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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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Glassworks cutting room
As I mentioned in the previous post, last summer we visited old glassworks in Harrachov. It was interesting to see how the glasses are produced manually by men blowing into hot glass pieces and forming thus shapes of the glasses but the part of the glassworks that got my full attention was the room where the clear glasses are decorated manually by cutting their surface by a grinder, creating so various ornaments. I was absolutely taken aback by the quiet atmosphere of that room and I wished I had opportunity to spend at least an hour or two by absorbing the light, the colours and the objects and their mutual…
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Still life in an old hammer mill
While looking for photos for my project Technical last year, I came across quite a few interesting places I might not have visited otherwise, such as this nook in an old hammer mill in Dobřív. I love the contrast of the two ways of processing this still life photo, that dreamy imaginary on the left and the reminiscence of the old times on the right. What a different world many of us live in nowadays…
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Curly leaf parsley
I thought the fresh curly leaf parsley that I grow in my garden would be good not only for cooking but it could also look good in still life photography. So here it is, in two versions of a still life image. Two images, two different stories despite almost the same contents. The power of editing is awesome… By the way, as for the cooking, I add curly leaf parsley to soups, potatoes and stuffing, it adds “a breath of nature” and tastes good!
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Cold and rainy
Last night it was raining heavily here, the rain woke us several times when beating against our roof lights. And not only brought the night the rain but also a change in temperature when it dropped a few degrees lower in comparison with previous warm days resulting so in a wet and cold Sunday. Well, despite the noise, we were happy about the rain as the weather has been very dry lately and the level of ground water is very low here. Abundance of water is one of my dreams now, who would have thought! No more taken for granted. And as everything outside was soggy, I decided to discontinue…
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Build up when creating your art
I make the same mistake all over on my photography path. I always want and almost expect to get my camera out, take a photo and be a witness to how great an image I created. Stupid, right? It happens here and there that the first photo is good, sometimes better than the following ones but much more often I need to start somewhere, immerse myself in the photography mood and build up. The same applies to editing. I edit a photo or two and don’t like any of that, but the process may give me an idea for editing an absolutely different photo. Like in case of this lawn…
