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Evaluation of my be-still experience
At the end of 2014 I announced my intended participation in Kim Klassen’s year-long course “Be still 52”, a course that was focused on creating still life images. As I told you at that time, after experiencing my 52-week photo project in 2014 I wanted to improve in planning, arranging, working with light, working with the depth of field, working with textures, I wanted to open my imagination more. Have I met those expectations? Have I improved those skills? Here is my evaluation. I haven’t fulfilled all of the assignments that we got in the course but for a change, I don’t feel guilty about it. I started the course…
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Getting messy
In the last assignment that we got in the Be-still-52 course, Kim asked us to get messy… The idea was to use whatever we found appropriate to create a scene that doesn’t look neat but makes an interesting image and take a top-down photo. I had some plants at home that I needed to replant and decided to shoot the replanting which I supposed would be messy enough. Yeah, it was… The first plant is a succulent that was very small when I bought it but it grows really fast. I thought I would separate the offshoots but the root system was not easy to divide so eventually I ended…
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Guidance and inspiration in one word a year
Several years ago I read for the first time about the idea of choosing a word for the following year, a word that is supposed to be an inspiration and guide rather than any kind of resolution. The word can represent something personal to be focused on throughout the particular year, something one wants to learn, develop or improve in, or it can represent a desired change in one’s life, a direction to be followed, a dream to be fulfilled… So many possibilities… But how do I choose such a mighty word, I asked myself, and couldn’t find the answer easily. Those following this practice recommended pondering, meditating, praying and…
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PF 2016
Here we are again, at the end of another year. Nobody knows what the next year holds for them and how they’ll be able to embrace that. It’s time to wish one another strength, health and happiness and it’s high time to send New Year cards to our friends, families and business partners. Someone celebrates the last day of the year as a milestone, others refuse to see anything special in it, but the truth is that the date changes and we need to get used to that new number… I’ve posted New Year cards in this blog since 2011 and just a few weeks ago I was made aware…
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Coffee and change
Take some change, coffee or tea and shoot top-down or any other way that suits you, that was another assignment from the Be-still-52 course I’ve been following this year. I gave it a try and found out that there are so many possibilities how to fulfil this assignment. I agree with Kim who mentioned that it could be quite an interesting series. We still have Czech crowns in the Czech Republic so you can see a few pieces of our Czech change in the images. I have two favourite photos from this shooting, both in two versions. All images have been processed in Lightroom. Photo No. 1 was shot top-down…
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Gratitude
Amid these Christmas preparations I wanted to tell you that the other day, when I was coming home from work and was driving through a wood near our village, it struck me how much my life has changed recently. Partly from the outside and more importantly from the inside, but it’s all intertwined and interlinked, isn’t it? I wanted to add that there were times in my life a few years ago when crashing my car head-on into a tree seemed like a good solution to all the bad feelings and thoughts I had. I never tried, just let the idea in and out, but the depressive thought was there.…
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Beauty of the withered
When I was preparing props for my in-crate assignment about which you could read in my previous posts Autumn in the crate and Inspiring hydrangea, I gathered also some withered flowers from my garden and tried to set a few compositions with them. They might have not made it into the group of my favourite shots of that day but they made me think. About fading beauty, about a circle of life, about having (or not) a character. Withered doesn’t have to mean ugly, does it? In the course of this almost year long still-life experimenting, I’ve learnt that some photos carry a plain message but other can wear different coats and arise…
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Inspiring hydrangea
As I promised in the previous “Autumn in the crate” post, I’m going to present a different set of in-crate images today, this time with hydrangea. Even more different than I imagined because when I wanted to create a square-formatted image from my hydrangea-in-crate shots, I found out that all those shots were captured in too tight composition to do that successfully so I tried and set a similar scene for another shooting a week later. Well, as it happens, the newer photos do not look the same… Not only the sky was overcast that day and the light was very different, also perspective changed. But it was an interesting comparison for…
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Snowy
When I woke up on Sunday morning, the light felt different. I was wondering what was going on but as soon as I got up, I knew the answer. Everything behind the windows was covered with snow and its fresh white colour dominated surroundings of our house. Our garden, neighbours’ garden, our yard… I loved the occasional colourful contrast like in the following photo. Our neighbours across the road are building a new house and its unfinished condition looked wonderful against the snow. As soon as I saw it, I grabbed my camera, opened our kitchen window and took a few photos. I took some also from our dormer window…
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Thoughts on learning strategies
When you are learning something new, what’s your strategy? Do you mainly gather pieces of information, go through them quickly and then keep them in your laptop or (note)books for future reference or do you try and use them until you master them? Long time ago I realised that I belong to that first group of learners, I’m definitely a gatherer. Not of things but pieces of information. I have always been, since childhood. In this digital era I have plenty of files in my laptop containing articles on things like English grammar and vocabulary, photography techniques, Lightroom tips and manuals, Photoshop Elements tutorials… I enlarge my collection day by…
