Grab your Camera and Go!!

For me, one the hardest types of photography is Model/Static portraits. I never really know how to place people and there's always that issue with time and patience. I frequently see other photographers work and admire the poses, location, post-processing, etc. Recently I've been thinking that I need to work this and see if it's even something I'd be interested in.

So the first beautiful day we had this winter, Caitie and I grabbed the camera and took off to downtown Asheville. I had a couple of places in mind, but also wanted to walk the streets and see what happened. Needless to say we had a great time. The first image is from one of our first stops. I had a few ideas and a little direction and let Caitie move and pose as she wanted.

This image was made while we were on our way to the location of the image below. Caitie stepped on the curb stop and it crumbled under her feet. She asked if there was a way to make a picture form this so we played around for a while and finally came up with this one.

As some people already know computer/software and I don't get along at all. My original thought was to load these into lightroom, then jump into PSE and use the NIK Color Effects Pro plug-in to work the image for color and style. Well that didn't work, I had a couple of problems keeping images, or saving images and then when I quit PSE and went back to LR one of the images appeared but without any adjustments. So, I kept everything in lightroom, made all my modifications and was happy with the results...enough said
I have a few more images that I like from the afternoon and if I can figure out how to load them onto this post I will, it seems to be limited to four images for some reason.
The bottom line...if you want to get better at something you know, or learn something you don't know, grab your camera and go make some images. You might like want you've done, you might not, but there's a good chance you'll have fun either way.

Cheers,

Mark

Inspiration

It seems funny how things come about sometimes, 2 of the 3 items I wanted to photograph during this Winter season are bare trees and icicles.  There is something that draws me to the bare trees each year but I can't exactly put my finger on it.  And there are a few clusters of icicles I see each Winter on the rock faces along some higher elevation roads.  One of my goals this year was to put a couple of days aside and spend some time with the trees and the ice.  Usually, when I have ideas like these I'll also have somewhat of a game plan...maybe some ideas in my head, and usually some sketches with rough concepts on them, but for these two I have nothing, just the fact that I want to go and do it, and yet it's mid January and I still haven't even made an attempt.  I think I'm hesitant because I just don't know what to do, or even were to start.

As I was skimming through FB today I happened to come across a post from a famous photographer that I follow (or Like), and there was an image of a cluster of icicles, with a foreground feature, just as beautiful as any could be, and it immediately struck me, That's it...not that I want to copy the image I was looking at, but it gave me great reference, composition, rule breaking ideas.

And later today,  while I was trying to remember a username and password that I had created to pay some bills I got tired of defeat and decided to read some blogs that I  follow, one of the articles referenced an upcoming print sale and had a link to the photographer who's prints they'll be selling, low and behold the photographer has an outstanding gallery of images of...that's right...trees.  http://www.charlescramer.com/index.html

Once again the creative wheels started turning and I already of a collection of ideas in my head.  2 items covered in one day, I might be busy this weekend.

Cheers.