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Frustrating lilacs
Frankly, my photo project for this year hasn’t been progressing much, I haven’t been feeling inspired at all lately. Yet I admit, I know that good results are much more often achieved based on persistency and regular showing-up than on the famed inspiring sparks, and more often than not there is an opportunity to do something about it. My last photo post featured some lilacs from our garden and though they are long gone, more of their photos inhabit my computer. I chose two more this time and after endlessly struggling through their processing, here they are… You know that frustrating feeling when you see what result you want to…
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Lilacs
We had an exceptionally warm April this year and lilac bushes burst into flower almost three weeks earlier than usually. Felt sort of strange… But as lilacs are great flowers for any kind of photography, and still life is no exception, I used some of the flowers for playing with still life compositions. Here is one of them, in several editing results. It seemed to me I could get an interesting result when flipping the photo horizontally and adding it to some other version, so I created one more edit… …flipped two of them, and here is what came out of the experiment! What have I done? Now I cannot…
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Rose, ribbon and heart
I had some time this morning for following my still-life photo project but the mind was not there at all. I took several objects out of cabinets and saw no usage in them so I put them back, and felt absolutely no inspiration for creating a composition. You know that oppressive silence inhabiting your mind instead of burst of ideas, don’t you? Frankly, that’s where I would have left before. But isn’t it the reason why we so often don’t get anywhere – because we give up too soon? We expect wonders from the beginning and when they don’t arrive fairly quickly, we don’t persist in the effort? Yesterday I…
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Birdie and candle
As I promised myself, I started this year’s still-life photo project in the previous days and after the first two weeks I can tell you I find it quite technically challenging (as I expected so no surprise here). Controlling light is definitely not easy but together with visualisation it is the vital part of still-life photography… It is nice to have some helpful equipment but you must know how to use it, so first of all I need/ed So many options and for the moment such unsure results. But I do make the effort and I am really glad about it and already feel intrigued by all the possibilities. The…
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My photo project for 2024
It is here… The New Year… 2024! And in this year I intend to start a new photo project of mine focused on still life, by which I mean manually created compositions photographed either indoor or outdoor. I paid attention to still-life photography back in 2015 and 2016, you can read about that experience here. I liked the style and wanted to continue to improve my skills as it was a genre I seemed to have a sense of. True, in the following months and years I took a few photos here and there after creating some simple still-life compositions but I missed guidance and lacked space, technical skills and…
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Spiky
You wouldn´t find many black & white photos in my archive but surprisingly enough, this year I created quite a lot of them. I didn´t shoot the photos with the intention to get the b&w result but when I was editing them, the limited colour range brought out the voice they spoke to me with. Like the image above. I took the photo at a maize field where the patterns and structures caught my attention. I still like the original colourful photo. I also like the b&w version I transformed it into. But I went even further to create this contrasting image and realized this was the voice I heard…
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Calendar Technical
Better late than never so on Sunday I finally (!!) – after almost two years – completed the calendar I promised myself to put together for my photo project “Technical” and sent it to be printed, which makes the project fulfilled at last. I can tell you that when the printed calendar arrived today, I felt somewhat nervous before opening the package. I was afraid of being utterly disappointed but eventually I was very pleasantly surprised by both the look of the photos and the quality of the calendar itself. I decided to share printscreens from the calendar software here rather than photographing the pages, I think it will give…
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Mayrau Mining Museum in black and white
I wanted to have my project “Technical” completed till the end of 2021 so I am a bit late with this post. Nevertheless, the photos presented here were taken in 2021, during our visit of the Mayrau Mining Museum in Vinařice, only they were sitting in my files waiting for my being ready to tackle them. It is an interesting place to visit, a piece of history but it feels lonely and somewhat depressive… … and the photos captured it mercilessly. Eventually I decided to go with the somewhat artistic black & white depiction as it seems to add certain tranquillity to the original shabby look… Frankly, I am so…
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Magical
Some places feel magical without any obvious reason. While you might be bored and wondering why I am staring at a spot or an object, I might feel a pull towards it not being able to take my eyes away. Another time it might be vice versa. Me wondering and you staring. I experience such a situation repeatedly on photo walks with my husband as we are often attracted by quite different sceneries and objects… The triptychs below are created from two photos that I took at the end of last year – one of an old cemetery and the other one of a garden in the same village. Both…
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Mirrored
I took the photo above based on several reasons: And funnily enough, look at the resulting image, where it all ended. Colours are gone, patterns and textures are partly sidelined, and the overall tone is quite dark. And yet this is a much more expressive scenery than the one captured in the original photo. The same and yet not the same, mirrored in my thoughts, feelings and expectations. Sometimes it’s not good to stop just after you started. Sometimes you need to make a few more steps to arrive where you wanted to be in the first place. Sometimes we perceive more than we realize and it takes time to…
