frustrated

but working through it.

star party

At the McDonald observatory, Fort Davis, Tx. Shot with moonlight and the red safety lights they use, to help preserve your night vision. The observatory does a few tours and star viewing sessions a week. I was really impressed by how good their presentations were and how well they explained things. Learned a few ideas that really helped through the whole week. Also got to see Saturn through a big telescope - could see the rings really clearly and a couple of the moons. It was almost a full moon last week, hence all the bright moonlight in this shot, shining off all 3 domes. Was also great for actually viewing the moon directly.

I've done the first pass on the images I took last week, cut away about 75% of the shots so far, down to a final selection of close to 500. There are quite a few potential HDR shots in there, maybe 100 or so frames to be combined as and when I work out a workflow for doing them. Getting there slowly.

evolution of an idea

Paul had the good idea to request that we post more about SoFoBoMo and where the ideas flit in and out from, or try to capture some of the experience from last year that we gained. This evening an idea popped into my head for a SoFoBoMo project, while reading a different photography book. Reading always seems to stimulate these random ideas for projects. The main thing I've learned to do is to write them down. Then and there. So I was sent scrambling for a notebook, almost upsetting the cup of tea on the table beside me. It was just a simple idea, in part stimulated by Mark Hobson's post over on the Landscapist, about shooting a book in a day, that was very similar to Paul Lester's book in an hour from last year, One. I was thinking about what might make an accessible shoot to do in a day, maybe shooting from sunrise all the way to sunset or in to twilight. A good sunrise is always a colour event in my head and that triggered an idea from the book I'm writing, about shooting colours and using those as the motivation and guiding idea. I've used this quite often to help people get moving and taking pictures and I thought it would be a decent theme for a day's shoot.

Then I start thinking that I need 35 images and maybe I need to consider more than one colour. That leads easily to the colours in a rainbow - 7 colours, 5 shots each. Now that seems like something that could be shot in a day. Maybe the whole book could be shot and finished in a weekend without too much trouble.

But what does the book look like? Probably sections, themed or titled for each colour. Maybe I could use one of the standard mnemonics to bind the sections - Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain. Or just go with something graphic using typography. The words repeated over and over, with the section picked out in that colour and everything else black and white. Or just repeat the word over and over.

Then maybe the pictures could tie or blend in to each other - so I shoot more solid reds for the middle images, but start to find some red/orange mixes for the overlapping sections, then more orange, all orange, then mix in some yellow and so on. These images could all be strung together small on one page as an overview of the whole book - 7 wide, 5 deep. Perhaps the cover page could be created out of letters shot on the same day, a red R and so on.

I might never make this book. It might be forgotten tomorrow - especially if I hadn't written it down. Maybe I'll come up with another 3 ideas and do 4 books in 4 weekends. This idea may well morph and evolve into something completely different. But the key was getting some of it down on paper. If you have ideas, respect them, capture them. You can always throw them away later and come up with more. But get used to paying attention to them and keeping them.

autumnal

Took a picture today. Was writing in my journal over lunch, rambling on about creative blocks and things like that. Got back in the car and was struck by the wet trees and colour. The picture is taken with a camera phone and isn't exactly my best ever, but it was surprising how compelled I was to make the image. I'm getting back to wanting to take pictures and I think the things I'm doing to try to spur on my creativity are actually starting to work, no matter how much I'm fighting against it.

I also got a chance to use FotoFlexer to edit the image. Surprisingly effective and easy to use. Good to use in a crunch.

halloween

A good chance to put what I've learned about off camera lighting to the test. Well, really a chance to take everything I've learned and try to do the opposite! Amanda did a fantastic job as the corpse bride. I had fun playing with make-up to give myself a big head wound, with a squash ball smack in the middle. Kate went for a classic vampire look. A lot of low angles with the flash and up close to get harsh shadows and quick fall-off. Was also a good time to use all those wacky coloured gels that you can't normally get away with using!

a mixed bag of lighting

A couple of common themes for portraits in the last week. I did a lighting class last weekend and found while doing the more controlled, constructed lighting was interesting, I was still spending more time playing around with the ambient and trying to accentuate the lighting in the location. I'm not sure if I just don't really have the imagination to see completely contrived lighting, or I think really, I'm just not motivated enough to want to create it all from scratch. I do like finding the interesting light already available, then trying to build on that. I did some shots using strobes and adding in lighting, but I was still mostly working with the light I could find. One that I like was where I replaced the existing light with a strobe to essentially mimic what was there already - but being able to shoot at a much lower ISO and smaller aperture. It was in a hallway with a bare bulb hanging in the ceiling (below right) and I liked the light quality. With some help I put a strobe and a small softbox up in the same place, getting very similar light but slightly less harsh. A grid over the softbox helped control the fall off and edges, to shape it a bit more. I'd picked this hallway for the blocky green and orange wall paintings and thought it'd play well with the checked dress the model was wearing. All that I think works well, along with the lighting - but I struggle with posing a full body. That's why so much of my photography is tighter head and shoulders shots - fewer limbs to position and deal with.

Another theme has been shooting using windows and mixing in the daylight with the available indoor light, playing with the mixed colour temperatures that you find around those edges. Eric Ogden has many portraits shot with the window actually in the frame, blowing out behind the subject and I tried a bit of that with the portrait of Amanda above. Just put the meter on center spot to ignore the background and shoot for these - nothing too clever going on. I like how the outdoor light turns slightly blue when her skin is balanced for the indoor light - made a bit stranger by the fact we were in a predominantly green-walled restaurant which added some unique colour casts to the shot. I also used an old idea of shooting through glass, for the second shot of Kevin, above, using the neon lights in the bar we were in, along with an empty, slightly dirty pint glass in front of the lens to create the coloured flare.

I've also been thinking about and cropping nearly all the shots over the last week to a square format. I've been shooting with that crop in mind and just seeing how it works for me. I doubt there will be a Hasselblad anywhere in my near future but that different crop has been interesting to work with. I'm blaming looking at Mark Tucker's portraits for that particular influence. I don't think it is something I'm going to keep doing much longer but it was interesting to try adding another arbitrary constraint into how I was shooting for a short time. It certainly changes how you arrange things in a frame.

Another shot, (below) was lit using the available light and the modeling lights of the alien bee strobes that we were using. I'm not sure that that really counts as using the strobes properly, but any light that's available counts. the modeling light is low to the camera right, balancing with the wall light fixture. This could be another example of me only being able to see what the continuous sources give well and not having enough experience to predict how the brief strobe will act, but I much prefer working with the continuous light sources - it seems to suit my biases and process. Maybe I should be thinking about video more!

photo expressions available from blurb

Photo Expressions

v2.0

By Gordon McGregor

Book Preview

Finally, after a couple of revisions and a bit of colour management tweaking, my SoFoBoMo book is now available from blurb. I know a couple of people have expressed an interest in buying a copy. The image wrap version of the book arrived today, which has quite a different finish to the classic hardback style, with a sleeve cover. I tweaked some of the images to get better colour and printed using the B3 custom workflow, this time around. As a result the new v2.0 version has much better colour reproduction and I'm happy with it. Finished at last. While looking through it, I did find one small imperfection, that I'm going to consider my Persian flaw and leave in. A few people have asked about my portrait approach and the two short essays in the book lay it all out. Now I just need to work out what's next!

trial balloon: experiences with blurb.com

I've been ruminating on a couple of book ideas; for SoFoBoMo and another in progress and wanted to try out blurb.com as the printer. They seemed like one of the few PoD companies that would do decent photographic prints while also being geared up to at least allow some resale. I have a notion of creating a teaching book that people could purchase and blurb.com might well be a good outlet. I can revise and update the book as I go along, releasing new versions and potentially if there is interest use it as an avenue in to showing a publisher. I've tried other PoD companies, such as lulu.com and was very disappointed in the print quality. I've actually seen blurb.com books in person at trade shows and was reasonably impressed. The booksmart client software that they provide is not terrible. I don't relish the idea of authoring a book with much text in it though - in terms of desktop publishing support it is pretty basic. I think I'll use Adobe InDesign for layouts, then just paste full-bleed pages into blurb for a final print version. However, for this sample, I took a simpler approach. One picture per page, full bleed with a black background for the remainder of the page. I picked a somewhat funky font, made it large and kept things simple. For the book, I picked the cheapest hardback sample that I could put together, 7" square book, with about 15 pages - you could do more pages for the same price - up to 20 for the cheapest book - then you start paying an incremental cost per page. As this was a trial, I thought that would be enough. I selected and edited the images in Lightroom then exported them to Photoshop for a final tweak and colour profiling. The one thing I have heard are lots of horror stories about bad colour from blurb and other PoD companies. I'd found a colour profile for their printer and picked a challenging image for the cover - bright, lime-green with magenta highlights. Perfect. I switched on the soft proof in Photoshop and the defaults looked terrible. Muddy sickly yellow. Anemic colour, flat highlights, muddy shadows. But with a bit of tweaking, some selective colour adjustments to move away from the real lime green to another apparently printable green and some additional contrast, things were looking much better. I went through the same process with all the images, doing some radical adjustments to the original image, just to get it back to close to how I wanted it in the soft proof. That always concerns me, but I thought I'd go along with it.

Assembling the book was straightforward in booksmart. I uploaded the final version after some previewing and bought a copy. Surprisingly, the book shipped only a couple of days later - I'd expected a longer lead time. The book arrived in decent packaging, quickly and without any problems. There I had it, a few days later, a book of my photos! First thing is to notice how fantastic it is to have a hardbacked book of your images. There's a certain thrill to that that is difficult to replicate with online displays or even individual prints, mounted and framed or not. I know all I did was pay some money, there's no real validation involved, but it sure looks good! I've put together a few books for different purposes and the feeling hasn't gone away yet. The second thing to note is that 28 sides (14 pages) isn't very many. You end up with quite a slim volume, particularly in hardback. All cover and no content, if you aren't careful. The slip cover looked great - particularly that green I'd been worried about translated very well, close to how it looked in the soft proof. I'm impressed with how similar it all turned out - throughout the book. On the other hand, I think if I'd uploaded straight, unadjusted sRGB versions of the files I would have been quite disappointed. Some of the original colours just wouldn't have worked out at all. Blurb doesn't make a big deal out of mentioning this - it is there on their site, but they certainly don't push colour management and soft proofing. Something to watch for. The print quality is certainly not as good as I can get from my inkjet (an Epson R800), but is certainly well above acceptable on most of the images. There is a slightly visible cross-hatching in the smoother areas of some images, if you look particularly closely, but from a normal viewing distance all of the images look great. Some of those that were slightly less sharp than others really become more noticeable on the printed page. Also higher ISO black and whites lost a lot of the presence and depth that they have online. They just don't translate too well, the noise becomes more noticeable, the contrast isn't as strong and they just don't have the same amount of life. The one disappointment for SoFoBoMo is that booksmart isn't a simple way to get a PDF of your book. At least, not without a large watermark through each page. using pdf995 I was able to get a final PDF of the book from booksmart, but the layout is not great and the watermark is very visible. Might do in a pinch, though. I also made one rookie mistake, putting something too close to the edge of the slip cover. The cropping is probably about a quarter of an inch tighter than the previews - certainly you are well warned about this but I almost lost an eye from the cover! This particular book has a bar code printed on the rear. From blurb's blog it appears that different printers and different books may or may not end up with this bar code. I've also read that all of the books larger than 7" are printed on a slightly better printer, so the quality should improve even over this quite acceptable start. The binding seems solid, the book feels like a real book. The pages appear to be glued and stitched into a cloth-backed hard cover. It all looks professionally put together, though a bit skinny. A 14 page book cost $22.95 for the 7" hardcover, plus $8 shipping. It is the same price, up to the first 40 sides. Note that blurb refer to pages as each side of one physical piece of paper being one page for the cost calculation. An additional $3 doubles the page count and the book would start to feel more substantial. White space is your friend. Overall I'm happy with the results and plan on using blurb for a final copy of my SoFoBoMo book.

contrast

I was amazed this time around when I got to Death Valley national park. In the past it has been a beautiful, desolate landscape. Nothing but mud and rocks with the occasional creosote bush to break up the scene. The sun bakes down from a typically cloudless sky and the temperatures can soar to 130F and beyond. This time there was a carpet of 2 foot-high, yellow flowers across the whole of the area around Furnace Creek. They stretched all across the flood plains and up through the small valleys in the foothills. I noticed a particular increase in the density of the flowers around the roads. I'm told that cars driving along increase the local humidity around the road due to the exhaust moisture from the engine.

The wide open skies and flat desert was quite a contrast to the scene the night before in Las Vegas. I met my friend, Marti, at the Vegas airport and then we went for a walk around the Strip to find some dinner and do some shooting. I didn't take a tripod but managed to find enough ledges and walls to perch my camera on to get a few long exposure shots that I'm happy with. These days, the best thing about Las Vegas is using it as a jumping off point to all the amazing national parks that cluster around that part of the country. Only about a two hour drive between the scene above and the scene below.

green

For this week's Austin Flickr meet-up I suggested we do something of a themed shoot. Got a load of bits of paper with colours written on them and then anyone that was game picked a colour at random. That's your new favourite colour for the next few hours - go shoot it! We decided that the 6 primary (for additive and subtractive) colours were a good starting point - red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow. I picked green. First reaction (it always seems to be this reaction) oh, no, not green. Any other colour. Not green. I don't know why my brain always seems to rebel at these externally imposed, random constraints. It is never what I want. I looked out side, tons of vibrant reds, blues, cyans, magentas and yellows assaulted my eyes. No green, just bushes and grass. Boring. I want another colour. But I'd suggested this stupid assignment in the first place, I can't be the first person to quit! So I buckle down and start trying to shoot green. Then, as often happens, my eyes make that switch. I tune into the green theme. Green's are everywhere, all these green options to shoot. Why would anyone want to shoot any other colour, ever ? I'm still suffering the aftershocks this morning, seeing interesting green things to shoot all around. Maybe I'll always have that initial dislike of the random constraint. But it makes me think that element of randomness is important, otherwise I'll tend to pick something I'm comfortable with if I don't know what to shoot. I'm back reading the Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel - I think there's some great ideas in there that could be adapted to random photography games. Odd book. Interesing book.

crystal & chelsea

I met this pair on South Congress, while out shooting with Chris after the flickr meet. They were trying to take a picture of themselves, so we offered to help out. Then followed up with the obvious request. What I like about these was how I found backgrounds that really complimented their clothes and style. The posters reflect the themes in their hair style or glasses as well as fitting in with the black/white & green colours, or the pale yellow and blue. I feel I've come a long way from timidly asking if I could take a picture then snapping off one shot. I was able to think about this, ask them to move a few feet to a suitable background and get better results. The amazing part for me is that both of these shots were taken about 3 feet apart and I could find such diverse and complimentary backgrounds so easily. I'm finally starting to feel like I'm slowing down and getting a bit more comfortable with this portrait photography. Long way still to go.

jessa

85mm 1/250s @ f1.8, ISO 1250

This is Jessa, from the Strobist get together in Austin. We found what probably looked like the least appealing end of the corridor that we had been shooting in, for this shot. I think Kirk wanted us to see what you can make, from essentially nothing. There was no interesting light - other than the tungsten light fittings in the hall. No ambient light in the corner we'd picked either. We sat down in the middle of the corridor and I put my canon 580EX flash on the floor, pointing to the wall on my right. Tried a few shots like that. Then we put a large silver reflector on the floor, that you can see in the catchlights in her eyes. The flash was aimed up towards the corner of the wall/ ceiling and fired in TTL mode. I composed the shot to use some of the lighting elements in the background to provide a frame and just fired a few shots. This was my favourite. I had originally planned to take it to black and white, but after doing that, I partially resaturated it to bring it up to this muted, half colour half black and white palette. I've used this technique quite often when I try black and white images. Often I like the feel that you get - a uniquely digital palette, but not overly obvious or too saturated. Subtle colour, turned down but still part of the composition. It seems to work particularly well for high ISO shots so that the noise in the image adds a subtle grain, particularly in the out of focus regions. Holly asked How are you using your flash off camera? I got a Canon ST-E2 infrared flash controller for Christmas, so I've been playing around with that. It means I can use TTL flash triggering, which seems to be a mixed blessing. Easy to get good exposures, but it seems you can't use it to manually trigger the flash at a given, repeatable power output. I've also got pocket wizards, which have a much longer range but no TTL capability. I'm working on learning how to use both more effectively.

looking for suggestions

I know a few people read this blog. I don't usually get many comments though. So a plea for some input on this one. If you read it and have an idea or a favourite exercise - please post it. Don't worry about it being original or concerned that I've heard of it before - I want to know what you yourself have enjoyed or find helpful. I'll do the filtering later. A common brainstorming exercise is to just get it out there and worry about how useful it is later - so let us try that - please comment. I'm going to allow anonymous and non-signed in comments for this post - so you don't even need a blogger account. I may use any suggestions you provide, though, so don't comment if you are concerned about that.

If even half of the people who read this blog provides one idea, I'll be swamped with suggestions and that would be great. So with that said, I'm looking for the self-assignments or mini-projects that you've found valuable to get you out into the field and shooting. I'd like to hear what your favourite creativity exercises have been, what worked, what sparked your imagination. I don't need much, just a couple of lines explaining the exercise - I'll do the rest. Something like 'shoot your favourite colour' has worked well for me in the past and provided a good focus for a couple of hours of shooting. You don't have to go in to much more detail than that, if you don't want to. Or if you have a favourite exercise that's more involved, feel free to describe it in as much detail as you like. As an incentive - a free, signed copy of the book (when & if I get it finished) to the person who submits my favourite new exercise. If you submit an anonymous entry I won't be able to tell who you are though, so only those with some way to contact them will be eligible for this. If you don't want to post a comment or suggestion publicly, you can also email it to me at ideas@mcgregorphoto.com

christmas cactus

Merry Christmas from Texas! Took the lensbaby out this evening, with the star aperture and shot some Texan Christmas lights.

heading back E.A.S.T.

As I mentioned, on Saturday I went around a few studios in East Austin as part of the East Austin Studio Tour. I decided to take my camera along to do some portraiture. I've got an opportunity coming up to shoot some artists for a non-profit organization and wanted to explore doing environmental images, of artists with their work, but without the pressure of expectation on the results. I gave myself the assignment to shoot 5 portraits that I was happy with. I think I mostly got there!

I really enjoyed seeing around the various studios that I went to and I got to meet and talk to some very generous and interesting artists. There was such an inspiring variety of great work on display, too. I deliberately didn't pay any attention to which studio I was going to next - just picked an area on the map, then walked around, following the numbers. This meant I had no idea what sort of work I was going to be seeing - I wasn't bringing any preconceived notions of what I liked or didn't like, didn't skip artists that did work I wasn't interested in. So I saw a lot of new ways of seeing and expressing. A great way to spend the day. From full frontal male nude photography, to Hispanic religiously-inspired art, I saw it all. Caroline Wright (left) paints gorgeous abstract images, capturing beautiful light and scenes that I could just get lost in for hours. Lovely use of colour and space. It was intriguing to hear how sound inspires some of her work and you could really see the dynamic tempo in those pieces. Ava Sharifian (above) paints what seem to be organically inspired, colourful canvases, full of movement and life. Her work was so dynamic and lively. Spirals of brush strokes blending in to planes of colour, huge canvases that seemed just perfect. I wouldn't know how to even start creating something like that - the huge empty canvas would haunt me. Perhaps I'd have even more trouble knowing when to stop. Piercarlo Abate's studio was the first place that I stopped on the tour - he also happened to be number one on the list. He really set the tone for the whole day - warm, friendly and inviting, with some great photography of Venice and also some lovely portraiture work. We talked for a while and he made me feel very welcome. He was also shooting a project, using the people visiting his studio as part of his art - seemed like a great idea! You can see a video of the project he shot last year as part of EAST, on his web site. Jennifer Balkan (below) had a wide variety of nude studies in her studio - but a piece that she had done of a rabbit, in a Alice in Wonderland theme, really caught my eye. Deep purple drapes set off an almost blue, white rabbit. I think it was the use of colour that really caught my eye about that piece. She also does a lot of work mixing in maps with figures, combining the sense of anatomy and networks of veins in a body with the similar feeling that can be found in a map - waterways, arterial roads and the like. Really interesting work and my friend Erin was really excited to see I'd taken her picture! The final portrait I took was the one I posted yesterday, of April Bederman, who makes dramatically colourful hats. She was showing in a part of a studio that was shared with Barry George who is a sculptor, working mostly in metals. April's hats were on display on some of that sculpture and the mix of hard iron and her bright, soft fabrics was quite unusual. I visited a few other studios and artists - but these were the people who I felt I managed to make some small connection with and were kind enough to work with me on a portrait. What they didn't know was that I printed out my favourite shot of each of them and then went back around this morning to give them a print. I got quite the range of reactions to that. Everyone was very kind and positive, but most of us have a hard time when faced with ourselves in a picture. I think that's why so many photographers create self-portraits that are so abstract or hide the face. We all have our issues to deal with. It was a lot of fun to be able to turn up unexpectedly and hand over the print. I spent quite a bit of time talking to April again today and she turned the tables on me and took my picture. I suppose that's fair game! EAST was a great experience - I'm really glad that I went. Also setting myself this small assignment meant that I made more of an effort to connect with these people and find out about their art and motivations. I got a lot out of that experience that I don't think would have happened if I just went in and looked quickly, then moved on.

april bederman

April makes these amazing hats, forming them over balloons, layering the wool to build up the colours and textures. We talked about it while I was walking around EAST - the East Austin Studio Tour. 120 artists open up their studios to the public. I went for a walk and took some portraits along the way. This blue hat was April's favourite.

what would you do...?

... with a box of 25 2" foam red noses ? I know what I'm planning on doing with them, as my next photo project, but what would you do (photographically...) ? Lighting, subject, backgrounds, location, themes, emotional content, overall concept - I'm interested in hearing it all. If someone gave you a box of these noses and the brief to come up with a photo project around them - how would you design it ? What would your concept be ? How would you approach it ?

Comments really welcome on this one.

confessions of a photographer

The more I photograph people, the more fun photography gets for me. Each and every time I put myself out there with my camera I get to interact with people I'd normally not talk to or get to spend time with. In this case, I met up with some friends and we were shooting on Sixth Street in Austin. We walked past the new Alamo Drafthouse in the Ritz, that had just opened. Outside was superman. Or at least Christopher Dennis, wearing the blue suit, advertising the documentary 'Confessions of a Superhero'. I didn't know much about the film and figured he was just hired locally to promote it. We chatted, I shot some pictures, worked the scene a bit, he was in to it, struck some great poses and we went on our way. I liked the result and sent it to the Drafthouse. They were kind enough to give me credit and a link back on their web site. Then I get another email asking to use the image in an interview with the director of the documentary, Matt Ogens. From that I find out that I'd actually been taking a picture of one of the four people the documentary is about. Christopher Dennis spends his life as superman, getting tips and taking photos with people out in Hollywood. Check out the movie web site here and also the trailer on youtube. If we hadn't started taking pictures on Sixth Street, I wouldn't have ended up finding out about Christopher's story. Each time I spend the time to take someone's picture links me in to something interesting. I'm wanting to go and see the documentary now!

aussie aussie aussie

Amanda, Kate & Tim this weekend. Shot with window light. Tim and Kate have a great apartment in the middle of Houston. They had an Australian flag on the wall and it seemed like a perfect opportunity as a background. I opened up the blinds for the window to let a bit more light in and shot a few quick portraits. I loved the fact that everyone was wearing shades of blue, so they fill in the part of the flag that they cover up.

the amanda project

I've been talking a lot over the last year about the value of projects. A recent vacation to a few national parks seemed like the perfect opportunity to work on something with a consistent theme. For this trip, I picked my wife, Amanda, as the subject. The goal was to take a set of good pictures (around 20) of her that we were both happy with, in the various locations we found ourselves.
I decided to limit it technically too - I just took two lenses with me. I had a 50mm prime and an 85mm prime. The 50mm is one I haven't used much at all and the 85mm has been my go-to portrait lens for the last year. In fact, it's been my go-to lens for almost everything for the last year. I wanted to use the 50mm but put the 85mm in the bag as a fall back position. I tried to shake things up a bit by shooting almost everything with the 50mm. It turns out that about 90% of the shots I took were with the 50mm. Quite a turn around for me.
Now a 50mm and 85mm lens aren't exactly classic lens choices for a trip around national parks like Death Valley and Yosemite. Typically, you'd be thinking about some super wide lenses in the teens range and also a longer telephoto to abstract elements of the landscape. I decided to totally skip those options. I've been to Death Valley before and shot a lot of very wide scenics. I've never been to Yosemite but I've certainly seen a lot of classic landscapes from there. I wasn't going to compete with those images. I didn't even want to bother recreating various Ansel Adams views of the park, in worse light, or David Muench cloned images. Maybe I've finally gotten to the point where I have the courage to look for my own vision rather than copying others. Or I've switched to copying portrait photographers - I guess I'll find out over time. A few people suggested I was mad in taking this approach. That I'd spend the entire week regretting the decision or kicking myself, missing shots of a lifetime with the wrong lenses in my hand. Instead I took shots of my life and my times - I shot what matters to me. More valuable to me than pretty scenics of well-worn subjects. There's a joke that says half dome requires an extra stop of exposure now, than it did when Ansel Adams first took his shots of it, because so many photographers have sucked the light out of it. I contributed a bit, but with a slightly different motivation.
So the Amanda project was born, from an idea from Steve Barth with his excellent series featuring his wife. One week, 800 shots, lots of locations, dramatic changes in lighting, collaborations on clothing choices, hair. Hiking for miles, 4am starts, rain, bear sightings, climbing, driving : all in all a great time for both of us and I think a pretty good collection of images with a consistent theme.
I did cheat a touch on the only 50mm/85mm lens selection aspect - I took along a small, wide-angle, panoramic format point and shoot that I used a couple of times in this collection - but other than that, nearly all 50mm. I think there is one 85mm shot and that's the night image from Las Vegas. By the end of the week I was trying to find fresh ideas, use lighting, new focal lengths. I never actually felt I was missing out on shooting the grand landscapes by not having a wide angle lens. Yosemite is beautiful. Death Valley is amazing. We drank it all up, together, looked at the views, enjoyed the sunrises, sunsets and times in between. I did take a few landscapes and I'll start posting them up later, but I had a much more interesting project to work on, than scenery.
The project focus also pushed me beyond some of the standard portrait shots I'd have taken. I started looking for new angles, compared to how I've been shooting with the 85mm. Normally all I do is fairly tight head/shoulders portraits. The 50mm forced me to step back a bit. Shooting the same subject for an extended period forced me to look for new angles, new body positions, new ways to move. It got me thinking about posing a full person, even when they aren't posing as such, rather than just eliciting an expression. So again I found that pushing a subject area via an assigned project has helped me break new ground. I also pushed my lighting skills a bit, using room lights, rearranging furniture, etc. to light the night time Las Vegas shot. Something I probably wouldn't have done without this assignment in the back of my mind.
Hope you enjoy the results. We had a great time shooting them all. Click on the collage above to go to the set of images. Comments are very welcome.

In the comments, Kate asked: Of the shots in the project montage, were most with the 50mm? Of the 25 shown, 18 were taken with the 50mm lens. 2 were taken with the point and shoot DMC-LX1 and five were shot with the 85mm lens (old habits I guess).