Lens Fixed @ 18mm

The day first started with class and then it ended up with a collage of images of babies. Shooting with an 18mm lens is not easy.  Trying to compose correctly becomes
a challenge and makes one yearn for
other focal lengths.  Lens choice is as important as choosing the right tool for the job.





The lighting’s pretty nice on the baby and mom and friend, but there’s too much background distraction.  I wanted some background for context, but it’s too in focus.



The approach in photographing children is to bring the camera down to their perspective.  In other words giving a child's view of the event.  Dad’s busy signing up for more pink tutus and cupcakes.  If I’d waited a bit longer the figure behind the dad might have walked out the picture too, which would have made it simpler, more focused, however by then I might have lost eye contact with the little girl.

I wish I had gotten the light right for this one. I’m trying to stay within the parameters of the camera's suggested exposure.  What caught my eyes was the side light hitting the child's face, catching a poignant expression, and the flow of the colors from mom to baby, with that good burnt orange in the background. We’re missing the mom’s expression though, and that would have pulled it all together. Maybe that tent top should go, and a little shift would have eliminated the tiny head in the background.

What makes this image  is seeing child and how he has his own point of view.  Mom’s attention is one way, the child's another. The focusing could have been sharper on the baby’s eyes; less sharp for the background.








What caught my eye here was all the green - dad in his shirt, his daughter in her green; the green on the table and butterfly











You have to like the candor of baby’s before they learn to pose!  Not bad, not great. A bit flat in perspective.

The image below almost works.  The subject of the image is placed between the foreground interest – the dummy with the pink tutu- and the real subject, that little girl carefully peeling her banana. Too much green on the left takes our attention away. The grid on the right is OK, but it also might be a little too much causing the little girl to get lost in its pattern.



What do you think?  How would you have made similar images with a single focal length?  I guess that is the beautiful struggle when working with a focal length.  Keep in touch and see how I improve.

MCooling

Ramblin' Road Trip

I took a road trip in March with two friends and creative forces, Tiffany Napper of Bats on Strings and Megan Victoria of Jupiter Lala. We had a plan: roam across the South, from New Orleans to Nashville,  and make magic with whatever the wind blows our way. 

We each had our essentials for the trip: loaded iPods, a grandfather's ukelele, a flask, handcrafted jewelry, favorite boots and Milk Duds. My essential packing list included several cameras and lenses. I wanted to try and document not just the places where we stopped along the way, but also the improvised, whimsical feeling of the whole trip. There were stops at state borders for impromptu dances and sit-downs in coffee shops and boutiques that turned into collaborative sessions for future business ventures. I wanted to capture the invigorating brisk temperatures, the comfort of an old leather sofa, the luxury of time to just ramble at our own pace through the landscape.

I played with several cameras and lenses on the trip, looking for details and light, in color and black and white. I tried to not be the nerd with the oversized camera bag everywhere I went, though; I limited myself, mostly, to one kind of camera for each stop. A Holga, an old film SLR, my DSLR and a point-and-shooting. What are your essentials for shooting while traveling?

JKay

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