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I appear to be on hiatus.
It wasn't a
conscious decision; it just happened. But I do see
that creativity (at least mine) is a very fragile thing,
and anything that is distracting can send the urge to be
creative far away. On top of that, I've got to
come to terms that I'm getting older & less interested
in handling stress. In my working days, I led
extended teams of thousands on projects that were of
vital importance to my employers. Nowadays, I'm
semi-retired & self-employed, and my stress level is
significantly less, and this has been the case for over
a dozen years.
But two "projects" around this
time brought stress back to me. These projects:
- With the Affordable Care Act, I had to
find new insurance, a project that was full of
anxiety due to normal health issues of an older
person.
- Also, as an older person, I decided to
undertake the terrifying process of forming an
estate plan.
I won't bore you with the details of these
"projects" -- these are, after all, personal & private.
But suffice to say that they were (and still are)
distracting.
Below are some artistic variations to this
image:
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So, how do these distractions
impact the photo-session. Well, speaking for
myself, my brain never shuts down, and the part that
should be focused on the model is spending some time
thinking about the projects. For example: to
whom do I leave the copyrights to the images I'm making?
In general, new ideas have, for the most part, deserted
me. Hence, we start in the big comfy chair because
it often has great light, but there's nothing new here.
And somehow, Tiana immediately starts in the nude, not
in my usual "Getting Started" setup. |
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Yes, the picture to the
left is a cropping of the image above. I still
enjoy cropping images, trying to reduce them to a
pleasing composition while keeping the "essential" parts
of the images.
I actually crop pretty
much every picture. I got in this habit from using
my first camera, a Nikon S2 Rangefinder, which was about
as old as I am. Unlike modern SLRs (Single Lens
Reflex), the viewfinder uses totally separate optics
from the lens that recorded the image. With this
arrangement, the photographer is never sure exactly
where the edges of an image lie, so to be safe, I
learned to take a step back & include a little extra
into each exposure, planning to crop the image in post
processing (originally in the darkroom and eventually
while editing photos on my computer).
Some times the cropping
is radical, as in this example (above & to the left).
Other times the cropping is more subtle, as in the
example below. But it's a safe bet that all images
you see here are cropped to some extent.
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I like the cropped
image. It's one of those "nude & not nude" images
-- clearly, Tiana does not have a single thread of
clothing on, yet the viewer can't see any "naughty
bits". I find these kinds of images to be more
interesting & stimulating. |
| The big
comfy chair gets some of the best light in the house.
But, with all natural light setups, the light can change
quickly. In this case, the exposure shifted, which
in turn shifted the color balance & saturation.
But using my good ol' sepia toning does save the image.
(I'll probably include the color version in the Out
Takes pages).
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I can tell
that Tiana & I are not "connecting", and I blame my own
distractions. So, when things aren't exactly
flowing, I fall back on some ideas. One such idea:
"Near, far, left, right, up, down", which is a little
litany I sing to myself to remind me to step back, move
close, move around, and change perspective. Hence,
the images (especially the one above) which show off
more of the living room than I usually do. |
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