorful warehouse-and-street-mural maze of Wynwood and lounged outside the honeycombed bar (“Guiro” by Los Carpinteros and ABSOLUT) temporarily set up in Collins Park. A concert and exhibit by singer/songwriter Daniel Johnston unexpectedly turned into a live painting demonstration. Thousands, probably, of social media avatars were created in front of half an installation by Gary Simmons (in whole, it read “I wish it could be morning all day long”.)

Familiar corners took on a new character, and isn’t that point of public art -- to see not just the installation, but to see an ordinary locale in a fresh way?

JKAY

Site Unseen

Visually impaired students from the Miami Lighthouse Project recently took a unique tour of SunLife Stadium. Instead of filing past the Don Shula memorial like other football fans, they 
 stopped to run their hands over the statue’s feet, getting an idea about the height of the bronze players from the size of their shoes. They tried on a Dolphins player’s helmet, learning that the crunching sound they hear during games comes from 7-pound helmets crashing together. On the field, they held handfuls of the cool, cropped grass.

Watching the students through my camera, it wasn’t they used their hands to experience the stadium -- it was how they related to each other and to the people around them. They leaned in to each other to talk, and they verbalized all their actions so that the others could follow. They got close to the objects and talked their way through their experiences so that a friend on the other side of the statue would know to move his hands from the shoe up to the calf muscle to feel how strong the bronze player was. Their relationship to each other was more fascinating than the fact that they had to touch all the objects that people without vision problems take for granted.

I was struck by how extroverted the students were as they passed around the helmet and shared handfuls of grass. One of the students asked what I liked about photography, and I said that I liked expressing my experiences through a different language, a visual language. It occurred to me that I was watching the students speaking in a different language, too, and it made me wonder what vocabulary they use in school, at home or out in the world without their teachers.

JKay

Between the Lines

Lines can be a pictorial element, lines can form patterns and shapes, lines can lead your eyes to specific subject, and lines can help you frame your subject.  Lines are to be read leading and transforming complexity to simple composition.  Hence it takes a really good eye to read between the lines. 

Lines are the architecture of the Holocaust Memorial - lines are everywhere. There are the long horizontal lines of names, all the victims lost. These lines are the background to the human figures sculpted at the heart of the memorial. Everywhere you look, behind and through the bronze figures, the names of the dead fill in your view.

The last name in the list is Zusha Mamber, and whild that line stops abruptly, the story isn't finished.  The memorial leaves plenty of blank black granite where more names can be added at families' request.                                                                                               

A trip through the entire memorial takes you around in a circle, but straight lines in its design keep visitors moving in the right direction. Diagonal lines of stone point toward the giant hand and the tortured figures climbing up its arm at the heart of the memorial. Narrow shafts of light shift throughout the day in the tunnel that leads to that hand. These lines do more than guide visitors, they pull them toward the memorial's center of grief.


JKay

iPhone Vs Camera

The previous blog set the stage: One vacation, many cameras. I shot most everything twice, trying to line up the composition so that the only real difference was the focal length - one I could control with an SLR or DSLR, or one that I could not control with the iPhone 4. With the camera phone, I tried to keep the filter consistent and subtle so that the images were not overly distorted. I wanted the iPhone images to capture the same element I sought with the "real" cameras - the way the soft, warm light of late August, even on overcast days, enhanced the textures of water, faces and wood.

Sometimes, the iphone gave me a perspective that I didn't realize I had when I looked through the "real" camera's viewfinder - it really gave me height, the ability to focus while holding the phone above my head. The extra room around my mother standing in front of her classroom blackboard, for example, gives you more information about her classroom than the saturated colors picked up by my DSLR. However, the lack of a filter on the DSLR led to more saturated colors - the colors of summer that I was trying to convey - such as the green grass stains on my mother's white tennis shoes as she mowed the lawn.

  

I added my digital point-and-shoot, with all it's shooting options and zoom capabilities, to the mix? What else would have been revealed about the subjects? Or does the filtering options on the iPhone inherently add an interesting element unattainable with a "real" point-and-shoot camera? That's the exercise I have planned for my next trip.I found both camera options to be valuable tools and successful in their own ways. Now I'm curious: What if I had added my digital point-and-shoot with all its shooting options and zoom capabilities into the mix? What else would have been revealed about the subjects?  Or do the filtering options on the iPhone inherently add an interesting element unattainable with a "real" point-and-shoot camera?

Urban Safari

 
Strolling Jungle Island can be a great opportunity to practice photography as there are a wide variety of subjects to challenge one's creativity and technical skills. Particularly, when you get to go with your photography professor and three very energetic kids running ahead of you!

 
It is a great location to practice how to overcome certain challenges. For me, the major issues were the distance to the animals and shooting through glass or bars. In these situations, sometimes tightly cropping to an animal's face, or body, helps getting a shot with real impact.




Moving subjects can also be challenging as rarely do these animals stay still, although I did stumble upon one or two animals in the perfect pose.

Patience is a must and for the most part one has to stick around and wait for something interesting to happen. And, of course, there is always the changing light and trying to find a good angle of view. 

 




Since I now have an annual pass, I will most certainly go back soon and try again with different exposures and lenses. As with all things, practice makes perfect!