Finally, enough time to actually talk about my photo class. I’ve already talked about how much I enjoyed it, but I am hoping that you are interesting in hearing the details.
We started with looking at a slide show of Gales work – both photos that worked, and also ones that hadn’t. As we went through the slideshow, she talked about the good and bad points of the shots, why this one worked but that one didn’t, the challenges in getting the shots, the choices she had made in setting them up. I loved this, for a couple of reasons – first it was gratifying to realize that even the teacher, who get paid real American dollars for her photography skills takes bad pictures and makes bad calls about what will work in a picture and what won’t. If she does it, maybe I don’t have to beat myself up quite so much when I do it – and it doesn’t mean she can’t get amazing and awesome pictures, and so can I. Second, it was priming the pump for my creative brain to engage, looking at her collection of creative work and thinking critically about color and composition and framing.
After that, we started putting ourselves and our cameras through some hands-on exercises. Nearly everyone had brought samples of their handiwork to use in our exercises – I brought shawls that I have knit, one woman was a weaver who had brought a bunch of her amazing work, another made these fantastic felted dolls, and a fourth had gorgeous colorwork hats. We used these for our photos. Our first exercise was a simple color exercise, trying a sample piece on a number of different backgrounds, to see how the different colors would work together. After we had played with that for a bit, we moved on to having our volunteer model wear different sample pieces and we worked together as a class brainstorming where and how she should stand, what she should do and snapping picture after picture. Gale offered advice and suggestions, showed us different tricks for lighting and reflecting light exactly where we wanted it, and then pulled out fabric for backgrounds so we could see the effects we could create with those.
We broke for lunch and downloaded our pictures onto her machine so we could review them after the lunch break. Before we reviewed the photos, we did a quick photo processing tutorial, where we learned how to do some basic image editing. A lot of that was review for me, but I definitely learned some new tricks as well as finding a cool online processing app, for those times you don’t need full-blown Photoshop. The photo review was instructive, with everyone offering compliments and criticism of each others work, and it was interesting to see how a group of people all taking the “same” pictures ended up with very different pictures, depending on where they were standing, exactly, or the moment that they chose to snap.
We had daylight left after the review of the mornings work, so we headed back outside for more practice, with different garments. They were different colors, different fabrics, different types of knitwear and we talked while we worked about what we would need to do differently to capture and show off what made each piece special.
I got a lot out of the class, and the hand-on time with guidance was definitely something that I’d not gotten a lot of of from the other classes I’ve taken. The biggest piece was edging a little further past my biggest block in learning to take good photos – that I need to step up and control my shot, as much as I can. Working with a model, I need to get comfortable telling them what I need, even if it looks goofy outside the frame of the photo and changing things if something isn’t working. Working with still life components, I need to get over feeling like it’s excessively twee and precious to create the shot I want.
I carry around this idea in my head that all those gorgeous pictures I see just “happened” – that the photographer was somehow magically in the right spot at the right time, or just always lays out their food just so, or magically sees a perfectly framed shot that I don’t see. The more I practice, the more classes I take, the more I realize how foolish that mindset is, but I’m still struggling with getting over myself and creating the scenes that I need to create to get the photos I’ll be happy to show off.
I think if the weather is good this weekend, I’m going to make Miss. H be my model and take lots more pictures.
With Thanksgiving coming up I want to thank my mother (she’s on the right) for bringing Martha’s Vineyard into my life and the lives of my family. Little did she know when she set me down on this beach in Oak Bluffs for the first time what an important and life defining occasion it was. CLICK HERE for more about my mom.
Passing the Vineyard to new generations is a tradition for lots of families and mine is no different. Here at State Beach in Oak Bluffs in the early evening one May is my daughter Deb and her dog Chappy.
My daughter Patty and son-in-law Mike at Aquinnah… actually on a beach in the summer.
In 1996 the next generation appears. My grandchildren Tiffany and Tyler at Edgartown lighthouse during their first trip to the Vineyard. It was the month of May, not swimming weather but good for collecting shells and rocks and seeing the ocean for the first time.
