Change It Up!!! ~Floral Friday

Rainy Day Magnolias, a photo by C.Duncan's Photography on Flickr.

Every creative person I know gets stuck. Moments where you're in a rut. You have artist block. Nothing seems new. Or interesting. You'd rather bury yourself in a carton of Super Chocolate Caramel Explosion ice cream and watch reruns of Wonder Woman... well... some of us anyways.

Thought I'd share my go-to list of things I do to switch things up and gain new inspiration. If you've been doing photography for many years, these will be old hat to you. But if you've never tried these, it can put the excitement back into photographing whatever comes your way. Here we go;

Set An Absurd Boundry ~ We all know the ideal conditions for shooting inside, outside, whatever. So give yourself a specific shooting condition and only shoot that way. Only landscapes in the rain. Only portraits at twilight. Shoot every day for an entire month only from your backyard, or along a specific stretch of road. Force yourself to get creative. And tell others about your
self-inflicted project so you follow up.

Use Your Gear... All of It! ~ Use your lenses in creative ways. Wide Angles for portraits! Yep, you heard me. Figure out how to get creative with your perspective and the POV you shoot from and get some cool portraits. Stop reaching for the obvious lens choice. Use your telephoto first when photographing architecture instead of the wide angle. Force yourself to see within a tighter, less chaotic frame. It's simply thinking outside the box but sometimes we're in a comfortable rhythm and can't see anything else, then wonder why our images seem uninspired.

Face Your Weaknesses ~ If you steer clear of macro nature shots because you can't seem to get what everyone else gets in the lens, start exploring what else you can aim a macro lens at. Over the course of a month, those skills will grow. If you avoid portraiture in general, start with a fun project with your family making crazy faces, or only your dog for a few weeks, in different light, in different locations, and hone those portrait skills you were afraid were non-existent. What you learn about yourself you'll be able to apply to what you do love. Or it may open up a new vocation for you completely. And how exciting would that be.

Invoke The Buddy System ~ Invite others to participate. The more the merrier, and everyone stays motivated, feeding off each others energy and experiences. This is what my friend Dave Pratt and I did with our Epic Personal Photo Challenge... we opened it up to anyone who loved photography and every two weeks a new person picks a theme we have to shoot in. We reveal all our images on the same Sunday and discussion runs rampant on what our individual approaches resulted in, and new ways to see a subject. It's fabulous and very inspiring. The fun is injected back into the act of photography, and you can tell by looking at the images each week. You can click the link above to join us if you'd like....

So have a fabulous Friday gang, and let's inject some inspiration back into our photography. Just change it up!

Magnolias ~ Floral Friday

Magnolias in Rain, a photo by C.Duncan's Photography on Flickr.

Magnolias. They ooze old world romance and purity. I love trying to capture those things in the lens. I can spend hours photographing magnolias. And feel renewed afterwards. I was thrilled working on this image for today. Thrilled and ..... giddy. I just love magnolias.

The weather cooperated for once. I love photographing flowers after lazy rain showers, the sky still overcast. The colors are cleaner, no high contrast to work around, and a few rain drops still clinging. Add a little, and I mean little, fill flash to erase deep shadow on the subject and you have the makings of a fine photograph. Had my trusty tripod, plus bumped the ISO up to 320 since there was a slight breeze and I needed my shutter speed to freeze the blossom without loosing the exposure I wanted. It's extremely rewarding to see the image in your mind become the final product on the screen without excessive processing.

Now on to other news. You may have noticed that today's image has been posted through another source other than blogger itself. I want to thank Flickr for providing photographers with the option to post images through their site for a very important reason. I've noticed recently in my blog feed that someone is "lurking" about the blog, waiting for me to post images here, then googling the titles and copying my images on the google search site. NOT cool friends. I don't know what this person is using them for, but it's the sneaky way to ignore the copyright of any of my images. For the most part it's not a huge issue as I have been posting small resolution images, and I'm not naive about what happens in Internet land, but still. So posting through Flickr has eliminated a good portion of this problem as far as I know. And we need to spread the word... photographers work just as hard as anyone, the minute you take their images without permission, you devalue every photographer out there. We already struggle with being asked for free photographs every time we turn around. So let's enjoy the images, and if you're super attached to one, contact me, we'll work something out.

Thanks for the ramble today gang! I appreciate each and every one of you who show up to read the blog and let it inspire you somehow. Thanks! 

Magnolias ~ Floral Friday!

"In A World of Her Own"

(1/400 sec.@ F/9, 50mm prime, fish eye effx in Corel, ISO 160)

Since I was away from the blog yesterday, I thought I'd combine florals and experimenting today. Ever look into a tiny raindrop and a whole new world or scene seems to be contained within? Well, I have and it's usually while I'm out in the garden after it's rained. It's right around that time that I begin wishing for a macro lens or fish eye lens to magically appear on my camera so that I can try valiantly to reproduce that.

So far the lens fairy's been a no show.

So what to do, it takes a week for a rented lens to arrive in my area, and sometimes I just want to get the overall effect without the cost that goes along with renting or buying... in steps PaintShopPro x3 to the rescue. I get to take an image like the one below, a fine image in it's own right, and pop it into the distortion lens effects menu option after I've done any editing to it I wish. I rotate the image's distortion in the fish eye selection vertically and horizontally till the composition is pleasantly filling the sphere. And then I save it. Magnolias in a rain drop. This is why the digital darkroom can be so delightful. You can create art that mimics photography without loosing a sense of what was so magical about the image in the first place.

"Magnolias in Sweet Sunshine"

As it is, this image was primed with a conversion into Corel's Cross Processing filter and then a Colored Edges Outline option, so as to give them some bright definition, emphasizing the full sun. All in all, it gave me bolder color, something I feel works for this shot... remembering that every once in a while, it's great to play in the darkroom! And that flowers still rock as a photography subject! I love Floral Fridays, how 'bout you?

Have an awesome long weekend Canada! And thanks for the ramble everyone!

DOF ~ Telephoto Tuesday!

"Softly She Emerges"

Perhaps my favorite image from the trips I made to the Spring Show is my post for the day. This was the only open magnolia blossom on the branches in the displays, and when I saw it I knew it needed singled out in whatever shot I took. Isolated is perhaps a better term.

Used my trusty modest telephoto zoom, dialed her wide open to an F/4.5 to soften everything but the blossom, spot metered against her white flesh, and got off a series of shots. In the background were banana trees, bird cages, and other visitors but you'd never know it with the depth of field I chose.

Almost as important as what you are featuring in your shots, is what you choose to exclude from your shots. And this is one way of getting that. I am always aware of the background, constantly recomposing around the subject in order to get the best image with the perfect backdrop. My new favorite compositional word is "cohesive". Everything needs to work together.

Thanks for the short ramble folks! Have a good one!