seeing double

This past week's Picture Imagination assignment was Seeing Double. Tracey wasn't looking for a self-portrait, but I figured it was about time. I try to take self-portraits ever few weeks.

Self-portraits are hard for so many reasons. First, they are a challenge to take -- taking a photo without being able to look in the viewfinder is always hard, whether you're holding the camera out, using a tripod and remote, or doing the "10-second dash" (using the timer and running into the photo). Second, I know very few women who are fully content with how they look, and I am no different. I can come up with all sorts of excuses as to why today isn't a good day for a self-portrait, but I don't think there's ever a good day, so I just have to do it. It's extra hard when you have children with their own self-esteem issues and you want to present a happy-with-yourself front to them.

That's a big reason why I do self-portraits -- to present that happy-with-myself front to my children and also to myself. I'm hoping it's infectious. And since I tend to be the one behind the camera most of the time and run away from other cameras, I want to make sure there are a few photos of me for posterity's sake.

This wasn't actually the photo I intended to take. I wanted to get more of me, and I had an idea of how it would look. But I got this first and I liked all the eyes. I bumped up the contrast in the reflection significantly to bring out the reflection. And I resisted my usually-present urge to warm it up.

finding my own rhythm

Interesting that the last post I put up here was about finding rhythm, because I clearly haven't yet learned to add this blog to the rhythm of my life. Between flickr and facebook and family and work, I have so many communication and creative outlets, and figuring out how to make this blog meaningful and how to fit it into my weekly schedule is a little daunting. Those of you who blog regularly, perhaps you can help me out. If you have a few things to write about on one day (perhaps because you missed a few, like me), do you fit things into one post or would you actually create a few different posts on the same day to separate your ideas?

I'm going to start here by updating my Picture Inspiration progress, and see where that takes me. I'll save this past week's assignment for it's own post, because I have some thoughts to share.

Working backwards, because that's how it would be if I'd actually kept things up-to-date:

Two weeks ago, our assignment was "to infinity and beyond." Exploring linear perspective is actually one of my favorite things to do with my camera. As far back as I can remember, I've been fascinated by vanishing points in art. My younger daughter is following in those footsteps -- lately she's been drawing roads vanishing into nowhere and talking about the metaphorical side of this. I can't get over the fact that before the Renaissance, noone could conceive of drawing landscapes in perspective, and now even a child can do it.

Tracey used a fence as an example. I participate in the Fence Friday group over on Flickr, where I've shared photos of fences with vanishing points many times over.

So for this assignment I wanted something a little different. It was surprisingly difficult to think beyond the fence for me, but on an evening walk with my husband I found these railroad ties basking in the sunset, and they seemed the perfect subject:


The previous week's prompt was "how things stack up." She asked us to photograph stacked objects. She was hoping we'd stack something ourselves and photograph that. I tried -- really, I did. I stacked bowls, I stacked books, I stacked candy... But I wasn't happy with any of those photos and preferred this springy photo of trays ready for seedlings at our friends' farm:



Okay, I've really missed a while, haven't I -- I have to go back one more week to catch up.

The theme for the third week of Picture Inspiration was Motif, a spin off the previous week's "rhythm" theme. Now I'm aware that the definition of motif in visual arts is "a design or figure that consists of recurring shapes or colors, as in architecture or decoration"and that one might usually look for a graphic pattern, such as one might find on fabric, but I was having a rough week emotionally and decided to squeeze a another photo I'd taken into the definition. This one has repeating lines, and leaves and ripples.



Okay, mostly caught up. This past week's assignment will go in its own post.